Happy belated Summer Solstice! Yesterday was the longest day of the year and the first day of summer. To celebrate, I wanted to round up some books about summer or taking place in summer that I would like to read before the end of my favourite season!
Beach Read by Emily Henry
My list of beach reads wouldn’t be complete without the book that’s titled “Beach Read”. In this Emily Henry book, Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast.
They’re polar opposites.
In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they’re living in neighboring beach houses, broke, and bogged down with writer’s block.
Until, one hazy evening, one thing leads to another and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts: Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. She’ll take him on field trips worthy of any rom-com montage, and he’ll take her to interview surviving members of a backwoods death cult (obviously). Everyone will finish a book and no one will fall in love. Really.
The Hotel Nantucket by Elin Hilderbrand
Fresh off a bad breakup with a longtime boyfriend, Nantucket sweetheart Lizbet Keaton is desperately seeking a second act. When she’s named the new general manager of the Hotel Nantucket, a once Gilded Age gem turned abandoned eyesore, she hopes that her local expertise and charismatic staff can win the favor of their new London billionaire owner, Xavier Darling, as well as that of Shelly Carpenter, the wildly popular Instagram tastemaker who can help put them back on the map. And while the Hotel Nantucket appears to be a blissful paradise, complete with a celebrity chef-run restaurant and an idyllic wellness center, there’s a lot of drama behind closed doors. The staff (and guests) have complicated pasts, and the hotel can’t seem to overcome the bad reputation it earned in 1922 when a tragic fire killed nineteen-year-old chambermaid Grace Hadley. With Grace gleefully haunting the halls, a staff harboring all kinds of secrets, and Lizbet’s own romantic uncertainty, is the Hotel Nantucket destined for success or doom?
Filled with the emotional depth and multiple points of view that characterize Hilderbrand’s novels (The Blue Bistro, Golden Girl) as well as an added dash of Roaring Twenties history, The Hotel Nantucket offers something for everyone in this compelling summer drama.
The Homewreckers by Mary Kay Andrews
Apparently, this novel combined romance, HGTV shows, and murder mysteries. I could not ask for more!
Hattie Kavanaugh went to work restoring homes for Kavanaugh & Son Restorations at eighteen, married the boss’s son at twenty, and became a widow at twenty-five. Now, she’s passionate about her work, but that’s the only passion in her life. “Never love something that can’t love you back,” is advice her father-in-law gives her, but Hattie doesn’t follow it and falls head-over-heels for a money pit of a house. Hattie is determined to make it work, but she needs money, and fast.
When a slick Hollywood producer shows up in her hometown of Savannah, Georgia gets an opportunity to star in a new reality show called The Homewreckers, but the demo day turns into a mystery.
The Setup by Lizzy Dent
She has a plan. Fate has other ideas.
The last place very average thirty-one-year-old Mara Williams thought she’d be is on a solo vacation impersonating her fortune teller when she finally meets the one. Josef, a gorgeous Austrian cellist, sees her for a reading, she’s telling him his destiny will be sitting in a pub in the English seaside town of Broadgate on the last Friday of August. And her name is Mara.
Mara has three months to turn herself into the stylish, confident woman she’s always hoped to be. Meanwhile, the crumbling, formerly glamorous beachside pool club where she works is under threat and her eccentric colleagues enlist her help to save it. Can Mara pull off this transformation? And by summer’s end, will she know who is her destiny?
The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach by Sarah Stodola
What could possibly be a better beach read than an investigative deep dive into the dark underbelly of the beachside resort business? With expert precision, Stodola weaves together travel notes, and climate journalism on the past, present, and future of coastal travel. She takes us from Monte Carlo, where the pursuit of pleasure first became part of the beach resort experience, to a village in Fiji that was changed irrevocably by the opening of a single resort; from the overdevelopment that stripped Acapulco of its reputation for exclusivity to Miami Beach, where extreme measures are underway to prevent the barrier island from vanishing into the ocean.
