The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

The Ghost, by Robert Harris. Never mind the effusions of Cherie and counter-attacks of Alastair Campbell, Robert Harris's quickly produced thriller about the nameless ghostwriter to Britain's former Prime Minister is the definitive literary response to the Blair years — as well as a riveting read. Out this week in paperback.

The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett. This little novella about the Queen developing a surprising passion for books is just a joy, line by line. It's cheeky and camp but also has an absolutely serious core about literature enlarging life: a Bennett classic.

Dreams From My Father: A story of race and Inheritance, by Barack Obama.You don't want to read any politician's memoir, let alone an American one, do you? Oh yes, you do. Obama wrote this book, first published in 1995, when he was 33 and seeking for his own identity, as the son of a white Hawaiian mother and absent Kenyan father. It's touching, revealing, brave and generous — and, if sometimes stretching plausibility in reconstructing dialogue, unprecedentedly well-written for any politician.

The Wild Places, by Robert Macfarlane. Macfarlane, a young don at Cambridge, sets out to discover what wilderness there is left in these overpopulated islands, traversing the land, sleeping out in all weathers, before coming home to east Anglia. If sometimes a little precious, this is beautiful as well as intelligent writing — and in Macfarlane we have a new naturalist to set beside the classics in our literature.

The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman. This book is a weirdly alluring thought-experiment. Weisman, reacting to overpopulation and global warming, investigates and imagines what would happen to the earth if all human beings were suddenly gone for good — how long it would take the houses to fall, the streets to become rivers, the nuclear plants to overheat ... What would survive of us? Not much. Mount Rushmore, perhaps, carved in granite. Science fiction, for real.

Eight Lives Down, by Chris Hunter. There are many vivid first-hand accounts of combat coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan now, but this story of a tour of duty as a bomb disposal expert in Basra is both eye-opening and completely compulsive.

The Discovery of France, by Graham Robb. For any Francophile, Robb's meandering exploration of the hidden past of the country — its dialects, its superstitions, its resistance to change — is irresistible. The book may be a hotch-potch rather than offering any sustained argument but it's all the better for that. 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 Private Lives of Pippa Lee, by Rebecca Miller. The sorry reality of bookselling now is that Richard and Judy matter far more than any other means of reception and review. 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. 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.

The Last Oil Shock, by David Strahan. 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. David Strahan, a TV journalist, delivers here an angry and chilling survival guide to the imminent extinction of Petroleum Man', concluding with passnotes for policymakers, plus advice on what we all can do. We may not know exactly when peak oil will hit; we do know that it's coming.

Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart, by Tim Butcher. The former Telegraph correspondent travelled up the length of the Congo, retracing the exploration of hM Stanley, and this astonishing travel book resulted, unsparing about the danger, poverty and sheer horror he encountered — but also full of admiration for the spirit of the people he meets, surviving in this ruined land.

Young Stalin, by Simon Sebag Montefiore. The story of how the monster grew, taking him up to 1917, full of new research and extraordinary detail. Prior to this book, Stalin had lazily been thought to be grey and inhuman — Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals him as glamorous, artistic, a lover, and a man of action, as well as profoundly wicked. An absolutely compelling life.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. The road is not new even in paperback this year but many have only caught up with the book recently in the wake of the film of No Country for old Men. Its premise — one man and his son wander the dead landscape of post-apocalypse America, searching for tins of food while avoiding cannibal marauders — sounds repellent. But this novel, more spartanly written than McCarthy's westerns, is perhaps the best of all fiction from the past few years. It devastatingly reveals to you how many assumptions you make about human permanence and continuity every day in your own life. If you haven't yet read it, it's the number one choice.

Disgrace, by JM Coetzee. The 'Best of the Booker', in which the public votes on a shortlist of six titles, is announced next week, on 10 July. In all likelihood, it will be won by Salman rushdie for Midnight's Children, which will then make it all the more poignant if his latest effort isn't even shortlisted this year. But it's a good chance to go back to this masterpiece, which won nearly 10 years ago now, in 1999, and which, portraying the white dilemma in Southern Africa, seems ever more prescient and admonitory as time goes by.

Sebastian Faulks's pastiche of James Bond has now sold 109, 889 copies in hardback in a month, a triumph of marketing at least, it must be said. But have all those who've bought it really read Ian Fleming's Bond originals recently? They are, you will not be surprised to hear, rather better, still fresh and surprising.

Penguin has republished some late Fleming scraps and stories, when he was tiring of his creation, under the title Quantum of Solace — but much better to go straight for the Bond classics, from Casino Royale onwards, hopefully re-issued in hardback by 'Penguin 007' last month with Bond Girl' covers, but widely available in paperback too.

Synopsis from Foyles.co.uk

How would the world change if human beings vanished from the earth right now, for good? What would the planet be like in a day, a week, a month...a millennium? Just how long will our greatest achievements and our biggest mistakes last after we are gone? To discover the answers, Alan Weisman looks to areas of the world that are currently unoccupied and speaks to experts in fields ranging from nuclear physics to archaeology. He reveals how the natural world would react to our disappearance and wrestles with some of the key concerns of our time to offer an intriguing glimpse of the real legacy of our existence on the planet. 'Compelling...jammed packed with fascinating 'what if's" - "Guardian". 'The results of this huge thought-experiment are both fascinating and surprising' - "Daily Mail". 'Flesh-creepingly good fun...an expert-led fantasia of the post-human planet' - "Independent". 'A wonderful idea...This is a terrific book' - "Scotsman".