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Richard Fitzpatrick picks his top summer reads — don’t go to the beach without one of these in your bag.

If you get a chance to lounge on a beach this summer, don’t do it alone, pop a book into your beach bag. Our top picks cover everything from sports to short stories, fact to fiction — there’s something for everyone in our top 12 list.

COLUM MCCANN’S TransAtlantic (Bloomsbury, €20.99) is probably the most-vaunted novel of the year to come from an Irish writer. It follows on from his US National Book Award-winning Let The Great World Spin. McCann will be hoping it also shifts a million copies. Like its predecessor, it weaves several storylines together, beginning with Alcock and Brown’s transatlantic flight in a converted bomber from Newfoundland to Connemara in 1919 before stepping back in time to ex-slave Frederick Douglass’s trip to Ireland in 1845, just as the country was being engulfed in famine, and forward to 1998 and Senator George Mitchell’s role in the Northern Ireland Peace Process. A fictional family of women, one a servant girl in the house which hosts Douglass who takes a coffin ship to the New World, threads the stories together.