Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie I have long been meaning to read the classic novel set in Ghana, Search Sweet Country, by Kojo Laing (McSweeney’s) and will finally do so in the next weeks. I am looking forward to Elizabeth Alexander’s The Light of the World (Grand Central Publishing), a beautiful memoir by a gifted poet, and Loving Day: A Novel by Mat Johnson (Spiegel & Grau), whose work has that rare combination of being funny and true. I first read Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich (Phoenix House) as a teenager and it sparked my ongoing fascination with the second world war. I plan to re-read it this summer, more than 20 years later, to see how it holds up. Jesse Armstrong Top of my pile is Boxer Handsome by Anna Whitwham (Chatto & Windus) – a tough, lean novel about East End boxing. I’ll also be taking a real bicep-builder, What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer (Vintage), which dissects the 1988 presidential campaign when Michael Dukakis took on George HW Bush. It’s a book of lovely gossipy-serious, slightly moist-eyed American political journalism. Genuinely funny novels are hard to come by but the one I’m pinning my beach hopes on…