The books you need to read this summer, as recommended by Barack Obama

Based on the history of a real reform school in Florida that destroyed the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is the story of idealist Elwood and sceptic Turner, who become friends at the Nickel Academy, a chamber of horrors where physical, emotional and sexual abuse is rife. The tension between Elwood and Turner leads to a decision which will have decades-long repercussions.  

Science fiction writer Ted Chiang’s short story The Story of Your Life was the basis of the film Arrival, which starred Amy Adams. Exhalation is his second collection of short stories.

We suspect Obama is reading Wolf Hall in preparation for the release of Hilary Mantel’s third and final novel in her Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & The Light. The trilogy is a fictional retelling of the life and rise of Thomas Cromwell, who was chief minister to King Henry VIII.

Translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen, Men Without Women is a collection of seven stories by the internationally acclaimed Haruki Murakami. Involving vanishing cats and smoky bars, the short stories all involve the lives of men who have found themselves alone.

In 1986, Marie Mitchell works at the FBI as an intelligence office. As the only black women in an all-white boys’ club, her career is at a standstill, until she’s recruited to a shadowy task force aimed at undermining the revolutionary president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara. Although fiction, American Spy was influenced by true events.

In The Shallows, technology writer Nicholas Carr looks at how the internet is literally re-wiring our brains to change the way we think, read and remember. Carr argues that the internet is fostering ignorance and urges us to look again at our dependence on the web.

Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist and professor of geobiology. Her memoir Lab Girl is about work and love, from stories about the discoveries she’s made in her labs to her childhood playing in her father’s lab and the field trips she’s taken. 

Another novel grounded in history, Inland follows Nora, a frontierswoman awaiting the return of the men in her life with her youngest son, who is convinced that a mysterious beast is stalking the land around their home, and her husband’s 17-year-old cousin, who communes with spirits.

Fresh from a failed marriage, Jonas hits the road to trace the route that his Ethiopian parents took to Nashville, Tennessee 30 years previously. Going from the war-torn Ethiopia of his parents’ youth to the contemporary America he lives in, Jonas’ journey holds the possibility of reconciliation and redemption.

As a struggling single mum Stephanie Land worked for years as a maid, working long hours to provide for her family. This memoir explores what it’s really like to be in service to the upper-middle classes, and examines what it takes to survive in an unequal society.