This list has the best books to read this summer. You won’t regret diving into these pages while relaxing oceanside on your next vacation.
This site contains affiliate links, view the disclosure for more information.
Summer makes reading a new novel magical and my list of books to read this season is endless. I love reading all year round but nothing compares to grabbing your book and heading out to the front porch with your glass of wine, reading while hanging out by the pool, or my personal favorite – enjoying a book with my toes in the sand and the sound of ocean waves as my background noise. It’s the perfect season to get lost in the pages.
These are the top books to read this summer that you’ll be sure to love. These books are guaranteed to be the page-turners you’ve been waiting for. Enjoy!
Books To Read This Summer
1. The Most Fun We’ve Ever Had
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “A gripping and poignant ode to a messy, loving family in all its glory.” —Madeline Miller, bestselling author of Circe
Book Details:
- Author: Claire Lombardo
- Number Of Pages: 640
- Publication Date: April 6th, 2021
Plot Description (provided by amazon):
In this “rich, complex family saga” (USA Today) full of long-buried family secrets, Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s, blithely ignorant of all that awaits them. By 2016, they have four radically different daughters, each in a state of unrest.
Wendy, widowed young, soothes herself with booze and younger men. Violet, a litigator turned stay-at-home-mom, battles anxiety and self-doubt. Liza, a neurotic and newly tenured professor, finds herself pregnant with a baby she’s not sure she wants by a man she’s not sure she loves. Grace, the dawdling youngest daughter, begins living a lie that no one in her family even suspects.
With the unexpected arrival of young Jonah Bendt—a child placed for adoption by one of the daughters fifteen years before—the Sorensons will be forced to reckon with the rich and varied tapestry of their past. As they grapple with years marred by adolescent angst, infidelity, and resentment, they also find the transcendent moments of joy that make everything else worthwhile.
2. Every Summer After
Six summers to fall in love. One moment to fall apart. A weekend to get it right.
Book Details:
- Author: Carley Fortune
- Number Of Pages: 320
- Publication Date: May 10th, 2022
Plot Description (provided by amazon):
They say you can never go home again, and for Persephone Fraser, ever since she made the biggest mistake of her life a decade ago, that has felt too true. Instead of glittering summers on the lakeshore of her childhood, she spends them in a stylish apartment in the city, going out with friends, and keeping everyone a safe distance from her heart.
Until she receives the call that sends her racing back to Barry’s Bay and into the orbit of Sam Florek—the man she never thought she’d have to live without.
For six summers, through hazy afternoons on the water and warm summer nights working in his family’s restaurant and curling up together with books—medical textbooks for him and work-in-progress horror short stories for her—Percy and Sam had been inseparable. Eventually that friendship turned into something breathtakingly more, before it fell spectacularly apart.
When Percy returns to the lake for Sam’s mother’s funeral, their connection is as undeniable as it had always been. But until Percy can confront the decisions she made and the years she’s spent punishing herself for them. They’ll never know whether their love might be bigger than the biggest mistakes of their past.
Told over the course of six years and one weekend, Every Summer After is a big, sweeping nostalgic story of love and the people and choices that mark us forever.
3. Girls Like Us
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Banker’s Wife, worlds collide when an FBI agent investigates a string of grisly murders on Long Island and faces the impossible question: What happens when the primary suspect is your father?
Book Details:
- Author: Cristina Alger
- Number Of Pages: 320
- Publication Date: April 7th, 2020
Plot Description (provided by amazon):
FBI agent Nell Flynn hasn’t been home in ten years. Nell and her father, Homicide Detective Martin Flynn, have never had much of a relationship. And Suffolk County will always be awash in memories of her mother, Marisol, who was murdered when Nell was just seven.
When Martin dies in a motorcycle accident, Nell returns to the house where she grew up so that she can spread her father’s ashes and close his estate. At the behest of her father’s partner, Detective Lee Davis, Nell becomes involved in an investigation into the murders of two young women in Suffolk County. The further Nell digs, the more likely it seems to her that her father should be the prime suspect–and that his friends on the police force are covering his tracks.
Plagued by doubts about her mother’s murder, and her own role in exonerating her father in that case, Nell can’t help but ask questions about who killed the two women and why. But she may not like the answers she finds–not just about those she loves, but about herself.
4. Identity
The #1 New York Times-bestselling author’s terrifying next thriller about one man’s ice-cold malice, and one woman’s fight to reclaim her life.
Book Details:
- Author: Nora Roberts
- Number Of Pages: 464
- Publication Date: May 7th, 2024
Plot Description (provided by amazon):
Former Army brat Morgan Albright has finally planted roots in a friendly neighborhood near Baltimore. Her friend and roommate Nina helps her make the mortgage payments, as does Morgan’s job as a bartender. But after she and Nina host their first dinner party―attended by Luke, the flirtatious IT guy who’d been chatting her up at the bar―her carefully built world is shattered. The back door glass is broken, cash and jewelry are missing, her car is gone, and Nina lies dead on the floor.
Soon, a horrific truth emerges: It was Morgan who let the monster in. “Luke” is actually a cold-hearted con artist named Gavin who targets a particular type of woman, steals her assets and identity, and then commits his ultimate goal: murder.
What the FBI tells Morgan is beyond chilling. Nina wasn’t his type. Morgan is. Nina was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. And Morgan’s nightmare is just beginning. Soon she has no choice but to flee to her mother’s home in Vermont. While she struggles to build something new, she meets another man, Miles Jameson. He isn’t flashy or flirtatious, and his family business has deep roots in town. But Gavin is still out there hunting new victims, and he hasn’t forgotten the one who got away.
5. Fourth Wing
Enter the brutal and elite world of a war college for dragon riders from New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Yarros. Books to read this summer.
Book Details:
- Author: Rebecca Yarros
- Number Of Pages: 528
- Publication Date: May 2nd, 2023
Plot Description (provided by amazon):
Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general―also known as her tough-as-talons mother―has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.
But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away…because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them.
With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter―like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant.
She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.
Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom’s protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.
Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda―because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die.
6. The Midnight Feast
The deliciously twisty new locked room murder mystery from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Guest List and The Paris Apartment.
Book Details:
- Author: Lucy Foley
- Number Of Pages: 512
- Publication Date: June 18th, 2024
Plot Description (provided by amazon):
It’s the opening night of The Manor, and no expense, small or large, has been spared. The infinity pool sparkles; crystal pouches for guests’ healing have been placed in the Seaside Cottages and Woodland Hutches; the “Manor Mule” cocktail (grapefruit, ginger, vodka, and a dash of CBD oil) is being poured with a heavy hand. Everyone is wearing linen.
But under the burning midsummer sun, darkness stirs. Old friends and enemies circulate among the guests. Just outside the Manor’s immaculately kept grounds, an ancient forest bristles with secrets. And the Sunday morning of opening weekend, the local police are called. Something’s not right with the guests. There’s been a fire. A body’s been discovered.
THE FOUNDER * THE HUSBAND * THE MYSTERY GUEST * THE KITCHEN HELP
It all began with a secret, fifteen years ago. Now the past has crashed the party. And it’ll end in murder at…The Midnight Feast.
Enjoy! These are the top books to read this summer.
