While on holiday this summer, award yourself an extra ice cream if you see someone with an e-book reading device. You won’t put on a lot of weight. More column inches have been devoted to e-books than to any other trends in the book world recently; but most of us are sticking to print on paper. Many of us are likely to take on holiday precisely the heavy hardbacks that the digital revolution promises to eliminate from our luggage. The nonfiction book of the moment, Antony Beevor’s 600-page D-Day, will be a much more likely sight — on beaches in Normandy and elsewhere — than the Sony Reader.

The Times asked leading booksellers to predict what their customers would take away on holiday. Waterstone’s and WH Smith went for Twenties Girl, the first novel in hardback from Sophie Kinsella (aka Madeleine Wickham) — “albeit at £18.99 the price is a challenge” in the view of WHS’s Rachel Russell. Sapphire by Katie Price is a more realistic £12.99, and fans upset by the rift between Price and Peter Andre will no doubt make this another bestseller in one of the most unexpected fiction careers of our time.

Waterstone’s expects to do well with three slightly more upmarket offerings: Kazuo Ishiguro’s collection of stories about music, Nocturnes; Sarah Waters’s ghost story The Little Stranger; and Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s new tale of bookish mystery, The Angel’s Game. At Borders, there’s enthusiasm for the late John Updike’s last short story collection, My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, and for M. J. Hyland’s compelling new work, This Is How. The left-field offering from Borders, which has a tradition of backing such books, is Donald Ray Pollock’s story collection Knockemstiff, set in an Ohio town of that name.

Waterstone’s reckons that Mike Pannett is about to follow James Herriot as a bestselling chronicler of working life in Yorkshire. Pannett’s book of policing reminiscences is called You’re Coming with Me Lad. The chain also fancies Lynn Barber’s memoir An Education, part of which concerns Barber’s teenage affair with an older man. Other nonfiction summer hits, our booksellers say, will include paperback editions of memoirs by Dawn French and Julie Walters, among others.

So to paperback fiction, the choice of most holidaymakers. Three years ago everybody — or so it seemed — was reading Victoria Hislop’s The Island; a good proportion of them will come back for Hislop’s The Return. Maeve Binchy (Heart and Soul) is a default choice for many. Other selections include Ian Rankin (Doors Open), Bernard Cornwell (Azincourt), Catherine Alliott (The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton) and Chris Cleave (The Other Hand). Borders is backing horror with John Lindqvist (Handling the Undead) and Guillermo del Toro (Strain).

My own choices are more expensive novels, I’m afraid, and somewhat bleak: Hyland’s previously mentioned This Is How; and Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places, a pungent slice of Midwestern gothic.

Explore Commercial

• Easy Reader

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy