Bored by the beach

Ronan Browne sorts through the books on offer this summer, sorting the thrilling from the trite to ensure you get the holiday read you deserve

No common themes linked our summer reading in 2004, a year which gave us a disparate poolside library, littered with dead dogs, famine ships, a murdered girl, an Afghani bookshop and a 500 year old religious code. We bought The Curious Incident with The Da Vinci Code, The Lovely Bones and The Bookseller of Kabul – all books by unknown authors. If one could tell from the covers that these were the quality books on offer, choosing what we want to read would be a cakewalk. But the judging a book by its cover cliché is true, something you'll know if you've been stuck 500 miles from Easons with a bad, bloated (but glossy) novel. Guessing what will hold your attention is fraught with difficulties, so here's a helping hand to avoid disappoitment. Cast aside the unopened Christmas biographies, start wistfully imagining some restful time off and start the dreamy joy of planning your holiday reading. Leave it to chance at your own peril.

The page-turning thriller will be, as usual, the Holy Grail of holiday reading. Last year's Da Vinci Code devotees will have shelves of imitators thrusting to fill the void left by the non-appearance of its sequel, The Solomon Key. The early contender seems to be Caldwell and Thomason's The Rule of Four. It has dead relatives, ancient obscure mysteries, shady assassins, indecipherable codes and a word of mouth popularity which is undimmed by the crushing realisation that it isn't what readers want it to be – a book by Dan Brown. Those demanding the familiar will welcome the return of Michael Connolly's grisly anti-hero, the Poet being pitted against Connolly's super sleuth Harry Bosch in The Narrows. Meanwhile, Harlan Coben's growing fans get the usual pace while being spared another missing persons who-done-it in The Innocent. The Guardian have nominated David Gibbin's debut thriller Atlantis, a pacy story of the search for the mythical lost city as their pick while Amazon.com is offering Belfast writer Adrian McKinty's sophomore work, Hidden River. A tough, bleak thriller it features Northern Irish detective Alexander Lawson who tracks an ex-lover's murderer to Colorado. The site draws comparisons to Dennis Lehane's Mystic River, big shoes for the Irishman to fill.

The elusive literary thriller is a sought-after property, giving us the pace of a Grisham but with none of the junk paperback connotations – think Ms Smilla's Feeling for Snow or Snow Falling on Cedars. This year's model is The Shadow of the Wind which after a Richard & Judy recommendation has already sold over 250,000 copies in the UK and topped the Irish and US fiction lists. The Spain portrayed in Carlos Ruiz Zafón's story of post-civil war Barcelona is vastly different from the Andalucian beaches on which it will be read. It follows hero Daniel Sempere's search to discover more about mysterious Spanish writer from the 1930s, Julian Carax. Carax had written a little-known novel (The Shadow of the Wind) which has begun to disappear and Sempere's search is a refreshing energised thriller, filled with memorable, well-drawn characters. It has been greeted with unqualified admiration worldwide, deemed a "breathtaking pageturner" by Stephen King.

Two of the bigger players of UK literature, both past Booker Prize winners, have added to their reputations this spring. Ian McEwan's Saturday is currently outselling Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, but it seems likely that the latter will have reversed this position by summer's end. Saturday, one day in the life of a rich and successful London neurologist may be the book that everyone admires but Ishiguro novel looks like being the one you'll love. The writer of The Remains of the Day has fashioned a sad, creepy and mysterious modern fable which resonates long after you've finished. Both books were the subject of Marian Finucane's book club this month and while both were admired, Never Let Me Go seems to have entertained and intrigued more of the contributors.

These will be followed in early summer by Julian Barnes' Arthur & George, a 19th century fictional mystery solved by Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. and Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down. Hornby has moved on from the popular culture defining works like Fever Pitch and High Fidelity in this tale of five people who meet on top of a building famous for its popularity with jumpers. Another Booker Prize winner JM Coetzee leaves us a longer wait for his next novel when he follows Elizabeth Costelloe with Slow Man, due in September. Those unable to wait may be sated by three books which have begun to make summer waves in paperback; Andrea Levy's charming Small Island, David Mitchell's astounding Cloud Atlas and Khaled Hosseni's word of mouth sleeper hit The Kite Runner.

Just released in America to the same superlative reviews to those that greeted his debut novel is Jonathan Safran Foer's Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close. Now just 27, Foer gained the Guardian First Book Prize and much admiration for his first novel, Everything is Illuminated. His new novel has the hero try to find the lock to fit a strange key found on the body of his father, killed in the World Trade Centre attacks. Equally popular in the US is Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep, the account of a young girl's first year on a scholarship at a New England, old money boarding school.

Those averse to fiction could do worse than the two big US works of the season, Kurt Eichenfeld's Confederacy of Fools is a lengthy damning retelling of the Enron fiasco, a forensic look at the principles and principals which, if not quite making accounting sexy, certainly reads like a conspiracy thriller.

Also wowing them across the water is the current king of modern thought Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. His last book, The Tipping Point looked at word of mouth publicity and saw its title become a modern phrase, the FutureShock of today. Blink looks at the power of snap judgements and how the subconscious often makes our first decision the correct one to take.

If you're unwilling to take our advice on what books to take on your next holiday, perhaps Mr Gladwell's views on publicity, marketing and decision-making may help.