Summer is a season for reading. From elementary school summer reading challenges to lazy days paging through a book beside the pool, the images of summer and books are tightly linked in my mind. Summer beach reads and novels set in the summertime abound. I wanted to share my summer reading list, both new-to-me books I’m planning to read this summer and my tried and true favorites from summers past. My favorite types of narratives are coming of age stories and books centered around friendship. I am also a huge fan of novels that follow several members of a family and their relationships to one another. You’ll see those themes throughout these lists. You can also find my full Summer Reading List on Bookshop.

Tried and True Summer Favorites

Modern Lovers by Emma Straub

I will probably include an Emma Straub novel in any reading list I make. Her stories feel so believable, with a wide mix of characters in each book that you really come to know and root for. Modern Lovers takes place in Brooklyn over the course of a summer, telling the story of two generations each in a state of change. The parents are getting older and experiencing their own crises of identity; the kids are graduating and living through their own rites of passage to adulthood. This book will have your heart.

Foster by Clare Keegan

Clare Keegan’s books all are concise and emotional devastating. In Foster, the child of an impoverished family spends a solitary summer living on a farm with an older, childless couple. As the days pass, she faces the end of summer and having to leave her newfound home and family.

Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto

Yoshimoto tells the tale of two cousins, both connected to a life living by the sea. As one of the cousins is scheduled to move to Tokyo at the end of the summer, they pass their final weeks in the seaside place they have spent their whole lives. Part coming of age story, part friendship story, this book perfectly captures the bittersweet feeling of the final weeks of summer.

The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee

Non-fiction often falls outside of seasonal reading. While you could learn from this powerful book year round, it is fitting for summer. In the Sum of Us, McGhee discusses the tangible ways that racism hurts us all. A striking example that runs throughout the book is public pools. In the early 1900s, swimming pools were a major investment in public infrastructure, providing Americans a place to cool down during the most extreme summer heat as well as a social gathering space for building community. When Black Americans tried to use these public spaces they were met with a vicious backlash. Eventually as civil rights laws passed and sharing space became mandatory, municipalities preferred to close the pools rather than open the space to all Americans, in many cases literally filling in the pools with concrete or soil. Once a public good, public pools were now denied to all. McGhee powerfully weaves this narrative thread as she recounts the many ways that institutional racism has left all of us worse off. This book will stick with you long after you finish reading it.

The Unmaking of June Farrow by Adrienne Young

Young’s book is a perfect summer read for lovers of magical realism. Told over the story of several generations of strong women in rural North Carolina, the narrative timeline jumps and loops through the decades as the Farrow women fall in love, build friendships and make life-changing decisions. The youngest Farrow, June, faces tough choices about how to follow her own happiness and how to be a good person to the family members and friends she loves. As the narrative unfolds, June comes to understand her mother and grandmothers before her and how their own choices have echoed through the generations. This beautiful and heart-wrenching tale will pull you in completely.

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

A coming-of-age story will always get me. In Sag Harbor, Whitehead covers the slow, summer days of Benji, a teenager spending his summer in an enclave of the Hamptons where Black families have been summering for decades. Whitehead brings alive the feeling of being a teenager - the very specific obsessions and social rites of late childhood. He also captures the truly endless feeling of summer days growing up, whiling away the hours with friends, long days in the hot sunshine, and how all of a sudden it is over, heading back to school. This was an unhurried, meandering read for me, perfect for slowing down the summer days.

Find my full Summer Reading List on Bookshop.

Summer 2024 Reading List

I have so many reads I am looking forward to this summer! Here are the highlights of my Summer 2024 TBR (to be read list).

Sandwich by Catherine Newman

I was on the library waitlist to read this the second it came out in June! I find Catherine Newman’s slice-of-life writing to be absolutely devastating. She perfectly captures just how joyful and painful it is to exist in your body, to love and be loved and to feel time pass. In Sandwich, we spend a week with the protagonist (clearly modeled after Newman herself) and her family over the course of a week at the beach. Her newly adult children both need her and don’t, her body viscerally feels the pain and growth of menopause and of having given birth and not, and her aging parents join for a few days of the week when their own frailty becomes glaringly obvious. You empathize with and judge the narrator, in a similar way that we both criticize and appreciate our own selves and bodies.

Luster by Raven Leilani

A woman in her twenties navigates life - sex, race, work, and believing in herself as an artist. After meeting a man in an open marriage, she unexpectedly connects with his wife and becomes a role model to his adopted daughter, perhaps the only Black person the daughter knows.

The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada

Asa and her husband, a young couple, move to a rural town and adjust to life there over the course of a long hot summer. Supernatural (or magical?!) experiences lead Asa to become disconnected from reality and begin to question her own sanity.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

This book has been on nearly every summer book list I have seen. Set in a cherry orchard in Northern Michigan, Lara’s three adult daughters return home and over the course of the summer come to reflect on the life their mother led before them, their own relationships, love and marriage. The setting alone has me sold!

Pieces of Blue by Holly Goldberg Sloan

When a father suddenly dies by drowning, his broken-hearted widow and three children move to Hawaii to try to restore a ramshackle hotel and restart their lives.

Brutes by Dizz Tate

Set in the swampy Florida summer heat, this books revolves around a group of thirteen-year-old girls and the local preacher’s daughter who goes missing. There is both darkness at the heart of the story right alongside the joys of being thirteen and of deep childhood friendships.

The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters

An indigenous family is berry-picking in Maine in 1962 when their four-year-old daughter disappears. A second storyline tells the story of a girl growing up as the only child to an affluent family, whose dreams feel more like memories.

The Garnett Girls by Georgina Moore

This book is set on the Isle of Wight, where a mother and her three adult daughters reckon with the big life decisions. I’ll be visiting the island next week on a family trip and thought this would be the perfect read. Even if you won’t find yourself off the South Coast of England this summer, I highly recommend seeking out books set in places you live or will be visiting. They feel even more “of the moment” than a seasonal read.

Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados

Twenty-one-year-old Isa and her best friend gallivant around New York City and the Hamptons in a summer of fun, glamour, and no money at all.

Wait by Gabriella Burnham

When their mother goes missing, two sisters return to Nantucket. After discovering that she was deported back to Brazil, the sisters work together to reestablish themselves on the island and bring their mother home.

Writers & Lovers by Lily King

A young woman in 1997 reels from the death of her mother and a romantic heartbreak. She spends a listless summer in Massachusetts, waiting tables and attempting to write a novel she has been working on for years.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

I read so many Agatha Christie novels this winter. All cozy murder mysteries, I have always thought of Christie books as purely fall or winter reads. When I saw this one on Emma Straub’s very short summer must-read list, I knew I had to read it this summer! A wealthy man found stabbed in the heart, Hercule Poirot turns up to save the day and solve the mystery.

Hopefully I can get through all of these in the next few months! What is on your reading list this summer? Any favorite summer-y reads from over the years?

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also enjoy:

• spring reading: poems for June

• spring outside: reading in the sun

• spring reading: sweet bean paste

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