Today’s guest selector of summer reading is Elizabeth Speller, author most recently of a highly praised debut novel, The Return of Captain John Emmett. She is also the author of several works of non-fiction – including a memoir, Sunlight on the Garden – and a prize-winning poet. Here are her choices: Dragging a hefty suitcase of books to Greece to provide a whole summer’s reading tends to sharpen opinions about the contents; there is, literally, a heavy freight of expectation and hope. This year three or four big disappointments have been balanced by three surprises. Only as I write do I realize that these are linked by a theme of war. This is perhaps not surprising as my own novels concern war, but my three choices are so different from each other that this almost irrelevant except that war changes everything and these are all novels of individuals whose certainties have been swept away. Richard Bausch’s Peace is a short novel set in a hard WWII Italian winter and focusing on one small, weary platoon …