What will you read on holiday this summer, whether on a foreign jaunt or staycation? A distinguished list of Tablet contributors offer their summer books.
The Tablet is a religion magazine available in church bookstalls and all good bookshops.
Keeping things local, WH Auden once worked as a teacher at Larchfield School in Helensburgh, and Helensburgh has its own beekeepers’ club.
Eamon Duffy lent his “well-thumbed paperback of Louis MacNeice and W.H. Auden’s Letters from Iceland” (Faber, £16.99; Tablet price £15.29) to a friend, who never returned it. A cheap replacement” of the book first published in 1937 “turned out to be a first edition, autographed by Auden”. Rowan Williams is looking forward to “getting to grips with Dark Night, the new translations of St John of the Cross (patron saint of journalists) by Martha Sprackland” (Penguin Classics, £12.99; Tablet price £11.69). And Catherine Coldstream has picked Martin Shaw’s Liturgies of the Wild: Myths that Make Us (Rider, £22; Tablet price £19.80) for its blend of “humble and moving reflections” on his conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy and “wild, windswept storytelling”.
For Melanie McDonagh, 2026’s stand-out book is The Complete Beekeeper (Gracewing, £20; Tablet price £18), Gabriel Wilson OSB’s account of his life as a beekeeper-monk. It’s a spiritual guide, she says, rendered in “fabulously honeyed prose”.