The beach-ready novels and non-fictions you need to pack for your holiday.

Your flights are booked. Your villa, or luxury hotel, awaits. Now you have only to decide which books to take with you to while away the flight and lazy days on the beach. Here, to get you started, are five new or recent books that have been creating a buzz in the literary world.

**by Ms Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

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Everybody loves a bit of true crime, and here’s a true-crime book threaded through with a true-crime memoir. The author, as a young law student, helped to get a child-killer off death row and, in the process, found herself confronting the darkness in her own past. Mr PG Wodehouse it is not, but here is a complex and shocking literary account of child abuse hailed in some quarters as the new In Cold Blood.

**by Mr Francis Spufford  **

Beach reads don’t come much classier than this one. Already garlanded with awards, including the Desmond Elliott Prize for a debut novel, Mr Francis Spufford’s book is now out in paperback. This ingenious and brilliantly entertaining story, whose mysterious protagonist enjoys a picaresque adventure through 18th-century New York, has been described as “the best 18th-century novel since the 18th century”. Swordfighting, spies, romance, chases and conflagrations, and a superb twist ending. Nobody I know who has read it hasn’t loved it.

by Mr Colson Whitehead

Mr Colson Whitehead’s novel, which is vying with works by Ms Zadie Smith and Mr Paul Auster on the longlist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize, is hotly tipped for the shortlist having already won the Pulitzer and National Book Award in the US. It tells the story of Cora, a slave who escapes from a plantation in antebellum Georgia, but the underground railroad of metaphor is, here, turned into a literal railroad. At once a thrilling adventure and a dizzying exploration of the nation’s troubled history.

by Ms Clare Mulley

Did you know that two of the greatest Nazi flying aces were ladies? If not, Ms Clare Mulley’s book will surprise and enthral you. Mses Hanna Reitsch and Melitta Schiller were two of the bravest women in the history of aviation. The former was the first woman to fly a helicopter and set a new world altitude record for unpowered flight. The latter was a test-pilot who completed more than 2,000 nosedives, not all of them successfully. One was a fanatically committed Nazi. The other supported the Stauffenberg plot to kill Hitler. Takes all sorts.

by Mr Adam Begley

Mr Félix Tournachon is probably the most fascinating person you’ve never heard of. This short biography will set you right. Under his nom de plume of Nadar, this remarkable 19th-century Parisian – cartoonist, balloonist, photographer (Mr Roland Barthes thought him the best ever), friend to the stars, novelist and self-publicist extraordinaire – is all over the history of the Second Republic. Passionate, wildly eccentric, impressively moustached, his is one of the oddest and most compelling lives of an odd and compelling era. He photographed Mr Charles Baudelaire, Ms Amantine Dupin (aka Mr George Sand) and Mr Victor Hugo (alive and dead). And he invented air mail, smuggling messages from the Siege of Paris by balloon.

**Mr Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator

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