10 Books Set In Summer To Add To Your Reading List

If you're looking for something to read on the beach or poolside this summer, this is the list for you. Together with our friends at the Guille-Allès Library we've got some recommendations to help you enjoy some me-time and escape with a great book that's set during the summer months.

 

 

1.  The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

An elderly artist and her six-year-old grand-daughter while away a summer together on a tiny island in the gulf of Finland.

As the two learn to adjust to each other's fears, whims and yearnings, a fierce yet understated love emerges - one that encompasses not only the summer inhabitants but the very island itself. Written in a clear, unsentimental style, full of brusque humour, and wisdom, The Summer Book is a profoundly life-affirming story.

Borrow here.                

 

2. Murder Under The Tuscan Sun by Rachel Rhys

In a remote castle high up in the Tuscan hills secrets are simmering among its glamorous English residents: The ailing gentleman art-dealer, His dazzling niece, Her handsome Fascist husband, Their neglected young daughter, The housekeeper who knows everything, and Connie, the English widow working for them.

Every night, Connie hears sinister noises and a terrible wailing inside the walls. Is she losing her grip on reality? Or does someone in the castle want her gone?

Borrow here.

 

3.  Beach Read by Emily Henry

January is a hopeless romantic who narrates her life like she's the lead in a blockbuster movie. Gus is a serious literary type who thinks true love is a fairy-tale. But January and Gus have more in common than you'd think: They're both broke. They've got crippling writer's block. And they need to write bestsellers before summer ends.

The result? A bet to swap genres and see who gets published first. The risk? In telling each other's stories, their worlds might be changed entirely...

Borrow here.

 

4.  The Summer Before The War by Helen Simonson

East Sussex, 1914, the end of England's brief Edwardian summer. Agatha lives with her husband in the small, idyllic coastal town of Rye. He works in the Foreign Office, and Agatha is certain he will ensure that the recent sabre rattling over the Balkans won't come to anything. And she has more immediate concerns; she has just risked her carefully built reputation by pushing for the appointment of a woman to replace the Latin master.

However, when Beatrice Nash arrives, it is clear she is significantly more free thinking - and attractive - than anyone believes a Latin teacher should be. For her part, mourning the death of her beloved father, Beatrice simply wants to be left alone to pursue her teaching and writing. But just as she comes alive to the beauty of the Sussex landscape, and the colourful characters that populate Rye, that perfect summer is about to end.

Borrow here.

 

5.  Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman

It’s the mid-1980s; the place is the Italian Riviera. Elio – 17 years old, precocious, the son of an academic – finds himself falling for the older Oliver, a postdoctoral scholar completing his manuscript on Heraclitus at the beautiful home of Elio’s family. Oliver is worldly, handsome, a seductive contrast to Elio’s own naivety. Both are bright and questioning; the hook of desire is soon caught fast. Call Me By Your Name is the contemporary classic of love, identity, fate and memory.

Borrow here.

 

6.  Instructions For A Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell

London, July 1976. It hasn't rained for months, and Robert Riordan tells his wife Gretta that he's going round the corner to buy a newspaper. He doesn't come back. The search for Robert brings Gretta's children - two estranged sisters and a brother on the brink of divorce - back home, each with different ideas as to where their father might have gone. None of them suspects that their mother might have an explanation that even now she cannot share.

Borrow here.

 

7.  Summerland by Elin Hilderbrand

A warm June evening, a local tradition: the students of Nantucket High have gathered for a bonfire on the beach. But what begins as a graduation night celebration ends in tragedy when Penny Alistair's car crashes, leaving her dead and her twin brother in a coma. The other passengers, Penny's boyfriend Jake and her friend Demeter, are physically unhurt - but the emotional damage is overwhelming.

As summer unfolds, details of that devastating night continue to surface. Questions linger about what happened before Penny took the wheel, and startling truths emerge about the survivors and their parents: revelations of secrets kept, promises broken... and hearts betrayed.

Borrow here.

 

8.  Mailibu Rising by Taylor Henkins Reid

Malibu, August 1983. It's the day of Nina Riva's annual end-of-summer party, and anticipation is at a fever pitch. 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 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 promised she'll be there. And Kit has a couple secrets of her own-including a guest she invited without consulting anyone.

By midnight the party will be completely out of control. By morning, the Riva mansion will have gone up in flames. But before that first spark in the early hours before dawn, the alcohol will flow, the music will play, and the loves and secrets that shaped this family's generations will all come bubbling to the surface.

Borrow here.

 

9.  The Last Summer by Karen Swan

All her young life Effie Gillies has lived, wild and free, on the remote Scottish island of St Kilda. But when Lord Sholto visits the island, the attraction between them is instant. For one glorious week she guides the handsome young Lord around the isle, and falls in love for the first time. But a storm hits and her world falls apart.

Three months later, all the islanders are moved to a better life on the mainland. And Effie is surprised to be offered a job working for Sholto's father. But Sholto and Effie come from two different worlds - can love ever win?

Borrow here.

 

10.  Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls

In 1997, Charlie Lewis is the kind of boy you don’t remember in the school photograph. His exams have not gone well. At home he is looking after his father, when surely it should be the other way round, and if he thinks about the future at all, it is with a kind of dread. Then Fran Fisher bursts into his life and despite himself, Charlie begins to hope.

But if Charlie wants to be with Fran, he must take on a challenge that could lose him the respect of his friends and require him to become a different person. He must join the Company. And if the Company sounds like a cult, the truth is even more appalling. The price of hope, it seems, is Shakespeare.

Poignant, funny, enchanting, devastating, Sweet Sorrow is a tragicomedy about the rocky path to adulthood and the confusion of family life, a celebration of the reviving power of friendship and that brief, searing explosion of first love that can only be looked at directly after it has burned out.

Borrow here.