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. These five non-fiction reads will also transport you all over the world – from 1960s India and Afghanistan to Ancient Greece and Hitler’s Germany – without ever having to leave home.

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1. The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet

Lyse Doucet, the seasoned BBC journalist and current foreign affairs editor, uses Kabul’s Inter-Continental Hotel as a lens to understand Afghanistan’s social history over the past half a century. Sitting on top of a hill overlooking the city, the hotel has symbolised since it opened in the 1960s, Kabul’s relationship with the wider world in general, but the west in particular.

In The Finest Hotel in Kabul, Doucet recounts how the hotel has hosted guests from Pan Am flight crews and Afghan socialite fashion designers, to mujahideen commanders, terrorists of global renown, Taliban leaders and Nato officials. Doucet goes beyond a focus on “big men”, however, and chronicles the experiences of the hotel’s staff.

She deftly illustrates some of the ways in which ordinary Kabuli people have navigated the changing and deeply unpredictable world around them. Against the swathes of conventional journalistic accounts of Afghanistan – few of which depict the country’s people as rounded individuals seeking to lead respectable lives – this book is a powerful, important and corrective work. It deserves to be read widely. One can hope this beautifully written and carefully structured book will help to reorientate public and policy conversations about Afghanistan.

Magnus Marsden is a professor of social anthropology

Read more: Women’s prize for non-fiction winner, The Finest Hotel in Kabul, gives voice to the people of Afghanistan

2. Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

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