Here's a recommendation, which carried me joyously through our family holiday this year: The Adult by Joe Stretch, which has 5 stars on amazon.co.uk, and deserves every one of them, plus a suitably summery picture on the front (a boy on the beach with an inflatable dolphin).
It's a brilliant, beautiful, sad, wry, sexy, clever book that tells the tale of a northern lad, Jim Thorne, born in the early 80s and then growing up, surrounded by celebrity culture and an eccentric family including his lovely Mum, disturbed Dad, would-be Tracey Emin-styled artist sister and three very famous aunties. Stretch writes about growing up and family life with warmth, bizarre insights and huge comic flair, bringing to mind greats at that kind of writing from John Irving to Sue Townsend and Jonathan Coe. And this is a really funny book, from throwaway lines to bravura comic set pieces: there's a tale of two lads using a trumpet for non-musical stimulation that had me in stitches and reading it aloud to everyone (well, everyone aged 12 or more) I met on holiday! Then I choked up reading the last chapter. That doesn't happen to me often when I'm reading, still less when I'm reading on the beach.
But the humour's reminiscent of those other great authors because it's part of something more profound - a moving family drama and doomed romance that, in turn, dissects some of the sadness and strangeness of contemporary life for the last twenty years. It also has some of the strongest female characters in recent literary fiction.
In short, you know those books where you wind up loving the characters, so much so that they never really leave you again? The Adult is one of those, I reckon. I hope it wins a major prize of some sort.
(Something unspeakable happens to the inflatable dolphin on the cover, incidentally!)