A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth centres around who Lata will chose to marry? Is her idea of a suitable boy the same as her mother's? This simple dilemma propels a story set against an India struggling with its new independence.

Although Angela Carter is famous for her short stories, I prefer her novels. Wise Children is especially enjoyable for the refreshing portrait of two elderly sisters whose lives in working class south London and stage careers are both more music hall than luvvy. Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth brings together the oppressed of two continents as the brutalised sailors on a slave ship find common cause with their captives and together seek and find their freedom.

As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee is a great book to read on the beach where you can relate to the heat of the Spanish plains. In 1934 the young author walks to London and then on a whim hops on a boat to Spain. As he walks through Spain, the beauty of the land is described as well as the peasants and workers he encounters. But as he is caught up in the revolution his attitude hardens from observation to sympathy and solidarity.

Steve Harrison (Poplar)

Bully for Brontosaurus is the fifth volume of collected essays from Stephen Jay Gould's column in Natural History magazine. Gould is an evolutionary biologist and the subjects discussed are diverse and always thoroughly entertaining.

Their Morals and Ours, a pamphlet written by Leon Trotsky, is a wonderful hard hitting polemic against liberal and ex-Marxist intellectuals of the 1930s who were rapidly drifting to the right. Trotsky's classic defence of revolutionary morality is just what's needed when the 'moral effluvia' of New Labour gets too hard to take anymore. Edinburgh has been disrupted recently by the making of the film version of Thomas Hardy's novel Jude the Obscure, which prompted me to read the book. It describes and gives a real feel for the impact that the industrial revolution had on rural areas.

Rhona Dodds (Edinburgh)

Sembene Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood is a brilliantly vivid and inspiring novel about an African strike against colonial capitalism. If you enjoy poetry, the pride and humanity of Maya Angelou's The Complete Poems and the incisive anger of Tony Harrison's Selected Poems (particularly the final poem 'v') and his booklet of anti Gulf War poems, A Cold Coming, are certainly worth a read. Karl Marx gives an excellent step by step explanation of capitalist exploitation and the limitations of trade union struggle in the little book Wages, Prices and Profit.

Mark Brown (Glasgow)

Richard Stites's Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution is one of the best examples of 'revisionist' writing on cultural history of revolutionary Russia. The book is stuffed full of remarkable examples of the extent to which the revolutionary enthusiasm of 1917 spilled over into cultural and artistic practice and into the living of everyday life.

Hollywood has etched Los Angeles into our collective consciousness. So, two books which take LA as their setting: California Red, the autobiography of Dorothy Ray Healey, a Communist activist and organiser in LA from aged 14 in 1928 to her final departure from the party in 1973. Despite the awfulness of some of Healey's Stalinist politics, her passion and commitment to the struggle shine through. Mike Davis's City of Quartz takes the lid off Los Angeles past and present. Here is the socialist commentary to all those LA movies from Chinatown to Heat. Read this book and next time someone comes up with the nonsense argument that class doesn't exist in the US, you'll have all the arguments at your fingertips.

James Eaden (Chesterfield)

Daniel Guerin's The Brown Plague is a fascinating and terrifying eyewitness account of the rise of fascism in Germany, and was written as a warning to the French left that Hitler's rise had nothing to do with the German national character. David Hilliard and Lewis Cole's This Side of Glory is the best of the recent crop of books on the Black Panthers. An inspiring retelling of their strengths, by one of their leaders, that isn't afraid to admit their weaknesses.

Another side of Lenin is shown in Memories of Lenin, a biographical history of his life and the building of the Bolshevik Party by his comrade and wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. Martin Millar's Milk, Sulphate and Alby Starvation is a very funny story of punks and paranoia in south London. If it has any politics they're probably anarchist.

Ken Olende (Hackney)

I recommend a small, very cheap (60p) book, Pity of War by Wilfred Owen. This might seem like bleak reading for the summer, but set against the increasing mood of jingoism and hysteria maybe it is timely.

Owen was killed within days of the end of the First World War; he was 25 years old. As a younger man he wrote soppy sonnets about not a lot. His experiences during capitalism's first major European war transformed his poetry­it is bitter and angry against the perpetrators of war and full of compassion for its victims.

Pat Barker's trilogy, ending with The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize this year, and it is also about Owen and the First World War. It makes good fairly easy reading­blending fact and fiction with a class dimension and some revelations. The best book of the three in my view is the first, Regeneration.

But if summer reading means light reading with a bite, Leonardo Sciasca's The Day of the Owl or Sicilian Uncles might be for you. Sciasca's novels are sophisticated detective stories, as you might expect from a Sicilian lawyer. There is also a political dimension (he was always on the left politically) and his books combine a flowing narrative with a sharp wit.

Beth Stone (Newham)

The sound of willow on the heads of cricket's establishment is wonderful in Mike Marqusee's Anyone But England. A kind of look back in anger at the British Empire (and umpire) and the racism that went with it. Two books to prove you cannot skin a live tiger claw by claw are Ian Birchall's Bailing Out The System and Revolutionary Rehearsals, ed Colin Barker, a history of modern workers' uprisings. Working for Ford by Huw Benyon was a classic account of life in a car plant. Jeff Torrington's new novel, Devil's Carousel, sounds promising, but Ben Hamper's Rivethead, both brutal and funny, shows workers' spirit. If you want a first hand account of why Labour failed in government, Tony Benn's Diaries (especially under Wilson 1966-70) are extremely readable and revealing.

