What to pack with your beach towel

Whether you want to be comforted or challenged, a good summer read should transport you as surely as plane, train or automobile. And if you're searching for something that won't bust the baggage allowance, plenty of the literary year's prizewinners are now in paperback. The Impac award brought a phenomenal debut to well-deserved wider attention: De Niro's Game by Rawi Hage (Old Street, £7.99) is a searing account of life in war-torn Beirut, brutal and poetic by turns. Through the voice of a young man overflowing with adrenaline, exhilaration and despair, Hage sets out the way war corrupts society and individuals alike to vivid, startling effect. Don't be put off Anne Enright's Booker winner by reports of its grimness: The Gathering (Vintage, £7.99), one woman's warped, wondering meditation on family history, childhood damage, the intimacies of marriage and the need for solitude, is playful, raw and wickedly funny. Enright's voice is quite unique.

When We Were Bad by Charlotte Mendelson (Picador, £7.99) is a big, bright family affair, combining writing to linger over, a plot to race through and characters to care about. The story of a north London Jewish clan who seem "doomed to happiness", it investigates their individual crises and epiphanies with cleverness and charm. For an atmospheric combination of adolescence, family disintegration and 1970s nostalgia, pack According to Ruth by Jane Feaver (Vintage, £7.99); this sultry tale of Bohemian parents and their out-of-control children going wild in the country one Northumberland summer is gripping, intense and beautifully written. There's another journey into childhood's foreign country - and the dying days of Rhodesia - in Lauren Liebenberg's extravagantly named The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam (Virago, £12.99). Eight-year-old Nyree is an innocent, unsettling guide to the brutal attitudes, crumbling colonial outposts, African folklore and rich flora and fauna that make up her vividly reported world, as she tries to protect her little sister from the danger closing in on her. An extraordinary time and place feels close enough to touch.