A Hundred Other Girls by Iman Hariri-Kia
Noora’s life is a little off track. She’s an aspiring writer and amateur blogger in New York―which is a nice way of saying that she tutors rich Upper East Side kids and is currently crashing on her sister’s couch. But that’s okay. Noora has Leila, who has always been her rock, and now she has another major influence to lean on: Vinyl magazine. The pages of Vinyl practically raised Noora, teaching her everything. So when she lands a highly coveted job as assistant to Loretta James, Vinyl’s iconic editor-in-chief, Noora can’t believe her luck. Her only dream is to write for Vinyl, and now with her foot firmly in the door and the Loretta James as her mentor, Noora is finally on the right path… or so she thinks. As her supposed dream job quickly proves to be a waking nightmare, Noora is forced to decide where she stands—and what she stands for.
Clever, incisive, and thoroughly fun, A Hundred Other Girls is an insider’s take on the changing media industry, an ode to sisterhood, and a profound exploration of what it means to chase your dreams.
Six Days in Rome by Francesca Giacco
Emilia arrives in Rome reeling from heartbreak and reckoning with her past. What was supposed to be a romantic trip has, with the sudden end of a relationship, become a solitary one instead. As she wanders, music, art, food, and the beauty of Rome’s wide piazzas and narrow streets color Emilia’s dreamy, but ] weighty experience of the city. She considers the many facets of her life, drifting in and out of memory, following her train of thought wherever it leads.
While climbing a hill near Trastevere, she meets John, an American expat living a seemingly idyllic life. They are soon navigating an intriguing connection, one that brings pain they both hold into the light.
As their intimacy deepens, Emilia begins to see herself in a new light—both as a woman and as an artist.
Impostor Syndrome by Kathy Wang
In 2006 Julia Lerner is living in Moscow, a recent university graduate in computer science when she was recruited by Russia’s largest intelligence agency. By 2018 she’s in Silicon Valley as COO of Tangerine, one of America’s most famous technology companies
Alice Lu is a first-generation Chinese American whose parents are delighted she’s working at Tangerine (such a successful company!). Too bad she’s slogging away in the lower echelons, recently dumped, and now sharing her expensive two-bedroom apartment with her cousin Cheri, a perennial “founder’s girlfriend”. One afternoon, while performing a server check, Alice discovers something is amiss with her new boss’s boss’s boss.
Part page-turning cat-and-mouse chase, part sharp and hilarious satire, Impostor Syndrome is a shrewdly-observed examination of women in tech, Silicon Valley hubris, and the rarely fulfilled but ever-attractive promise of the American Dream.
Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
On that day in 1983, Nina Riva is throwing a party. Everyone wants to be around the famous Rivas: Nina, the talented surfer, and supermodel; brothers Jay and Hud, one a championship surfer, the other a renowned photographer; and their adored baby sister, Kit. Together the siblings are a source of fascination in Malibu and the world over—especially as the offspring of the legendary singer Mick Riva.
The only person not looking forward to the party of the year is Nina herself, who never wanted to be the center of attention, and who has also just been very publicly abandoned by her pro tennis player husband. Oh, and maybe Hud—because it is long past time for him to confess something to the brother from whom he’s been inseparable since birth.
Jay, on the other hand, is counting the minutes until nightfall, when the girl he can’t stop thinking about promises she’ll be there.
And Kit has a couple of secrets of her own—including a guest she invited without consulting anyone.
Malibu Rising is a story about one unforgettable night in the life of a family: the night they each have to choose what they will keep from the people who made them . . . and what they will leave behind.
Summer Job by Lizzy Dent
Birdy has made a mistake. Everyone imagines running away from their life at some point. But Birdy has actually done it. And the life she’s run into is her best friend Heather’s. The only problem is, that she hasn’t told Heather.
The summer job at the highland Scottish hotel that her world-class wine-expert friend ditched turns out to be a lot more than Birdy bargained for. Can she survive a summer pretending to be her best friend? And can Birdy stop herself from falling for the first man she’s ever actually liked, but who thinks she’s someone else?
One good friend’s very bad decision is at the heart of this laugh-out-loud love story and unexpected tale of a woman finally finding herself in the strangest of places.
