Take a dive into the summer's 10 most sizzling new reads

A blockbuster to rival Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a dark tale of sisterly bonds, a smouldering suburban drama about an apparent virgin birth and a sweeping saga set in the Deep South are among he brilliant page-turners that will keep you entertained on your holidays, whether you’re at home or abroad.

It’s been called one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, a modern War and Peace, and an epic that’s comparable to Homer. Published in a superb English translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler for the first time last year, Grossman’s

panoramic story of different families, set during the Second World War and the Battle of Stalingrad, is just out in paperback. The prequel to Grossman’s acclaimed masterpiece Life and Fate features many of the same characters, and at almost 1,000 pages long, it should keep even the speediest reader engrossed for the duration of the holiday and it’s my top choice.

(Vintage Classics, £10.99), buy it here.

Teenage sisters September and July, born 10 months apart and closely bound to one another, move to a new house on the North York Moors to start afresh, with their mother Sheela. Except that Settle House is not new. It is, according to July, “rankled, bentoutashape, dirtyallover”. It also holds dark memories from the past. This is the second novel from super-talented Johnson, who made headlines as the youngest author to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018, and is written in poetic, haunting prose to be savoured slowly.

(Jonathan Cape, £14.99), buy it here.

The year is 1954, and at 16, identical twins Desiree and Stella Vignes have run away from their oppressive small home town in Louisiana to make new lives for themselves. Stella discovers she can pass herself off as white, and marries a white man, while Desiree returns home 14 years later, holding the hand of a daughter as “black as tar” and with a legacy of violence behind her. Bennett tells the story of the girls’ diverging trajectories in rich, elegant prose; you can literally swirl the words in your mouth.

(Dialogue, £14.99), buy it here.

From the Israeli literary scholar-turned bestselling crime writer who commissioned TV series Hatufim, (the Israeli version of Homeland), comes this murky, suspenseful thriller about three unconnected women, each looking for love. They are slowly but surely lured into a relationship with an apparently decent guy, who turns out instead to be a dangerous predator. Three is already a bestseller in Israel and Germany, and Mishani is part of a new wave of exciting Israeli cultural exports that include Netflix TV hits Fauda and Shtisel, and Spy, a movie starring Sacha Baron Cohen.

(riverrun, £14.99), buy it here.

These profoundly moving “confessional” poems range from one about the release Kingsolver felt after her mother died, which ends: “Here begins my life as no one’s bad daughter” (it reduced me to tears), and another about divorce: “Your marriage is now oil and water. Some of your friends will chose to drink the oil”, to a word-perfect poem called How To Do Absolutely Nothing. Small enough to slip into a handbag, big enough to swell the heart.

(Faber, £14.99), buy it here.

“On the upper floors of the Kingdom, as the first winds of the monsoon picked up, the rains swept in just before first light.” So begins Lawrence Osborne’s latest literary thriller about a young American woman with $200,000 stashed in her suitcase who arrives in Bangkok in order to disappear, but gradually gets drawn into a circle of seductively dangerous expat women. Osborne, who specialises in stories about hapless Westerners coming a cropper in foreign lands, has another hit on his hands with this sinister, sensuous and wonderfully evocative tale.

(Hogarth, £16.99), buy it here.

The author was inspired to write the little-known story of seven siblings from Durham who changed late Georgian London society for the better after seeing Zoffany’s portrait of the Sharp family. Meet brothers Granville, Britain’s first campaigner for the abolition of slaver; James, an engineer; William, a surgeon to George III; John, a priest who commissioned the world’s first lifeboat, and their three sisters, Elizabeth, Judith and Frances, all independent-minded musicians who organised amazing recitals in barges on the Thames.

(Chatto & Windus, £25), buy it here.

Set in a London suburb in the late Fifties, this is an endearingly tender novel about a journalist who decides to investigate the implausible-sounding case of a woman having a daughter after a “virgin birth”. Emotions are ratcheted up when said journalist, who is single and pushing 40, befriends the subject and falls for her husband. Quietly devastating, this has already drawn comparisons to Barbara Pym, Tessa Hadley and Elizabeth Taylor. Chambers learned her trade at the feet of the legendary Diana Athill. Who better?

(W&N, £14.99), buy it here.

Wallace is young, gifted, gay and black. Originally from Alabama, he has come to a Midwestern lakeside campus university to do a biochemistry degree and is close friends with four white students. The tensions that arise revolve around race and sexuality, as well as the meaning of friendship itself. Largely autobiographical — Taylor also grew up in rural Alabama and trained as a biochemist — this is an original, glittering debut, with an undercurrent of assured, quiet anger. It has just been long-listed for this year’s Booker Prize.

(Daunt Books, £9.99), buy it here.

Early on in lockdown, Smith picked up a copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations for the first time for some practical assistance. She learned that talking to herself could be useful and that writing “means being overheard”. The result is this thought-provoking volume of six short essays — all royalties to charity by the way — full of slow-burn, meandering and often rhetorical questions. What do other people mean to us while we’re in isolation? How will the world have changed? What is the relationship between time and work?

(Hamish Hamilton, £5.99), buy it here.