There are many ecowarning books out there now and everybody with any interest in the future needs at least to consider what they have to tell us. Pippa Lee and her publisher husband, 30 years her senior, have just moved into a retirement home - we learn the story of their apparently happy marriage, first from the outside and then, quite differently, from Pippa herself. However, their lists are usually cannily chosen - and this engaging debut novel (by Arthur Miller's daughter and Daniel Day Lewis's partner) is the pick of this year's summer selection.

The sorry reality of bookselling now is that Richard and Judy matter far more than any other means of reception and review. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, by Rebecca Miller. In my favourite passage, a Vendée peasant writes lovingly, in the 1900s, to his fiancée, saying: 'the only thing I can compare you to is fields of young cabbages before the caterpillars have got to them'.

The book may be a hotch-potch rather than offering any sustained argument but it's all the better for that. For any Francophile, Robb's meandering exploration of the hidden past of the country - its dialects, its superstitions, its resistance to change - is irresistible.

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There are lessons packed in here, but Bennett doesn’t wallop readers with them. Bennett has fun with the proper behavior and protocol at the palace, and the few instances of mild coarseness seem almost scandalous.

Ultimately, it is her own growing self-awareness that leads her away from reading and toward writing, with astonishing results. mistaken for the onset of senility,” plots are hatched by the prime minister and the queen’s staff to dispatch Norman and discourage the queen’s preoccupation with books. Guided by Norman, a former kitchen boy and enthusiast of gay authors, the queen gradually loses interest in her endless succession of official duties and learns the pleasure of such a “common” activity. ) sends Queen Elizabeth II into a mobile library van in pursuit of her runaway corgis and into the reflective, observant life of an avid reader. Briskly original and subversively funny, this novella from popular British writer Bennett ( Untold Stories

The uncommon reader a novella