If you need something smart and more-ish to read in the warmer months, here are some of our best recommendations for smart summer reads of this year.

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori)

If you aren’t afraid of confronting and taboo, then the new novel from the author of the cult hit Convenience Store Woman could be your ideal summer read. Natsuki lives a quiet life with her asexual husband, surviving as best she can by pretending to be normal. But the demands of Natsuki’s family are increasing, her friends wonder why she’s still not pregnant, and dark shadows from her past are pursuing her. Fleeing the suburbs for the mountains of her childhood, Natsuki prepares herself with a reunion with her cousin Yuu. Will he still remember their promise? And will he help her keep it?

Life After Truth by Ceridwen Dovey

At their fifteen-year college reunion weekend, a group of Harvard graduates rekindle old loves and old resentments. Famous actor Jules, successful businessman Jomo, academic Eloise, teacher Rowan and homemaker Mariam weigh their glittering academic careers against the reality of their present-day lives. When the most infamous member of their class, Frederick - senior advisor and son of the recently elected and loathed US President - turns up dead, the soul searching begins in earnest. Old friends often think they know everything about one another, but time has a way of making us strangers to those we love - and to ourselves…

Memorial by Bryan Washington

Mike, a Japanese–American chef, and Benson, a Black childcare educator, both know that their relationship isn’t working anymore. When Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together, an absurd situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted. Memorial is a funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you’re supposed to be, and the limits of love.

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

Amanda, Clay and their two teenaged children head to an upmarket rental on Long Island, expecting a quiet holiday. But when the home owners Ruth and G. H. knock on the door late at night in a panic, the spell is broken. These strangers say that a sudden power outage has swept the city, and they have come to the country in search of shelter. But with the TV and internet down, and no phone service, the facts are unknowable. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple - and vice versa? An impossibly compelling literary thriller about the world we live in now, Rumaan Alam’s novel is keenly attuned to the complexities of parenthood, race and class.

Ordinary Matter by Laura Elvery

Spanning more than a century and ranging across the world, this inventive story collection (the second from award-winning Australian author Laura Elvery) is inspired by women whose work has altered history and saved millions of lives. From a transformative visit to the Grand Canyon to a baby washing up on a Queensland beach, a climate protest during a Paris heatwave to Stockholm on the eve of the 1977 Nobel Prize ceremony, these stories interrogate the nature of inspiration and discovery, motherhood and sacrifice, illness and legacy. Sometimes the extraordinary pivots on the ordinary.

Lucky’s by Andrew Pippos

Do you like confident, big-thinking, character-driven, multi-storyline family sagas? Then the debut novel from Andrew Pippos is for you. Lucky’s is a story of family. It is also about a man called Lucky. His restaurant chain. A fire that changed everything. A New Yorker article which might save a career. The mystery of a missing father. An impostor who got the girl. An unthinkable tragedy. A roll of the dice. And a story of love, lost, sought and won again, (at last).

What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez

A woman visits a friend with terminal cancer. Brilliant, strong-willed and alone, the friend, facing death, makes a momentous request. Will she accompany her on a holiday where she will, without warning one day, take a lethal pill to end her life on her own terms? Shaken and grieving, she finds the strength to agree. What follows is an extraordinary story - profound, surprising and often funny - of a lifelong friendship given the ultimate challenge; to witness its end.

Song of the Crocodile by Nardi Simpson

Darnmoor is the home of the Billymil family, three generations who have lived in this ‘gateway town’. Race relations between Indigenous and settler families are fraught, though the rigid status quo is upheld through threats and soft power rather than the overt violence of yesteryear. The Billymil family are watched (and sometimes visited) by ancestral spirits and spirits of the recently deceased, who look out for their descendants and attempt to help them on the right path. When the town’s secrets start to be uncovered the town will be rocked by a violent act that forever shatters a century of silence. This epic, multi-generational story is full of music, Yuwaalaraay language and exquisite description.

A Burning by Megha Majumdar

Set in contemporary India, A Burning is the story of three unforgettable characters, all dreaming of a better future, whose lives are changed for ever when they become caught up in the devastating aftermath of a terrorist attack. Jivan - a poor, young, Muslim girl, who dreams of going to college. Lovely - an exuberant hijra who longs to be a Bollywood star. PT Sir - an opportunistic gym teacher who once taught Jivan. Taut, propulsive and electrifying, from its opening lines to its astonishing finale, A Burning confronts issues of class, fate, prejudice and corruption with a Dickensian sense of injustice, and asks us to consider what it means to nurture big ambitions in a country hurtling towards political extremism.

The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay

Jean has never been good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in an outback wildlife park. As disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country, Jean realises this is no ordinary flu: its chief symptom is that its victims begin to understand the language of animals. This incredibly prescient road-trip novel is Laura Jean McKay’s second book and first full-length novel. Bold, exhilarating, and wholly original, The Animals in That Country asks what would happen, for better or worse, if we finally understood what animals were saying.