Predicting the bestselling titles of the summer is easy. They will be the usual suspects, plus the Richard and Judy Summer Reads. The perennial favourites Jane Green, Terry Pratchett, Cathy Kelly and Martina Cole top the charts, and they are joined by the first two Summer Reads, Linwood Barclay (No Time for Goodbye) and Sadie Jones (The Outcast). Kate Morton (The Forgotten Garden) is there too - she was a Summer Read last year.

Going on holiday, we reach for the familiar, nothing too demanding. The people who head for the sun with Moby-Dick or Ulysses in their cases, under the misguided notion that they will give these masterworks proper attention, appear to be in a small minority.

The summer bestsellers were entirely familiar until Richard and Judy took an interest. Some people have mixed feelings about the chat show duo's powerful influence. But they would not enjoy this influence if they - or rather Amanda Ross, who is responsible for the selections - were not so skilful at identifying what readers will enjoy. The 2008 Summer Reads are again an appealing mixture: among them are, in addition to Sadie Jones's intense story of growing up in the 1950s and Linwood Barclay's taut thriller, Rebecca Miller's dissection of a woman's compromises (The Private Lives of Pippa Lee), and Toni Jordan's quirky romance Addition.

Further obvious hits include Robert Harris's topical thriller The Ghost, and Ian Rankin's final Inspector Rebus mystery, Exit Music. And Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage is one of the most highly praised new US novels, as is Mary Ann Shafer's The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Set before the war, Bethan Roberts's The Good Plain Cook is the work of an author with a growing reputation.

Many nonfiction fans will likely pack paperbacks of two of the most highly praised titles from 2007, Virginia Nicholson's Singled Out and Charles Nicholl's The Lodger.

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