Whether holidays are the one time in the year you can do some serious reading or you are looking for a good thriller to take to the beach, The Tablet’s reviewers have a recommendation to fit the bill – from travel to memoir, Trollope to Camus and crime fiction to papal documents

Chris Patten
I have been reading three Irish writers with the greatest pleasure. Top of the list is John Banville’s novel The Book of Evidence (Picador, £8.99; Tablet price £8.10). I have also enjoyed John McGahern’s Memoir (Faber & Faber, £9.99; Tablet price £9) and two non-fiction books by the great Colm Tóibín – Homage to Barcelona (Picador, £8.99; Tablet price £8.10) and Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border (Picador, £9.99; Tablet price £9).

Lucy Beckett
Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £8.99; Tablet price £8.10) is a wonderfully readable account of the author’s decades of work as a brain surgeon. The stories he tells are compelling and Marsh emerges as an admirable man, compassionate, self-critical and hair-raisingly brave.

Teresa Morgan
Martha C. Nussbaum’s Anger and Forgiveness (Oxford University Press, £16.99; Tablet price, £15.30) argues, against much of Western philosophy, that anger is a bad tool for combating injustice or protecting ­individual self-respect. Forgiveness – the kind embedded in (some strands of) Judaism and Christianity, based on unconditional love and generosity, is better. Timely, readable, thought-provoking and inspiring.

Peter Marshall
Best-known for his superb crime series featuring the haunted Louisiana Catholic detective Dave Robicheaux, James Lee Burke has now turned his considerable talents to historical fiction. Wayfaring Stranger (Orion, £8.99; Tablet price £8.10) is a large and lush slice of Southern Gothic.