For a historical novel to trump other seaside diversions – jet-skiing, say, or dozing – it needs to grip idling minds like a vice while delivering a low-key literary masterclass. With Trust, the Pulitzer Prize finalist Mr Hernán Diaz nails this with panache. Inside this bestselling, New York-based evisceration of faith in financial markets and their over-inflated titans, readers find a novel within a novel, autobiographical notes, a memoir, a dénouement. Four times over, you will be enthralled, then duped. You will relish every moment.

It shouldn’t take an imminent Netflix adaptation to nudge us into (finally) reading a missed masterpiece. Still, what better place to savour what The New Yorker called “the definitive study of American celebrity” than beside a luxe hotel pool, in a bar of in bed? Ms Joyce Carol Oates’ totemic, fictionalised yet authentic study of the female triptych enshrined in the legendary Ms Marilyn Monroe (starry-eyed Ms Norma Jeane Baker, Hollywood bombshell Monroe, The Blonde) packs as much punch today as it did when it was first published in 2000.

As we grow older, the chances to wonder at natural wonders deplete. We’re busy and, as cynical, seen-it-all-before adults, we tend to forget how. A summer holiday provides time to reconnect with child-like awe and Mr Ed Yong’s majestic An Immense World is the ideal portal. This extraordinary book, which deftly illustrates how creatures perceive our shared planet, is so steeped in gasp-inducing insight, you might just sense your soul rejuvenating under that nascent tan.

If you’re bound for Fire Island, meet your perfect lounger companion. (If you’ve seen Fire Island, ditto.) For the rest, Mr Jack Parlett invites you on a heady tour of the famously hedonistic queer haven. Dues are paid – lyrically, scintillatingly – to the isle’s importance as playground and sanctuary for the closeted and persecuted as well as arts mavericks such as Mr James Baldwin and Ms Patricia Highsmith. Its queer residents’ communal traumas, such as the Aids epidemic and personal tragedies, are given proper space, too. Yet beneath Fire Island’s euphoric highs and devastating lows, this beguiling book asks readers to question not just whom an idyll is for, but what really makes any place “paradise” at all.

A wildly inventive and whip-smart novel-in-short-stories, Ms Eloghosa Osunde’s Vagabonds! garnered raves when it was published in March. Set in Lagos, it explores the hidden lives of those who live at the extremes of the mega city’s social hierarchy. It exposes the malignancies that lurk under high-status citizens’ façades, while illuminating the shadow lives of its criminalised queer communities. It’s a vital contemporary commentary on corruption and culture that is steeped in magical realism drawn from Nigerian folklore. Vagabonds! is the escapist beach read to relish this summer.

An untaxing, tragicomic page-turner of a sequel to Election, Mr Tom Perrotta’s 1998 novel about student council elections in a New Jersey high school. Aka, your jet lag and/or hangover and/or post-prandial reading material. It doesn’t matter if you are not a Perrotta devotee or didn’t see Ms Reese Witherspoon’s stellar turn as Tracy Flick in the Oscar-nominated adaptation of Election or if you’re exhausted by the notion that “unlikeable” women should not pursue their dreams – you a) already know Tracy intimately and b) are primed to root for her. And she needs you. Life has not been kind to the ferocious teen who longed to be president. Now, in the wake of #MeToo and via a campaign for school principal, Perrotta grants his famously put-upon character another shot at making it. Surely, society has evolved enough to give a charmless woman a chance. Hasn’t it?

Mr Joseph Han’s outstanding first novel has deservedly won widespread acclaim. A sophisticated and hilarious meditation on belonging and remembering, Nuclear Family’s action unfolds through the eyes, minds and hearts of multiple generations of the Korean-Hawaiian Cho family. This exquisitely wrought saga launches in the lead-up to the ballistic missile alert that was accidentally issued in Hawaii in 2018 as Mr and Mrs Cho strive to expand their deli business while eldest son, Jacob, departs for Seoul to teach English. Then calamity strikes and the fracturing family teeters between dissolution and profound acceptance and healing.

The exceedingly influential Ms Djuna Barnes’ modernist classic, which was originally published in 1936, seems to be having a moment. Whatever the reason for the recent swell in popularity, it’s glorious. Nightwood is, unabashedly, sublime. Renowned as one of the earliest portrayals of same-sex romance, the central bond plays out, alongside plenty more love-making, within a coterie of American ex-pats as they flit between Paris, Berlin and Vienna in the decadent and doomy inter-war period. Regardless of what attracts you to it, this is a book you will for ever carry within. As the writer Ms Jeanette Winterson says in the foreword to Faber’s 2015 reissue, reading Nightwood is “like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass… From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined.”

Mr Zain Kalid’s auspicious debut, Brother Alive, has enraptured critics and galley readers alike. Centred upon the tautly enmeshed tales of a radical Staten Island-residing, Saudi-American imam, his three adopted sons and their antecedents, Brother Alive is an astute and tender evocation of universal harms wreaked by faith and capital, both in the US and Saudi Arabia, and subtle testament to the restorative power of love.