The books we loved most this summer

Pinch, punch – it’s September, and the books world is gearing up for its busiest season, with new titles from Sally Rooney, Richard Osman and not one but two Clintons due out in the coming months. But for today’s newsletter, we’re clinging on to those last remnants of summer, and looking back at the books we loved reading on our holidays this year. And Sam Leith, who wrote about the importance of children’s books for yesterday’s Saturday magazine, tells us his favourite titles to share with the kids in your life.

Nothing says summer – well, to us on the Guardian’s books desk at least – like having long, uninterrupted stretches of time to finally get to the bottom of your TBR pile. Now that we’re in back-to-school season, here are our best reads of the last few months.

My Friends by Hisham Matar

I picked up My Friends after it was longlisted for this year’s Booker prize. At the heart of the novel is a real event: in 1984, gunmen opened fire on protestors from within the Libyan embassy in London, killing police officer Yvonne Fletcher. University students Khaled and Mustafa attend the demonstration on something of a whim, but find their life courses irrevocably altered. Khaled, our narrator, looks back on this Rubicon moment and the ensuing 30 years of political exile while taking a walk through London. The novel is an ode to the city, but also an aching lament for Benghazi, where Khaled’s family remain. True to its title, the novel traces the shifting contours of friendships – the author celebrates their beauty but also prises open their ambiguities and frustrations. I loved the way Matar catches the smallest of moments – a look that passes across a face, something said or unsaid – and from there articulates the essence of a character, a relationship, or a feeling. Ella Creamer, books reporter

A Voyage Around the Queen by Craig Brown

At what point am I going to have to admit that my penchant for reading about the royals is getting out of hand? That my inhaling of stories about this bizarre family isn’t quite the detached, anthropological exercise I would like it to be? Am I going to end up like one of those people who camps out all night for a glimpse of Princess Anne’s bouffant? So far I can just about maintain my cool by blaming it on the craft and brilliance of two recent books, 2022’s The Palace Papers by Tina Brown and, this summer, Craig Brown’s A Voyage Around the Queen. The latter is addictive as a store of behind-the-scenes gossip, genuinely fascinating as a piece of social commentary, and often just downright surreal (if you read the Guardian’s recent extract, you’ll recognise Kingsley Amis’s prophylactic use of Imodium as a case in point). It follows Brown’s acclaimed portrait of the acidulous Princess Margaret, Ma’am Darling, and the quality of its research and writing is the perfect excuse for those of us who still can’t quite admit we’ve become a little bit obsessed with kings, queens and hangers-on. David Shariatmadari, nonfiction books editor

You’re Embarrassing Yourself by Desiree Akhavan

A few weeks ago I had the rare treat of catching a train from Paddington to Plymouth that was neither delayed nor jam-packed – and to top it all off, I read a brilliant book: You’re Embarrassing Yourself by Desiree Akhavan. The film-maker and actor’s first book is essentially a memoir, told via a series of sometimes funny, sometimes moving, always unflinchingly honest essays. Anyone who, like me, loved Akhavan’s films Appropriate Behaviour and The Miseducation of Cameron Post is likely to enjoy hearing from the woman who made them – but Akhavan is such a good writer and her reflections so entertaining and astute that I don’t think it is only pre-existing fans who will enjoy this book. If you’re not convinced, you can whet your appetite with an extract from the book that appeared in the Guardian’s Saturday magazine. Lucy Knight, books commissioning editor

Choosing the best children’s books from the whole of history is sipping from a firehose. But – with a bias towards hidden gems, because you all know The Secret Garden is a banger, right? – here are a few.

Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co. is one of the great, genre-defining school stories: it’s very, very funny, but it’s also tender and moving and, as its protagonists move towards adulthood and military service, dignified and sad. John Meade Falkner’s Moonfleet, once a staple of primary school reading lists, seems to be getting forgotten – it shouldn’t be; it’s a fabulously gripping gothic adventure yarn. Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden is magically written, brilliantly conceived (a sort of reverse ghost story long before M Night Shyamalan got there) and the final page will leave you sobbing. If I had my way, too, TH White’s The Once and Future King – a riff on Arthurian legend that hops from unbearable beauty to Monty Python-style farce between one page and the next – would be as famous as Harry Potter. Richard Adams’s original Watership Down, too, is so much more amazing than the movie.

Nobody I know who has read Nicholas Fisk’s science fiction/horror novel Grinny has done so without being scarred for life – in a good way. SE Hinton’s The Outsiders and Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War both show just how gritty YA can get. I sense that Robert Westall’s The Machine Gunners, about life on the home front in the second world war, is drifting into obscurity: I very much hope it doesn’t; nor, for that matter, should Ian Serraillier’s The Silver Sword, set amid the wartime refugee crisis. Both are little masterpieces.

In picture books, you know Julia Donaldson is great. But what about Jon Klassen’s blackly funny I Want My Hat Back or Anthony Browne’s haunting and dreamlike Into the Forest?Or Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon – a limitlessly mysterious and rereadable bedtime book for bunnies.

• The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading by Sam Leith is published by Oneworld (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.