Claire Keegan
Claire Keegan's collection of stories, Antarctica, (Faber and Faber, £9.99 in UK) has just been awarded the 2000 Rooney Prize
I never liked summer as a child. Summer meant an adult hanging a blanket over the curtain-rail at 9 p.m., trying to fool you into thinking it was night. Winter was better, for anything could happen in the dark. This summer, I am going to Le Chateau de Lavigny, Switzerland, for three weeks in August with these books. Big Mouth, a collection of 11 stories by the Fermanagh writer, Blanaid McKinney. The one McKinney story I did read ended beautifully with a buffalo's breath in the cold. I bought two books based on their opening paragraphs: Hannie Bennet's Winter Marriage by Kerry Hardie, and Toni Morrison's Paradise, which begins "They shoot the white girl first."
Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, When We Were Orphans, tells the story of a detective haunted by the disappearance of his parents when he was a boy. Finally, because I'm superstitious, I'm taking Irish Weather Wisdom: Signs of Rain, by Gabriel Rosenstock, with illustrations by Rosemary Woods. It says, "Tomorrow will be a miserable day if the hens stay out after dark." I suppose some hens, like some children, prefer the night.
Nicola Barker
Nicola Barker won the 2000 International Impac Dublin Literary Award for her novel Wide Open (Faber and Faber, £6.99 in UK)
People involved in fiction rarely read it when they're working - either what you read is too good (and you lose heart completely) or it's terrible (and you begin to doubt the whole raison d'etre behind writing the damn stuff in the first place. Because of this, I'm mainly going to be carrying biographies with me over the next few months. Anything by Henri Troyat, and at the moment, I'm halfway through Lawrence Sutin's Divine Invasions: A Life of Phillip K. Dick.
I spend a lot of time on the south coast of England in summer. I can't go abroad because of my revolting dogs. I recently ordered the Above the River: Complete Poems, by James Wright, to read on the pebbly beaches down there. Wright's poems are dry and cruel and beautiful.
Finally, it has to be Martin Amis' Experience. I'll be re-reading it. The stuff about his father is incomparable. And not forgetting his first kiss and his problems with acne and his obsession with the size of his bottom - subjects the long, warm, light hours always make seem more painful and more dear.
Michael Cunningham
Michael Cunningham's novel, The Hours (Fourth Estate, £7 in UK) won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize
I have spent the last year, for the first time in almost 20, writing no fiction at all, a condition I have already set about altering by picking up the telephone whenever it rings, saying "no" without waiting to hear who's calling, and hanging up. Very soon I'm going for the entire summer to a remote house with no phone at all, where I expect (I hope) finally to get back to work.
I'll be taking a suitcase full of books with me. Some are old books I'll be rereading as research, of sorts, for my next novel: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; Seamus Heaney's Beowulf; and Freud's Studies in Hysteria. I'll also be taking an armload of new books, including Jim Crace's Being Dead ; Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans; Adam Phillips Darwin's Worms; Bosie, A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas, by Douglas Murray; Antonia Byatt's The Biographer's Tale; Anita Desai's Fasting, Feasting; and the new Harry Potter, the title of which, at time of writing, is known to only a handful of mortals.
Tom Paulin
Tom Paulin was recently awarded £75,000 (UK) by the British National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts
I'LL shortly be leaving for Donegal, where the Gweebarra hits the Atlantic. Here in Oxford, it's rumoured that there is a retired don who was ordered to shoot the Duke of Windsor in 1940 if the Duke didn't take the boat for the Bahamas. I'll hope to trace this rumour in Martin Allen's Hidden Agenda: How the Duke of Windsor Betrayed the Allies.
I'm also looking forward to reading William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow: The Chateau and The Folded Leaf. Maxwell is 92 and was Frank O'Connor's editor at the New Yorker. If I can find some new stories by Richard Ford I haven't read, they'll be also in my bag, as will Douglas Dunn's new long narrative poem, The Donkey's Ears, which tells the story of Russia's defeat by Japan in 1905 - in what remains the greatest naval battle in history.
