Summer reading

Niall Stokes Editor, Hot Press

I always have a book on the go. I read the books pages in newspapers, browse in bookshops and generally keep in touch with what’s going on, so I don’t end up suffering too many duds as a result.

At present I'm on a good run. I read Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, and for the most part I loved it: it's a marvellously sympathetic book, full of characters with an inspiring sense of decency.

I moved on to Paul Auster's Invisible, which is a magnificent jigsaw puzzle. It ignores taboos and asks the most searching questions of us with a dexterity and lightness of touch that are ferociously impressive.

I've just finished Ian McEwan's Solar, which is a great, uproariously funny and inspiring summer read that I'd thoroughly recommend. I am over halfway through Willy Vlautin's heartbreakingly bleak, spare and lovely Lean on Pete. Again, it's a must-read. Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin– a bit of a historical curiosity – will be next. And then I'm really looking forward to Joe O'Connor's Ghost Light, of which I have read such encouraging things, David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoetand Bret Easton Ellis's Imperial Bedrooms.

Enough to keep me going until August, at least!

As told to Tony Clayton-Lea