1 : A Few Words For The Dead by Guy Adams

2 : Find Me by Laura van den Berg
I love post-apocalyptic. I love road novels. I love the horror idea of a world gone mad (well, madder). Luckily, acclaimed shorts writer van den Berg's debut novel offers all that as her heroine is first stuck in isolation hospital and then wanders a landscape haunted by an Alzheimer's-esque virus outbreak. With many a glowing review, its apparently powerful look at memory and loss should make for a chilling and quiet read - perfect tonic for commuter heat on the Piccadilly line as Sweaty Armpit Man lurches towards my face...
3 : Harrison Squared by Daryl Gregory
Another writer who, like Adams, I have only recently discovered is Daryl Gregory, whose We Are Completely Fine simply blew me away last year . Now he explores that novella's central character's past in Harrison Squared, which looks at Harrison Harrison's (sic- hence the title) childhood in a Lovecraftian town of sea monsters and missing mothers. It looks superb, and if it is any fraction of an element as good as Fine, I'll be a happy camper. Not that I'll go camping. Cos it will rain.
4: The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

Yes, that Margaret Atwood ! The venerable Canadian's latest follows a couple in a collapsing society who seek refuge in a community that offers shelter and a life in return for spending half the year in their prison. Unsurprisingly, negative complications ensue. A bit like a society that reelects a patently anti-civil rights, anti-working class, anti-welfare, pro-banking, pro-nuclear arms, pro-wealthy party because they believe the shite peddled to them via the rich elite press who are in comfortable cahoots with said party... Oh wait, no, that's speculative fiction gone crazy. No way that would happen. No way. As we sit trying to read in a the grey half-light of a 55degrees Fahrenheit June day and the children without school places no longer play in the streets for fear of knife crime because there are no nurses to patch them up anymore...
5: The Whispering Swarm by Michael Moorcock

Yes, that Michael Moorcock! The venerable Brit's first novel in a decade is an autobiographical look at post-WW2 London. "Mixing elements of his real life with his adventures in a parallel London peopled with highwaywomen, musketeers and magicians", according to the blurb, so it could be a bewitching and surreal mixture, like a Pimms, or an old man's confused mess, like a Pimms made after seven have already been drunk, and you've run out of cucumber...
6 : Two Year, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie

As for the easier-to-guzzle-through world of television and film, I'll be cautiously ignoring Jurassic World like the loud unwelcome bully of a film it is, finally getting round to Ex Machina, revelling in the new A.I. series Humans, and creating a software hack for Netflix to delete the astonishingly-weak Sense 8 from both the site and hopefully my memory banks too. And watching Glastonbury Festival on BBC, sobbing over my lost youth. Unless it rains on them all. Then I shall laugh and pour another warm Pimms.
Written by English Scribbler, who doesn't actually like Pimms very much and would much rather have an Oreo shake with a Woodford Reserve chaser, but has trapped himself in a cliched self-caricature of Englishness, and clearly is just looking for famous names on netgalley now and not bothering with all those topless dude YA books anymore...