Of course you’re going to take Brenda Maddox’s biography of George Eliot away with you. And Martin Jacques’s brainy brick When China Rules the World. Or you will sneak into WH Smith at the airport and invest guiltily in the latest page-turners by Maeve Binchy (Heart and Soul, Orion, £7.99; Buy this book) and Patricia Cornwell (Scarpetta, Sphere, £7.99; Buy this book). Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons (Corgi, £7.99; Buy this book) has Tom Hanks’s face helpfully emblazoned on its cover.

In this one the Harvard professor Robert Langdon is involved in another “breath-taking race against time” (purpose best known to him), which glamorously includes the CERN Institute in Switzerland and the Vatican.

You’ll have more fun getting sand in the pages of Tasmina Perry’s Guilty Pleasures (Harper, £7.99; Buy this book), which feverishly charts the battle to take over a luxury goods company, with the action ab-fabulously swooping from glossy magazines to glossier hotel rooms. The heroine is the plucky Emma and the villainess her cousin Cassandra, the editor of Rive fashion magazine, who is prone to closing chapters with vixenish pronouncements such as: “I think this calls for champagne.”

Marian Keyes’s This Charming Man (Penguin, £7.99; Buy this book) is 883 pages of contrasting fonts — so is not easy to read — sketching the secrets and lies (the two vital ingredients of any bonkbuster) that link four women to Paddy de Courcy, who is apparently the Irish answer to JFK Junior. Expect sex. Lashings of.

The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads

Choose from a rich haul of novels and thrillers (including two prizewinners) or fill your mind with the sharpest new nonfiction

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• Summer reading: fiction roundup

• Summer reading: children's books

• Summer reading: audio books

• Summer reading

Summer reading

The Sunday Times top 12 choices in fiction and nonfiction

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• Buy the books here

Summer reading: fiction

A perfect day would start in the winding streets of Barcelona and end with a classic Agatha Christie mystery

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• Erica Wagner chooses her favourite summer books

• David Aaronovitch reviews the best history books for your holiday reading

• Tim Teeman reviews the best books to take on holiday

• Val McDermid reviews the latest thrillers

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• Summer reading for children

• Summer reading: biography/memoir

• Lisa Tuttle reviews the latest science fiction and fantasy novels

• Summer reading: fiction that you loved on vacation

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• Summer reading: music

• Summer reading: outdoors

• Summer reading: travel

• Summer listening: audiobooks

Freya North’s latest potboiler, Secrets (Harper, £7.99; Buy this book), finds the lovely, innocent Tess house-sitting for the brooding Joe in his place by the sea. Naturally they fall for each other, but as the title suggests, the past provides impediments to their happiness. Still, you have to love a hero who says things like: “I’m proud to be part of Middlesbrough’s bridge-building heritage”.

Sophie Kinsella’s Twenties Girl (Bantam, £18.99; Buy this book) is built on supernatural bedrock. Lara, a recruitment consultant, makes a strange bond with the ghost of her great-aunt Sadie. As with the best literary ghosts, Sadie is a mischief-maker and helps Lara with her many personal and professional problems, though things become complicated when she falls for Ed, Lara’s boyfriend.

Lara must solve the mystery of Sadie’s troubled past for all souls, past and present, to rest in peace. The closing pages are best read with a cold glass of wine at sunset (with tissues).

Past mysteries also litter Lisa Jewell’s The Truth About Melody Browne (Century, £11.99; Buy this book), the moving and dark story of a woman’s attempt to discover the truth about her childhood and the event that she has blanked from her memory.

Jane Green’s Girl Friday (Michael Joseph, £16.99; Buy this book) is a densely plotted brew of love and deceit in which the heroine Kit falls for the seemingly lovely Steve — “seemingly” because, as Green writes, “Steve says all the right things, does all the right things, but it is as if he has been trained.” Of course, Steve is not all he seems and Kit turns out to have a long-lost sister and a cold-as-ice mother . . . and (breathe deeply) a yoga teacher, Tracy, who falls for her boss, Robert. As Green’s seasonally appropriate The Beach House (Penguin, £7.99; Buy this book) also shows, the author is brilliant at manoeuvring characters and percolating intertwined plots.

A similarly dense stew, if a thousand times more salacious and excessive, Nicholas Coleridge’s Deadly Sins (Orion, £12.99; Buy this book) follows two very different tycoons in mortal combat, with good and bad children and millions of pounds and corporations at stake. There are timely references to corrupt politicians, and you can’t beat a patriarch called Miles Straker, especially when he goes mad at the controls of a JCB. Coleridge proves that men can write bonkbusters, but the nearest thing to a guilty pleasure pitched at men is Devil May Care (Penguin, £7.99; Buy this book), a James Bond mystery by Sebastian Faulks, “writing as Ian Fleming”.

Hard-boiled, fun and crisp as freshly pressed cuffs, it follows 007’s mission to confront the baddie industrialist Dr Julius Gorner. This is Boy’s Own territory at its most thrilling, with 007 at one point pressing the tip of a commando knife against a man’s artery to make him drop a gun, then, rather than cutting his throat, he uses the “carotid takedown”. So, jolly exciting and very useful in survivalist terms, too.

Also in my rucksack: Between Men 2 (Alyson, £10.99), a well edited (by Richard Canning) anthology of gay short stories, including contributions from Alan Hollinghurst, Patrick Gale, Mark Merlis and Ethan Mordden; Dale Peck’s Sprout (Bloomsbury, £6.99; Buy this book), a coming-of-age tale about a boy from New York City transplanted to rural Kansas; and William J. Mann’s classy, comprehensive and intelligent biography, Kate: The Woman who was Katharine Hepburn (Faber and Faber, £9.99; Buy this book).

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