Marian Keyes
Marian Keyes's latest novel is The Last Chance Saloon (Poolbeg, £6.99)
This year's "holiday" is going to be spent in Los Angeles researching my next book. So I have a couple of books lined up to give some local colour - High Concept, the biography of film producer and extreme bon viveur, the late Don Simpson. Also You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again by Julia Phillips, which is another fascinating account of Hollywood excess. For the long plane journey there, I'm saving My Life on a Plate by Sunday Times journalist, India Knight. I've already read the first chapter and it was a wrench to put it down. It's a witty, sparky and highly entertaining first-person narrative and I'm sure it'll block out the plane journey for precisely the amount of time it takes to read it.
I'm also bringing Meera Syal's Life isn't all Ha Ha Hee Hee. It's got wonderful reviews, which describe it variously as funny, intelligent, insightful and poignant. What more could you ask for? And for the plane journey home I've got Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson.
David Gates
David Gates's latest novel is Preston Falls (Gollancz, £9.99 in UK)
Everest books are an addiction of mine: each new account of scaling the Hillary Step or the Northwest Ridge thrills me less and less, and therefore I need to read more and more. This summer I plan to make time for Beck Weathers's Left for Dead and David Breashears's High Exposure.
My dippings into Frank Kermode's Shakespeare's Language make me want to find time to settle in with him. This summer, I've got a more modest version of last summer's Shakespeare-reading programme, in which I planned to read all the plays. This summer, how about just the Henrys and Richards? And to reward me for getting my nose rubbed in all that realpolitik, something mystical like The Tempest. Come fall, this may all seem Utopian. But it's a plan.
Susan McKay
Susan McKay's most recent book is Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People (Blackstaff Press, £12.99 in UK)
What I'd love to do this summer is to lie on my back in the Aegean Sea and look at the sky, not a book about me. However, the truth is, I won't be next or near the Aegean Sea. I will sit instead on the wooden summer seat in my back yard, and read.
I'll start with Amin Maalouf's novel, Ports of Call. It's a love story concerning a Lebanese man who is Muslim, and a Jewish woman he meets in Paris. It is about war and politics and nationalism too, and I'm told it is exotic and sad and wise. There's one journalistic book I want to read, and that's The Uninvited: Refugees at the Rich Man's Gate, by Jeremy Harding. It's about the terrible journeys people are making from Africa and Eastern Europe, driven by poverty and war, to try to get into Fortress Europe, where there is work and money.
I've already started Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, which is beautiful, but, I begin to fear, perhaps a bit overwrought. I'll try A. L. Kennedy's Everything You Need, which looks emotional and hard and fierce. I have my eye on Kathleen Jamie's new collection of poems, called Jizzen. There is a line about a soon-to-be-born baby
"sleeping in a bone creel". For indulgence, I'll leaf through Conrad Gallagher's One Pot Wonders so that I can gaze greedily at pictures of seared scallops with guacamole, coriander and chilli, and mango souffle with lime sabayon, while scrunching on an Armagh apple.
Mary Morrissy
Mary Morrissy's latest novel is The Pre- tender (Jonathan Cape, £10 in UK)
My first port of call this summer will be to return to Shirley Hazzard's memoir, Greene on Capri, a slim, beautifully produced volume by an Australian writer who knew Graham Greene during the late 1960s when they sojourned on the then unspoiled southern Italian island. I started this lovely book earlier this year and got sidetracked.
It's not that I'm an avid Greene fan, rather I'm more interested in Hazzard, who since her gem of a novel in the early 1980s, The Transit of Venus, has been silent, fictionally speaking. The combination of her graceful style, the nostalgic flavour of those ex-pat communities of writers and the evocation of Neapolitan heat will, I hope, successfully transport me to sun-drenched climes since I'm committed to staying in Ireland this summer. The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief by James Wood is a collection of criticism. Wood, a literary journalist, is that rare beast - an intelligent and inspiring commentator who writes with authority and passion about a huge range of literature. This volume moves from Thomas More to Don DeLillo and back. I may not always agree with (or even understand!) his arguments, but with Wood there's never an intellectually dull moment. Two Irish books will also feature on my reading list. One is Colum McCann's Every- thing in this Country Must; a novella and two stories set in Northern Ireland. I recently heard McCann read one of these short fictions and was struck by its starkness and intensity. The second is Big Mouth, a debut collection of stories by Blanaid McKinney, about whom I've heard great things.
