I find reading in the summer a lot easier than the winter. Something about the settled heat and ensuing stillness of the summer months makes my brain work at a heavily reduced speed and I become far more preoccupied with stories than facts. My mind becomes more interested in mysteries, romances and other people’s lives than my own. For many young people, the summer is a space to read what you like between semesters packed with conscripted texts. I have always followed the somewhat Victorian notion that reading is ‘improving’. These books below (read on overcrowded zero-hour work buses in June, park benches in July and below pine leaves in August) have certainly improved me. - Sasha

I cannot give an unbiased synopsis of this book because it’s one of my all-time favourites, so apologies in advance.

From the Pulitzer prize nominated author of the Poisonwood Bible, Flight Behaviour and Homeland, The Lacuna tells the story of a man caught between two nations. Set between the cold grasp of McCarthy’s America and the warm embrace of 1950’s Mexico, the protagonist and compulsive diary keeper, Harrison Shepard, is a problem child for his social climbing mother. As a young adult he begins to work in the house of Diego Riviera and Frida Kahlo, also home to Lev Trotsky currently in political exile. He unknowingly throws his lot in with the revolutionaries. The novel, exquisitely visceral, is a masterful account of the delicacy of human relationships. The heart of the novel continuously turns the questions of truth vs public perception as the protagonist is forced to continually move between the two nations.

It takes real skill to write a book like The Power. The nuances of sexism, its arbitrary nature and even the nature of power itself are skilfully laid out through a brilliant and original plot. The Power does not preach, it states and then it explores. It takes the lived experiences of women and puts them through an entirely different system (or rather it is posed the novel serves as an analysis of the current system disguised to seem alien and dystopian). Read this book, then read it again. Give it to your brother, pass it out amongst your friends and talk about it; it’s what it’s made for.

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings is the first volume of Angelou’s seven autobiographies. It beautifully documents her childhood and growing up as a black girl in the American South during the 1930s. Angelou masterfully interweaves heart-wrenching stories of sexual assault and racism with recounts of her childhood and the joy she found in her friendship with her brother, her love of learning and her experiences with love.

At first I admittedly found the book a little heavy going. I read it on holiday and found myself sharing in Angelou’s feelings of devastation and anger at her experiences when really I wanted something a little lighter. I felt this only briefly, however, and this is one of the reasons I recommend the book so highly; it is beautiful and joyous whilst being important and distressing at the same time. Angelou treads a beautifully fine line, contrasting the joys of a childhood spent playing and finding solace in reading and eating sweets with the bleak reality of life under segregation in America.

Tara Westover’s ‘Educated’ is a gripping tale of escape from her survivalist Mormon family in Idaho. Homeschooled by her mother, this is the tale of a girl growing up in a world without a proper education and therefore a world that is unimaginable to most of us. The story of her upbringing feels so foreign compared to my own and this makes for an amazing and addictive read.

It feels intensely rewarding as the reader witnesses Westover change her own narrative. She escapes from a toxic environment that promotes constant guilt into a world of education and academia where she thrives. Increasingly expedited from her family, Westover movingly depicts her pain at no longer belonging to those she loves so deeply. It is a profound illustration of how family shapes us, and the transformative and enchanting nature of education, which in the end rescues Westover from her dire situation.