Summer Reading: Tolstoy, Balzac, Orwell: authors recall the pleasures of holidays past

A ALVAREZ

I SUPPOSE the book that stands out in my memory as a milestone in summer holiday reading was War and Peace - not because I was reading it but because my 13-year-old son Luke was so involved in it that we barely saw him during our two weeks in Italy. I remember it because it was a moving experience watching my child absorbed by such philosophies, knowing that he would never be quite the same afterwards. Another book that continues to grip me and which I have persuaded my wife to read this summer is The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. Somehow reading about Scott and the bleakness of Antarctica is even more compelling when you are relaxing gently in the sunshine.

KAZUO ISHIGURO

ABOUT THREE years ago I was in Wiltshire with my family spending an exceedingly wet summer holiday. I remember we were staying at one of those hotels that concentrates on activities for children rather than grown-ups. With the rain teeming down I soon ran out of things to read so I searched through the hotel's bookshelves and spied a rather tatty and dog-eared edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped, which I have to admit I had never read before. To my delight I discovered it was one of the most evocative books I had ever read. I loved the central character, the young man who sets out to discover the world, I loved the picturesque and romantic language - almost like a literary ballad, musical, lovely. I fell in love with the Scottish moors on that holiday. Things haven't changed. I'll read it again.

JILL PATON WALSH

WE USED to take canal holidays - we owned a boat of our own and it commonly had a random assortment of the members of two families crammed into its 62ft by 6ft space. Wonderful when it was fine, but purgatory when it poured with rain all day. On one such day I seized Animal Farm and began to read it aloud to a company which ranged in age from six to 60. What I remember best was the stereoscopic vision which reading it in that way produced; seeing it simultaneously as immortal fable and as bitter 20th-century history. What our six-year-old got from the story will survive when nobody is left alive who knows who Trotsky was.

DAVID LODGE

IN THE summer of 1971 I took John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman with me to read on a family holiday on the coast of Connemara. I was a bit late in getting round to reading it, for it was first published in 1969, but it had only recently appeared in paperback. It was the perfect holiday read - a long, engrossing page-turner - and the wild romantic scenery made an appropriate setting in which to enjoy the story. But it was also an intellectual and aesthetic landmark book for me. I was fascinated by its metafictional games, especially the multiple endings. In that respect it influenced the otherwise very different novel I was working on myself at the time, Changing Places, and permanently affected my thinking about fictional form.

JOANNA BRISCOE

TRAVELLING ROUND Andalucia one spring, I read The Lover by Marguerite Duras. At first I thought it strange - a disturbing jewel of a novel, but so roughly formed that it was almost amateur. As I went from Cordoba to Cadiz to Ronda, I still couldn't be torn from this tiny novel, so sensual and exquisite. Every sentence demands that the reader lingers. It's the story of an impoverished young French girl's affair with an older Chinese man in Saigon, and the manipulation of her family behind the relationship. It's disquieting, but also intensely erotic, suited to a holiday's heat and distorted sense of time. It revolutionised the way I thought about writing: without being obstructively experimental, Duras pulls apart certain prose conventions, and The Lover freed my perspective. I've since read most of her other work, but this is the novel I return to, and that still dazzles me.

AMANDA CRAIG

TO THIS day, I can remember practically nothing of Thailand, where 10 years ago I picked up a battered copy of Balzac's Lost Illusions on a beach at Koh Samui and recognised everything he described about 19th-century Paris in the modern world of journalism. That was the trigger for A Vicious Circle. Similarly the novel I've just finished writing, In a Dark Wood, was partly inspired by Touched with Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison's study of manic depression and creativity. Reading about the artist's violent mood swings in intense heat, with cicadas shrilling in every tree, made her thesis on madness even more persuasive.

LAVINIA GREENLAW

READING JOSEPH Roth's The Emperor's Tomb in Vienna gave me a key to the city. It's had a lasting impact on my thinking about how to tell stories within history and how to balance both ends of the imaginative scale. There is as much pleasure in the novel's sparest details as in its historical scope. Reading Christoph Ransmayr's The Terrors of Ice and Darkness in the Florida springtime stays with me as a memorable confusion of light and dark. Holed up in Cornwall in winter, I re-read a book that's stayed with me for almost 20 years, Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift. I got more this time from every page and laughed more too.

DUNCAN FALLOWELL

AS A writer I don't have holidays; I go to places. Since I have been a writer all my adult life the only true holidays I've ever had were in boyhood with my family, often rather charged occasions demanding escape. They were dominated in my mid-teens by the wonderful Penguin Modern Classics Series with their expressive hand-drawn covers. But I also recall being shocked and excited by Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers at the Headland Hotel, Newquay, and being blown away by Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov at the Royal Hotel in Bournemouth.

LYNNE REID BANKS

MOST of my trips are for work, but I always take books as a hedge against boredom on flights or to read in bed. They're often impulse-bought paperbacks. In Sofia my hostess lent me Mother's Boys by Margaret Forster, which was gripping. In Gran Canaria I read Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guttman. The trial scenes were slow, but the historical background - Japanese-American farmers in a petty-minded community around the time of Pearl Harbor - was interesting and moving.

NICHOLAS COLERIDGE

I CAN always remember exactly where I read books, so the novels and holiday destination become merged in my mind, sometimes confusingly. I read Tom Wolfe's brilliant A Man in Full, which is set in Georgia, in the desert in Egypt - the contrast between the pyramids and downtown Atlanta rather added to the experience of both. Whenever I think of Trollope's The Way We Live Now, I'm reminded of Greece. Athens started to seem like Victorian London. And when I first read Jonathan Raban's Arabia Through the Looking Glass - on a beach in Miami - the beach bums and lifeguards began to look like Kuwaitis and Saudis. What does this prove? The universality of good literature, probably.