As we approach June, it’s time to start thinking about the books we’re taking on our summer holidays. From fantastic fiction – following trees, an intelligent lab rat, unlikely university friendships and a solar-powered android – to notable non-fiction discussing bacteriophages, the power of plants, the air we breathe and the health benefits of art, we have curated a list of 12 books that we’ve added to our ‘to read’ lists this summer. Want more recommendations? Have a look through our 2024 and 2025 lists for more inspiration. Fiction in the real world Richard Powers – an American novelist who explores the effects of modern science and technology on humanity – won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory. Furthermore, with popular endorsements from the likes of Barbara Kingsolver and Barack Obama, this novel is celebrated as an environmental fiction triumph. The Overstory, published in 2018, traverses time and space, weaving together the stories of nine strangers as they are summoned by the natural world to save it from catastrophe. Exploring topics of climate crisis, deforestation and environmental activism, this book anthropomorphizes trees, calling on its nine characters to recognize the importance of the natural world: “My nine bewildered characters in The Overstory each must discover, to their own amazement, that there comes a point when you need to take a forest as seriously as a city, and a tree as seriously as a human being,” Powers commented. Read The Overstory by Richard Powers First published in 1966, Daniel Keyes’…
