Stay for the Story: A summer reading list

Summer at the hotel means slower mornings, longer evenings, and, if you're doing it properly, a book you have no intention of finishing on schedule. With one eye on this year's Cambridge Literary Festival line-up, we've gone through the shelves and put together a list for the garden, the sun lounger, or wherever you've decided today's nowhere-to-be is.

Summery reads

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

One of this year's headline names at Cambridge Literary Festival, Hollinghurst won the Booker Prize for this novel of a scorching mid-1980s London summer. Nick Guest moves in with a glamorous political family in Notting Hill and drifts through a hazy, decadent season of parties, tennis and first love - before the heat breaks. A gorgeous, unsparing beach read for anyone who likes their sunshine with a shadow attached.

Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie

2026 marks fifty years since Christie's death, and this is the queen of crime at her most seasonal: Poirot, holidaying at a Devon cove hotel, finds a body on the beach within days of arriving. Sun loungers, secrets and a killer among the guests - pure poolside plotting.

The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

Another of this year's festival guests, Shafak tells a story that moves between 1970s Cyprus and present-day London, narrated in part by a fig tree that remembers everything. Warm, fragrant and full of island heat, it's an ideal companion for a garden hammock or a flight somewhere hot.

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

This is the book's centenary year, and it's being celebrated at the festival for good reason. Laura Willowes escapes a life of quiet spinsterhood for a Buckinghamshire village and, eventually, a rather unconventional pact - a strange, sunlit, subtly subversive novel about choosing your own summer.

Local interest

Blood Orange by Harriet Tyce

Tyce - another name on this year's festival bill - writes London courtroom thrillers with real bite. A barrister with a taste for self-destruction takes on a case that mirrors her own unravelling marriage. Not exactly a lazy afternoon in the sun, but very hard to put down on a sun lounger.

Capital by John Lanchester

Featured at this year's festival, Lanchester's state-of-the-nation novel follows the residents of one ordinary London street through a single eventful year, as house prices soar and lives quietly unravel. A big, generous, warm-weather read for anyone who likes their fiction populated.

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller

From another of this year's Cambridge Literary Festival guests - proof that a "winter" title can still make a fine summer companion. Two couples in a remote West Country village face the brutal winter of 1962-63; read it in the garden and be grateful for the weather you've actually got.

Grantchester Meadows and The Old Vicarage, Grantchester by Rupert Brooke

No summer list with a Cambridge postcode is complete without Brooke's poem, written from a Berlin café and aching with homesickness for one particular hot English afternoon by the river just outside the city. Half an hour's walk from the hotel will take guests to the meadows themselves - honey still for tea, if you know where to look.

Classic Cambridge

The Longest Journey by EM Forster

Forster's second novel opens among Cambridge undergraduates debating the reality of a cow in a quad, and follows Rickie Elliot from those golden, argumentative university afternoons out into a less forgiving world. A gentler, more optimistic companion to Maurice, and a lovely one for reading in a college garden.

The Go-Between by LP Hartley

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Hartley's novel is the definitive English hot-summer book - a boy at a country house in the summer of 1900, carrying messages between two lovers, in a heatwave that never quite breaks. Not set in Cambridge, but every guest who has sat out a July afternoon on Parker's Piece will recognise the weather.

Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf

Woolf's third novel returns for the summer list on the strength of its Cambridge chapters alone - young Jacob Flanders punting, arguing philosophy and drifting through golden undergraduate afternoons that the rest of the novel spends mourning. Slim enough to finish in a single sitting on the lawn.