Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I'm Lila Raptopoulos. So we made it. It's summer and the sun is extremely hot and we're ready to leave town. And FT. Weekend has once again put out their epic list of summer reads. This is one of my favorite June rituals next to maybe getting on boats and searching for the ice cream

truck, reading to me is a great joy of summer, and so is the summer book special.

Today we have invited the FD's book editors to join us and to give us their top picks from

these lists and beyond. Literary editor Fred Studerman and Deputy Books editor Laura Battle

are on the line from London. Fred and

Laura, hi. Welcome. Hi, Lila. Hi, Lila. It's so good to have you both. That's great to be here.

Thanks. Thanks for having us in. So, how are you both doing? How are you feeling about the summer

crop of books? Well, it's a very, I don't think I'm alone.

I think it's been quite a sort of odd year so far.

I mean, there's been a few big names in the world of fiction that I'm sure we'll come

and talk to about.

And Laura can say quite a lot about that in the sort of the massive world of everything

that counts as nonfiction.

Strange.

I mean, there's been, dare I say, endless books about AI and climate change.

So you can see sort of certain topics.

There have been some really interesting books, but the sort of showstopper,

I certainly haven't spotted it yet, which does not mean to say that there aren't a lot of

fantastic books out there.

But I do wish the commissioning editors had maybe held off a little bit on the whole AI.

Yeah, that's been overwhelming, hasn't it?

Really?

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