John Connolly
John Connolly's latest book is Dark Hollow (Hodder and Stoughton, £10 in UK)
I've been avoiding other crime novels while working on my own book, but the fact that three of the best crime novelists currently writing all have new books out this summer means I'll be forced to relent. James Lee Burke publishes his latest Dave Robicheaux novel, Purple Cane Road, concerning the death of Robicheaux's mother; Robert Crais follows last year's excellent LA Requiem with Demolition Angel, the story of a female bomb squad detective; and the brilliant Harlan Coben releases The Darkest Hour, the latest in his series of books about the New York agent, Myron Bolitar.
Outside the crime area, I hope to finish Thomas Lynch's latest book of essays, Bodies in Motion and at Rest, and Alain de Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy. Finally, I've been saving a book which I bought in the US and had never heard of before: Gregory Maguire's Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, in which Maguire imagines an earlier life for the old crone who is destined to end up melting at the hands of Dorothy.
Maurice Manning
Maurice Manning's most recent book is James Dillon, A Biography (Wolfhound, £25)
I've long given up on foreign holidays and will spend the summer between Dublin and Rosslare, where my reading will be divided into three categories - work-related, serious but pleasureable, and escapism. In particular, there is the chance to savour the books bought at Christmas and, as yet, merely tasted.
Two Irish studies, Michael Laffan's The Resurrection of Ireland, a splendid piece of scholarship, and Patrick Murray's Oracles of God, will be revisited. So too will Edward Pearce's Line of Most Resistance, a chilling study of Tory policy towards Ireland 11861914. One book I'm looking forward to is Questioning Ireland, a series of essays in honour of the best teacher I've ever known - Fergal O'Connor. At a wider level, Piers Brendon's The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s is the best study yet of that awful decade.
On the writing side, I'm seven chapters into a murder mystery about a very rich, very dead bishop. I hope the Rosslare air will spur me on.
Colum McCann
Colum McCann's latest book is Everything in This Country Must (Phoenix House, £9.99 in UK)
I'm a bit of a snob, really, and I stay away from the "blockbusters" - those sort of books seem to have perfected the art of saying very little in far too many words. There are always books from younger Irish writers that don't seem to get quite enough fuss made about them. Among my favourites this year: a debut novel by the poet Sara Berkeley called Shadowing Hannah; Emer Martin's More Bread or I'll Appear; also, an extraordinary collection of poems by the Wexford-born Gerard Donovan entitled The Wreckers; a forthcoming collection by Derry-born Sean O'Reilly called Curfew; and although it came out last year, I have just begun reading a fantastic collection of stories by Claire Keegan entitled Antarctica. I have also heard good things about Big Mouth, a collection of stories by Blanaid McKinney.
Claire Hennessy
Claire Hennessy (13) is the author of Dear Diary (Poolbeg, £4.99) which was an Eason's book of the month choice
Until I have enough money to go into a bookshop and buy a pile of books, or order from Amazon.co.uk, I plan to reread some old favourites. Maeve Binchy's Circle of Friends is at the top of that list, followed by all of Patricia Scanlan's novels. I've just finished rereading Marian Keyes's four books so they will have to wait until around the middle of August to be picked up again.
After that I am hoping to buy Rosie Rushton's new book Tell Me I'm OK Really. I'm looking for a copy of The Virgin Suicides, the book the movie was based on. Martina Murphy's latest title, Dirt Tracks, sounds good, so that will be on the list as well. And of course, for those glorious days of lying by the beach in Brittas Bay - assuming we are actually going to get some sunshine this summer - some light reading will be necessary. A few magazines - J-17, Sugar, Bliss along with some books from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Dawson's Creek and Star Trek series.
There isn't much intellectually stimulating and challenging literature in that list. But there's enough of that in school, right?
Eamonn Sweeney
Eamonn Sweeney's latest novel is The Photograph (Picador, £10 in UK)
The publication of The Photograph prevented me from making any summer holiday plans. But whatever the destination, books will be valued companions. Lisbon seems to be beckoning at the moment so I may end up reading the poems of Fernando Pessoa under his native skies. One of the nicest perks of a writer's life is the willingness of publishers to send you out advance copies of works by authors you admire. John Banville is one of my favourite novelists so I'll be diving straight into Eclipse, his new book, which is not in the shops until September but arrived the other day.
I've always been fascinated by the story of Abelard and Heloise and intend to finally read their letters. The enduring appeal of the affair probably reflects the fact that it's the ill-fated romances which resonate most with readers.