Phil Turner (Sheffield)

Always good for a summer read is Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. It's one of those rare books that gives a glimpse of a possible socialist future. You may not be totally enamoured with Piercy's vision­it's a bit too pastoral for some­but the book raises any number of intriguing issues. How will children be raised? Will we make greater use of reproductive technology? How will we share access to rare works of art or structure our working lives? And why not try one of Piercy's other books such as Body of Glass? The story is built around the internet, new technology, the golem myth, and a society dominated by huge multinationals.

My other recommendation is a first novel by a new writer, Ben Richards. The book, Throwing the House Out of the Window, tells the story of Jamie Collins, a housing officer on an east London estate. He has to contend with both the usual problems of racial harassment and more off beat tenants who want to make their flats into a shrine to a serial killer. It's a funny and witty book which also has a serious side. It attempts to show how local authority workers can find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place­but it never loses its humour or becomes too one dimensional.

Andrea Butcher (Kilburn)

Hammer and Hoe by Robin Kelley is a history of how Communists organised among black workers in the American Deep South in the 1930s. It is the only academic book I have read that has moved me to tears. It is now commonplace to say that the rise of Stalin and the bureaucracy in Russia was an inevitable product of the revolution. Michael Reiman's The Birth of Stalinism shows that Stalin certainly did not believe his rise to power was inevitable, and why he launched a bloody civil war against the working class and the peasantry. Isaac Babel was a writer who fought with the Red Army in the Russian civil war and died in a Stalinist prison in the late 1930s. His Collected Stories includes a cycle of episodes from the war. The striking language, images and situations are controversial food for thought on war, comradeship, the oppression of Jews, and literature itself.

Nicolai Gentchev (Glasgow)

Coca-Cola has grown over the last 100 years into a multinational whose operation has 'profound effects on the political and economic affairs of many nations'. In For God, Country and Coca-Cola

Mark Pendergrast tells the story of how this was achieved, and it's fascinating if not very pretty. It's the tale of capitalist 'success' involving drugs, racism and exploitation. I've read and reread Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety. It is a superb fictional history of the French Revolution.

Frederick Engels' Anti-Dühring is particularly enjoyable. In demolishing the arguments of a dotty theorist whose ideas were influencing the German movement in the 1870s, Engels gives one of the clearest accounts of Marxist principle ever put on paper. The pamphlet Socialism, Utopian and Scientific was extracted from this book which socialists should read in its entirety if only to enjoy Engels' sense of humour.

Sasha Simic (High Wycombe)

What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe is a hilarious send up of sleaze and corruption under the Tories. Based around the exploits of a particularly nauseating ruling class family, Coe sticks the knife into the barbarity of the ruling class while exposing them as a band of brawling brothers.

Trotsky's My Life is brilliant to read when you have a bit more time. It's his autobiography, charting the development of his revolutionary ideas from Tsarist

Russia to the Russian Revolution of 1917, and then the fight against Stalin.

The most inspiring and moving thing about the book is the way it shows the level of opposition towards Stalinism and Trotsky's continuing optimism and determination to fight for socialism.

Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England is a brilliant book. It is not only an excellent account of the barbarism of capitalism and the industrial revolution, but it also charts the emergence of the class capable of taking on the system. At the time it was denounced as 'a call for murder and arson written with bile, blood and passion'. Covering food adulteration, pollution, alienation and crime, some of it reads as if it could have been written only yesterday, instead of in 1844.

Jane Lewis (Fulham)

Victor Gollancz by Ruth Dudley Edwards gives us the story of the most unusual publisher of the 20th century, primarily responsible for the amazingly successful Left Book Club. Gollancz emerges not only as a man of enormous energy and dedication to socialist education, but as someone totally fooled by the dominant Stalinism of the 1930s. In The New York Intellectuals, Alan M Wald charts the growth of 1930s anti-Stalinism in the US, when the American Communist Party was the leading pole of attraction, through to the 1980s. A number of American intellectuals flirted with Trotskyism although after the war many went to the right. A fascinating account. Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos De Laclos was an 18th century sensation. The novel exposed the hypocrisy of contemporary high society and simultaneously scandalised it.

Ged Peck (Luton)

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is the most topical of my choices because it is about the meat industry. Set in the Chicago stockyards, it portrays the lives of immigrant workers who were exploited as much as the animals they worked on and it resulted in reform of the US food laws.

Soledad Brother is a collection of the prison letters of George Jackson, who was jailed for life for stealing $70, was framed along with two other black inmates for the murder of a guard at Soledad prison, California, and was finally shot dead by a prison guard in 1971. The letters chart Jackson's transformation from a petty criminal to a revolutionary fighter. By contrast, Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez is set in a Latin American port in the time of slavery and tells a tragic story of a young aristocrat's daughter who has been bitten by a rabid dog and is imprisoned in a convent so that she can be exorcised of the 'demons' that are believed to possess her. It is a wonderfully sad but not depressing tale, written in Márquez's fabulous style, about the human costs of a society dominated by a priesthood who are happy to fuel ignorance and superstition to preserve their privilege.

Mark Abel (Shepherd's Bush)