Light reading for the summer. Something diverting. From the heat, the humidity, that stranger's body pressed too close to you on the train (or not close enough).

Try stories: Yann Martel's The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios (Canongate, £6.99; offer, £5.94) was first published before this author's Man Booker-winning Life of Pi, but has been spruced up for its new release. Martel is a storyteller of wonderful gifts: you will believe anything he tells you. Joanna Briscoe's novel Sleep with Me (Bloomsbury, £12.99; offer, £10.39) will keep you up at night. Richard and Leila are in love, about to have a child, when Sylvie -plain and quiet as a mouse -somehow arrives in their lives. The love triangle is a common theme, but here it is handled with both ferocity and elegance.

Perhaps you are off to the seaside; so here are two haunting volumes, both reflecting on childhood holidays at the edge of the world. In Ali Smith's novel The Accidental (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99; offer, £11.99) 14-year old Astrid breaks the boredom of a summer holiday by filming every dawn -until the arrival of the mysterious Amber. John Banville's The Sea recalls the childhood of Max Morden, and his youthful encounter with Mr and Mrs Grace one summer at the shore. Smith's prose is nearly poetry, jazzy yet precise; Banville's precision is of a different kind, meticulous and sensual.

Don't leave the strand: collect Jeanette Winterson's Lighthouse- keeping (HarperPerennial, £7.99; offer, £6.79) like a shell. Winterson, as she says, piles stories on top of stories, like bedcovers for a cold night. But summer calls for some swash and buckle, too: Isabel Allende's Zorro (Fourth Estate, £16.99; offer, £13.59) gives the mythical swordsman a history and the twelfth instalment of the Flashman Papers, George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman on the March (HarperCollins, £16.99; offer, £13.59), sees Flashman in Abyssinia and is worth the price for the cover alone.

Finally, as ever, literary editor's wildcard. Ricky Jay's Extraordinary Exhibitions (W. W. Norton, £29.99; offer, £23.99) is a book for your table rather than your suitcase, but too fabulous an offering to ignore. Jay is one of the world's greatest sleight-of-hand artists and a foremost historian of magic and the unusual.

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