Arminta Wallace recommends some recently published titles for the long days ahead.
Literary Fiction
Irish novelists have, as usual, been beavering away to produce a clutch of top-class books. Jennifer Johnston's This Is Not A Novel (Headline Review, £14.99) is, of course, a novel - and an extremely good one at that - but also flirts with the conventions of memoir and biography, while Colum McCann's Dancer (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £9.99) takes the life of Rudolf Nureyev as the starting point for a meditation on success and stardom. The teeming misery of life on board the Famine ships is the subject of Joseph O'Connor's character-packed The Star of the Sea (Secker & Warburg, £12.99); and there's a boat journey, too - up the Parana river to Paraguay - in Anne Enright's The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (Cape, £12.99). New kid on the Irish block Keith Ridgway garnered lots of praise for his weird and wonderful first novel The Parts (Faber & Faber, £14.99) and watch out, too, for the aptly named All Summer by Claire Kilroy (Faber, £10.99). Meanwhile, two of our master stylists, John Banville and William Trevor, are on top form with, respectively, the quasi-mystical Shroud (Picador, £15.99) and The Story of Lucy Gault (Penguin, £7.99), a book with an eight-year-old heroine which has been described as "flawless", "perfect" and "haunting".
Keen to check up on the movers and shakers on the international scene? Javier Cercas's Soldiers of Salamis (Bloomsbury, £14.99) about the Spanish Civil War has so far proved a real tour de force of the year. Then there is this year's Pulitzer prize winner, Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex (Bloomsbury, £16.99), a rapid-fire text narrated by a feisty Greek-American hermaphrodite. At the other end of the stylistic scale, IMPAC prizewinner Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red (Faber, £7.99) is a slow-moving study of murder among Persian miniaturist painters - not the easiest of reads, but let's face it, how many Turkish novels are you ever going to get up close and personal with, even in translation? While you're at it, don't forget the Best of Young British Novelists (Granta, £9.99), which gives a flavour of who is upcoming on the UK scene. Some of the crop included are already accomplished novelists who also had books out this year, like Andrew O'Hagan whose Personality (Faber, £10) drew enthusiastic reviews. Graham Swift's his most recent outing, The Light of Day (Hamish Hamilton, €16.80), is the product of an impressively mature writing talent. Narrated by a private detective who has become rather too closely involved with one of his clients, it's an understated yet powerful exposé of the tragedies of everyday life, while D.B.C. Pierre's study of an unlikely serial killer, Vernon God Little (Faber, £12.99) has been hailed as a brilliant comic début. Ann Patchett's Bel Canto (Fourth Estate, £6.99) featured on the heavyweight shortlist of this year's IMPAC prize, but light reading doesn't come any lighter - or more satisfying - than this offbeat tale of an unlikely bunch of people, among them an international opera diva and a Japanese businessman, who are taken hostage at a Latin American dinner party.
Travel
It is in the nature of travel books to go places, but here's one dedicated to a road that goes nowhere. Iain Sinclair's intriguing London Orbital: a Walk Around the M25 (Granta, £25) presents the motorway as something akin to one of Dante's seven circles of hell; one of the non-places of supermodernity, peopled by refugees, weirdos and inarticulate snarls of traffic.
For something completely different, Fergus Fleming's The Sword and the Cross: The Conquest of the Sahara (Granta, £20) is an entertaining reconstruction of the life of Vicomte Charles de Foucauld, who turned his back on a hedonistic hussar lifestyle - he liked to dress his mistress in furs for al fresco balls on the frozen Loire - and became a Trappist monk in the desert.
Though it ought to be subtitled "This Is Not A Travel Book", Bill Bryson fans will want to have his latest tome, A Short History of Nearly Everything (Doubleday, £20), which sees him turn his hand - and his self-deprecating sense of humour - to popular science.
And if you've overdosed on Everest but are still asking yourself why people want to reach those mountain peaks there is Robert Macfarlane's Mountains of the Mind (Granta, £20), a cultural study of mountaineering, interspersed with personal anecdotes.
And if by any lucky chance you are heading for Russia, why not travel in the steps of Anton Chekhov via Janet Malcolm's Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (Granta Books, £13.99).
Current Affairs/History
International politics could perhaps be filed under "fiction" in the light of the continuing non appearance of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction". Still, war is real enough - and for a sobering introduction to the grim realities of the current global power structures, Robert Kagan's Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (Atlantic Books, £10) is worth squeezing into your suitcase.
Bernard Lewis remains a doyen in the field of Islam studies and among the many books emerging on the subject this year you may not do better than his latest The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99). The currently favoured policy of bombing people into submission began with the relentless Allied onslaught on German cities during the second World War - and commentators are only now beginning to get to grips with the disastrous socio-cultural results of that campaign, according to W.G. Sebald's eloquent extended essay on the topic, On the Natural History of Destruction (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99).
History, or current affairs? Either way, Ed Moloney's gripping study A Secret History of the IRA (Penguin, £8.99) tells its complex tale combined with what Irish Times London Editor Frank Millar called some of the ingredients of a Le Carré thriller.
On the environmental front, Colum Kenny's Fearing Sellafield (Gill and Macmillan, €12.99) hacks fearlessly through a forest of obscure scientific acronyms to find out what's really going on in the nuclear industry; and Colm Keena's lively account of financial wheeling and dealing, The Ansbacher Conspiracy (Gill and Macmillan, €12.99), is as hair-raising and compulsive as the sorry story it documents.
