Regular readers know that, each summer, I share my holiday reading material. Some folk kindly email me their own reading lists to entice me, or suggest titles they feel supplement my choices.

Choosing my holiday books is one of those sweet anticipatory moments before a holiday. Book shelves are lovingly pored over, dust jackets read and put aside into shortlisted piles, until finally, a selection is made.

Tudor England fascinates me. I read both fact and fiction. One book I’m longing to read is Lamentation by C J Sansom. It’s been out for a while, but, frankly, isn’t to be rushed at it in snatched moments. Sansom is an author to be savoured: the only author in my adult years to have me covering my eyes during a scary bit, because I didn’t want to “see” what came next.

My second choice is, Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery by Eric Ives. As I thoroughly enjoyed his earlier work, I have high hopes for his depiction of the Lady Jane as a real person and not just a pawn in a male game of thrones.

The third history book to join my luggage is, Killers of the King: The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I by Charles Spencer. It relates to Charles I’s execution and his son’s revenge on the “regicides,” once he became king. It has really piqued my interest.

My love of crime fiction is no secret. This year’s list is headed by Hans Olav Lahlum’s The Human Flies, a Norwegian locked-room mystery, and includes The Hangman’s Daughter by Oliver Potzsch; The Devil in the Marshalsea by Antonia Hodgson; Andrew Taylor’s The Silent Boy, and The Shut Eye by Belinda Bauer.

Others are Us by David Nicols; Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman; The Blind Man’s Garden by Nadeem Aslam and Bloody Margaret: Three Political Fantasies by Mark Lawson.

I’ll try sneaking more into the car, when the OH isn’t looking. I know there’s no hope of finishing the whole list, but reading is, for me, a lifelong source of enjoyment.

A holiday without far too many books is no holiday at all. More from Lyn