The best summer companion is a good book. This year has already given us some truly brilliant ones making it really hard to whittle down the best. But no matter what your tastes are, we have you covered. These novels range from historical fiction to gripping crime drama. From 1800s Ireland, to 1930s Taiwan, to post revolution Iran, this international selection will take you to all sorts of places without ever having to leave your own home.
1. Land by Maggie O’Farrell
Tinder Press
Maggie O’Farrell’s exquisite new novel, Land, is a haunting tale of loss, endurance and renewal. Spanning generations and continents, O’Farrell traces the fragile threads that connect people and place. Moving between intimacy and sweeping historical change, the novel reveals the land itself as a living archive of rupture, survival and belonging.
Land begins in 1860s Ireland, on an unnamed “windswept tongue of land” that branches out in the roiling, icy currents of the Atlantic. As a scholar of Ireland’s Great Famine, An Gorta Mór, I am aware of how devastating the 1840s were. One million lives were lost to starvation and disease and two million people emigrated in the immediate aftermath.
This is the context for O’Farrell’s novel: the land was changed utterly. A whole way of life was eroded, and Land imagines what it must have been like to walk among the ruins, to see an agrarian culture collapse, and, for those left behind, to forge a future from remnants.
David Nally, Professor of Historical Geography in the Department of Geography
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Land by Maggie O’Farrell is a haunting tale set in post-famine Ireland about history, map-making and memory
2. Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi, translated by Lin King
& Other Stories
Set in 1930s Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule, this exquisitely layered novel follows Japanese writer Aoyama Chizuko and her Taiwanese interpreter Ông Tshian-ho’h through a culinary and emotional landscape seeded with deliberate breadcrumbs: details that only reveal their full significance upon return visits to the book.
Taiwan Travelogue’s meta-fictional architecture is quietly audacious. Yang frames the narrative through a fictional author, a fictional translator and their respective silences, making the unreliable narrator not merely a device but a structural argument about whose knowledge counts and whose remains obstructed.
What makes the book genuinely pleasurable, however, is its treatment of intimacy between the two women. The queer undertow is rendered through the minute economies of shared meals and unfinished sentences, through which Yang smuggles the most profound questions about desire, friendship and colonial entitlement into the everyday.
Eva Cheuk-Yin Li is a lecturer in screen industries
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Taiwan Travelogue wins 2026 International Booker – a deftly translated tale of food, love and history
Picador
John of John is about the secrets and lies that fester under an oppressive atmosphere that is thick with damp and shame.
Fifty pages into Douglas Stuart’s atmospheric third novel you can almost feel the cold, damp air of the fictional Hebridean village of Falabay, and come to recognise its brooding and eccentric inhabitants like old friends and neighbours. Through a microcosm of everyday island life, Stuart demonstrates his finely honed skill in exploring the fundamental tensions of the human condition that have preoccupied men and women for centuries.
An omniscient narrator presides over John of John as we follow John-Calum Macleod – Cal – returning home to the Isle of Harris after student life in Edinburgh. Recently graduated from art school, Cal has been studying fashion and textiles, in an echo of the author’s own history.
The drama and (sometimes verging on implausible) twists of this novel make it feel like a soap opera, in the traditional sense of the term: small, interconnected characters and high melodrama, with domestic spaces as scenes of desire, revelation and unpredictability.
But this is not a criticism. Stuart’s lyrical prose and atmospheric narrative elevate the genre – reimagining the domestic and familial tropes by focusing on the unrequited affections of the men in the story.
Stevie Marsden is a lecturer in publishing
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John of John: weaving an island tale of secrets that lie beneath repression and shame
4. Cathedrals by Claudia Piñeiro, translated by Frances Riddle
Charco Press
Cathedrals is the latest work by Argentinian crime writer Claudia Piñeiro. Here, the crime is the murder and dismemberment of 17-year-old Ana Sardá 30 years ago. Yet, as ever in Piñeiro’s work, nothing is quite what it seems.
Each section is written from the perspective of a key character, and the truth emerges gradually as the stories intertwine. The first section is narrated by Lía, Ana’s middle sister. Cathedrals opens with Lía’s loss of faith, confirmed 30 years earlier at Ana’s funeral. This sets up a core premise of the book: how can a barbaric act that takes a human life ever be rationalised as “God’s will”?
Cathedrals is crime fiction with social comment. The characters’ experiences are connected to the sociopolitical context in Argentina: the dictatorship is still fresh, and society has not broken free of its restrictions. Poverty is rising, and religious doctrine is a powerful means of keeping women in set roles, because in the Bible: “[N]o one cares about heroines, they care about mothers and wives.” Those who think for themselves or break with expectations are ostracised.
With her characteristic edge-of-the-seat storytelling, Piñeiro exposes not only the monsters we live among, but also the society that produces them.
Helen Vassallo is an associate professor of French and translation
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Cathedrals by Claudia Piñeiro is a gripping Argentinian crime story about gender violence and the weaponisation of religion
5. Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur, translated by Faridoun Farrokh
Penguin International Writers
Published in 1989, Women Without Men was banned almost immediately and Shahrnush Parsipur was imprisoned twice for writing openly about women’s sexuality and autonomy – an act of artistic courage the Islamic Republic deemed intolerable. Despite the regime’s attempts to erase it, the novella endured. It moved through underground networks and crossed borders with quiet determination.
Women Without Men follows five women who flee violent marriages, stifling social expectations, and political chaos. Together, they build a sanctuary in a garden outside Iran’s capital, Tehran. The women’s retreat is not an escape, but a feminist rupture that marks a refusal to live within a world that insists on defining them. It is a choice to build, however precariously, a space where those rules collapse.
Through mysticism and magical realism, the women’s transformations gain political force. Each metamorphosis becomes an act of resistance: women reclaiming autonomy, dignity and possibility in a society intent on erasing them.
Parsipur’s novella exposed the brutality of Iranian patriarchy with rare clarity. It did so long before global audiences recognised that violence. The novella’s first English-language publication operates as a bridge between past and present. It makes visible how the structures that constrained women’s lives in the 1950s continue to shape Iran’s political realities today.
Hind Elhinnawy is senior lecturer in social science
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Women Without Men: the feminist book that Iran’s regime has failed to silence since the 80s
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