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

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

Read more: 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

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........

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