Memoir
The coolest memoir around this summer has to be Tom Humphries's hilarious, unputdownable Laptop Dancing and the Nanny Goat Mambo: A Sportswriter's Year (Simon & Schuster/Townhouse, €11.99). Sport be damned: this is reminiscent of Bill Shankly's comment about life and death, and football being far more important than either/both. Speaking of sport, however, the competition on the memoir front is ferocious.
Is there anybody left in the country who hasn't published theirs? If there is, they certainly don't include Hugo Hamilton, whose wry, subtle The Speckled People (Fourth Estate, £15.99) offers a child's view of an Irish-German upbringing; Richard Murphy, whose compelling The Kick (Granta, £9.99) moves from Co Mayo to Sri Lanka, from the Dublin of Paddy Kavanagh to the Oxford of C.S. Lewis; or Nuala O'Faolain, whose second volume of autobiography, Almost There: The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman (Michael Joseph, €14.99) has been praised for its honesty and depth of emotional insight.
In memoir terms, the biggest one of all this year of course is Hillary Rodham Clinton's Living History (Headline £20). Do we really need to know all about Bill's White House philandering? Do we heck . . .
Finally, a brief mention for two very different memoirs from the international scene: Eric Hobsbawn's Interesting Times: A 20th Century Life (Allen Lane, £20) does exactly what it says in the title, while Augusten Burroughs's bawdy, irreverent account of his bizarre American upbringing, Running With Scissors (Atlantic Press, £14.99, charts the ultimate in flamboyant dysfunction.
Crime/Thriller
There's nothing like a good murder to spice up the summer hols - on paper, needless to say, not on a beach near you - and there are plenty of craggily familiar faces at large in crime sections of the bookshops, notably John Connolly's latest, Bad Men (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99). Check out Henning Mankell's One Step Behind (Vintage, £5.99), which sees Inspector Kurt Wallander bring his unshakeable Nordic cool to bear on a grisly triple murder in a Swedish wood, and John Creed's The Day of the Dead (Faber & Faber, £10.99), in which hero Jack Valentine travels to Mexico to polish off an evil drug baron - and to pay a visit to Frida Kahlo's house, while he's at it.
Julie Parsons has produced a page-turner with a conscience in her study of suburban sleaze and Internet child porn in cappuccino-drinking Dublin, The Guilty Heart (Macmillan, £12.99).
Further afield, Martin Cruz Smith's Tokyo Station (Macmillan, £16.99) , a Casablanca-style tale of an American nightclub owner in Tokyo, is packed with atmospheric detail - while if you pick up Robert Wilson's The Blind Man of Seville (HarperCollins, £10), you'll encounter obsession, paranoia, vengeance and dysfunction. Oh, and did I mention that it's a whodunnit as well?
Pop Fiction
You hardly need us to tell you about Maeve Binchy's large-canvas portrait of a fictional Dublin restaurant, Quentin's (Orion, €10.20) - or, for that matter, Sheila O'Flanagan's acerbic take on an unhappy marriage, He's Got To Go (Headline, €10.20), both of which have been heading out of the bookshops in the proverbial droves. But if you've already read those, what next? You might try the latest from Marian Keyes, Angels (Poolbeg, €9.99): set in Los Angeles, it has more than its fair share of glamour and glitz, but is also possessed of a genuinely moving undertow on the theme of infertility.
For a feelgood read, ex-advertising executive Catherine Donnelly's chicklit début The State of Grace (Sitric Books, €12.99) offers a sideways swipe at the selling game; and Denise Deegan's first book, Turning Turtle (Tivoli, €9.99), sees a power-dressing PR executive turn homemaker and novelist, with delightfully disruptive consequences. For a look at the life of a young male on the prowl in Celtic Tiger Dublin there's Chris Binchy's The Very Man (Macmillan, £10 ), hot off the presses.
She may not be strictly ballroom in the pop fiction category, but Kate O'Riordan is a good bet for a great read: she writes beautifully, and has a real gift for creating rounded, memorable characters. The Memory Stones, (Pocket Books, £6.99) is a page-turning family drama set in Kerry and Paris.
Audio
For escapist enjoyment, try Scott Turow's latest page-turner, Reversible Errors. The story - about a corporate lawyer assigned to defend a man awaiting execution for a triple murder he says he didn't commit - is elegant and intricate, and the whole thing is read with lip-smacking bravura by one David Birney (Macmillan, four tapes, six hours, £12.99).
On a more literary wavelength, Daniel Mason's elegiac tale of a Britisher in Burma, The Piano Tuner (Macmillan, two tapes, three hours, £8.99), is beautifully paced by reader James Frain; if, on the other hand, a spot of real life is what you're after, Claire Tomalin's Whitbread prize-winning biography of Samuel Pepys, The Unequalled Self (read by Jill Balcon, Penguin, four tapes, £12.99), recreates the famous diarist in mesmerising, warts-and-all detail.
Much of the best material coming out in audio format is in the children's books department, but kids and adults alike will chuckle over Dawn French's wicked delivery of Neil Gaiman's contemporary ghost story Coraline (Bloomsbury, two tapes, three hours, £8.99) - and Carl Hiaasen's environmentally sound tale of endangered owls and school bullies in Florida, Hoot (read by the incomparable Kerry Shale, two tapes, three hours, £8.99).
Simon Callow's P.G. Wodehouse is always absolutely fabulous, and the latest instalment, The Code of the Woosters (Penguin, two tapes, three hours, £8.99) - a picaresque intrigue which features the on-off matrimonials of Stephanie Byng, the cantankerous Sir Watkyn Bassett, and a silver cow-creamer of distinctly dodgy provenance - is sheer genius.