We think of Charles Darwin circumnavigating the globe in HMS Beagle and eyeballing turtles in the Galápagos, yet he spent most of his career exploring the flora and fauna of his native Britain.

In Darwin’s Island (Little, Brown, £20; Buy the book), Steve Jones, the genius who explains us to ourselves, shows how the great naturalist drew on life at home — the expressions of his dog Sappho; a game of hide and seek with his infant son — and in his greenhouse. After forcing plants to mate with themselves Darwin concluded that inbreeding was injurious and, sadly, almost certainly accounted for his disabilities and those of his children, since he had followed family tradition and married his first cousin.

As Darwin discovered, Nature yields her secrets to the patient and the curious: The Dig (Penguin, £7.99; Buy the book) is John Preston’s fictional account of the famous 1939 excavation of an Anglo-Saxon burial ship, complete with treasures, at Sutton Hoo. An unpromising setting for a novel, you might think — a man crouching with a pastry brush in a heap of earth — but Preston conjures a captivating tale of jealousy, intrigue and understated human emotion from under the leaden Suffolk skies.

In Wildwood (Free Press, £8.99; Buy the book) Roger Deakin takes us with him on a journey through trees. Here he is camping at night in a bluebell wood listening to the whisper of pigeon wings and, as dawn breaks, to the layering of birdsong, from the cawing rooks in the canopy to the understorey of chiffchaffs and blackcaps; now climbing a Pyrenean mountainside to witness the palette of autumn colours. Deakin died before his time, in 2006 — Wildwood was his parting gift — but it is certain that his spirit is still moving in the woods and rivers.

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

Related Internet Links

• 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

Are we denying our children these wonders of nature, instilling in them instead a kind of ecophobia? In the US bestseller Last Child in the Woods (Atlantic, £12.99; Buy the book) Richard Louv frets that while they learn in class about the trashing of seas and logging of rainforests, many children know nothing of the meadow outside the school gates. Obsessed with stranger danger, parents strap GPS personal locators to their children and take them to supervised playdates in 4x4s. These are poor substitutes for the proven antidotes to crime — an active community, more human eyes on the street and self-confident children.

How else would they learn the special pleasures of walking, exquisitely rendered in Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust (Verso, £7.99; Buy the book), published in 2001 and already a modern classic. Centuries of painters, poets, philosophers, protesters and pilgrims are marshalled in celebration of the singular human pursuit, best enjoyed in solitude.

Closer to home, Freshly Picked (Chatto & Windus, £20; Buy the book ) is a practical hymn to the urban vegetable patch. On her East London allotment — “with soil as rich as chocolate cake” — Jojo Tulloh grows food for her family, cycles home via the Turkish deli, cooks deliciously and obligingly gives us the recipes. A domestic goddess in gumboots, Tulloh is an inspiration for neophyte kitchen gardeners everywhere.

Finally, a small hurrah for The Cloud Collector’s Handbook (Sceptre, £10; Buy the book ): tuck it in your pocket and you will never gaze at the sky in ignorance again.

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