The Vacationers by Emma Straub
For the Posts, a two-week trip to the Balearic island of Mallorca with their extended family and friends is a celebration: Franny and Jim are observing their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and their daughter, Sylvia, has graduated from high school. The sunlit island, its mountains and beaches, its tapas and tennis courts, also promise an escape from the tensions simmering at home in Manhattan. But all does not go according to plan: over the course of the vacation, secrets come to light, old and new humiliations are experienced, childhood rivalries resurface, and ancient wounds are exacerbated.
This is a story of the sides of ourselves that we choose to show and those we try to conceal, of the ways we tear each other down and build each other up again and the bonds that ultimately hold us together.
Seven days in June by Tia Williams
Seven days to fall in love, 15 years to forget, and seven days to get it all back again…
Eva Mercy is a single mom and bestselling erotica writer who is feeling pressed from all sides. Shane Hall is a reclusive, enigmatic, award‑winning novelist, who, to everyone’s surprise, shows up in New York.
When Shane and Eva meet unexpectedly at a literary event, sparks fly, raising not only their buried traumas but the eyebrows of the Black literati. What no one knows is that 15 years earlier, teenage Eva and Shane spent one crazy, torrid week madly in love. While they may be pretending not to know each other, they can’t deny their chemistry – or the fact that they’ve been secretly writing to each other in their books through the years.
Over the next seven days, amidst a steamy Brooklyn summer, Eva and Shane reconnect – but Eva’s wary of the man who broke her heart, and wants him out of the city so her life can return to normal. Before Shane disappears though, she needs a few questions answered…
Dandelion wine by Ray Bradbury
This is what I am currently reading… It started really slow, but I am determined to finish it and share my thoughts with you!
Twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding knows Green Town, Illinois, is as vast and deep as the whole wide world that lies beyond the city limits. It is a pair of brand-new tennis shoes, the first harvest of dandelions for Grandfather’s renowned intoxicant, the distant clang of the trolley’s bell on a hazy afternoon. It is yesteryear and tomorrow blended into an unforgettable always.
But as young Douglas is about to discover, summer can be more than the repetition of established rituals whose mystical power holds time at bay. It can be a best friend moving away, a human time machine who can transport you back to the Civil War, or a sideshow automaton able to glimpse the bittersweet future. Come and savor Ray Bradbury’s priceless distillation of all that is eternal about boyhood and summer.
The couple next door by Shari Lapena
I just finished it, and I loved it! A real page-turner with murder mysteries (not too bloody) and interesting story lines!
It all started at a dinner party one summer…
A domestic suspense debut about a young couple and their apparently friendly neighbors – a twisty, roller coaster ride of lies, betrayal, and the secrets between husbands and wives…
Anne and Marco Conti seem to have it all – a loving relationship, a wonderful home, and their beautiful baby, Cora. But one night, when they are at a dinner party next door, a terrible crime is committed. Suspicion immediately lands on the parents. But the truth is a much more complicated story.
Inside the curtained house, an unsettling account of what actually happened unfolds. Detective Rasbach knows that the panicked couple is hiding something. Both Anne and Marco soon discover that the other is keeping secrets, secrets they’ve kept for years.
What follows is the nerve-racking unraveling of a family-a chilling tale of deception, duplicity, and unfaithfulness that will keep you breathless until the final shocking twist.
Hello, summer by Mary Kay Andrews
It’s a new season…
Conley Hawkins left her family’s small-town newspaper, The Silver Bay Beacon, in the rearview mirror years ago. Now a star reporter for a big-city paper, Conley is exactly where she wants to be and is about to take a fancy new position in Washington, D.C. Or so she thinks.
For small-town scandals…
When the new job goes up in smoke, Conley finds herself right back where she started, working for her sister, who is trying to keep The Silver Bay Beacon afloat—and she doesn’t exactly have warm feelings for Conley. Soon she is given the unenviable task of overseeing the local gossip column, “Hello, Summer.”
And big-time secrets.
Then Conley witnesses an accident that ends in the death of a local congressman—a beloved war hero with a shady past. The more she digs into the story, the more dangerous it gets. As an old heartbreaker causes trouble and a new flame ignites, it soon looks like their sleepy beach town is the most scandalous hotspot of the summer.
