The sun is out and that can only mean one thing: summer reading season is here, reports BritPanorama. From the long-awaited return of Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie to insightful essays from David Sedaris and another gripping non-fiction instalment from Annie Jacobsen, 14 books have been highlighted for readers to explore while enjoying the warm weather.
Queenie is working on it by Candice Carty-Williams
Carty-Williams’s debut novel Queenie was a smash hit back in 2019, introducing readers to the eponymous, chaotic south Londoner. In this long-awaited follow-up, Queenie is now 33 and facing fertility questions, housing anxiety, career frustrations, and a situationship that keeps disappearing.
Trapeze, £20
The first house by Avni Doshi
After her husband announces he is leaving, a mother-of-two tries to hold herself together as her world unravels. Doshi’s second novel, after the Booker-shortlisted Burnt Sugar, is a deliciously readable study of domestic rupture.
Hamish Hamilton Ltd, £16.99
Family friends by Chloë Ashby
Two couples have spent 20 summers together in the south of France, but this year the old ease begins to fray. Secrets, grief, and temptation gather under the August heat in Ashby’s psychologically acute novel about friendship, marriage, and loyalty.
Fig Tree, £16.99
Cool machine by Colson Whitehead
The double Pulitzer-winner returns to Harlem for the final book in the trilogy. As 1980s New York booms, furniture-store owner Carney and his ruthless old associate Pepper are pulled back into heists, debts, and violence while the city remakes itself around them.
Fleet, £22
Love and rent by Jo Cheetham
Hannah is in her mid-thirties, broke, and not expecting Oscar Jennington-Bridge, an affluent friend-of-a-friend, to become part of the plan. Their awkward romance becomes a whip-smart, funny, and thoroughly modern novel about money and love.
Phoenix, £18.99
The project by Annie Lord
After a dismal one-night stand with her hopeless friend James, Daisy decides her love life needs a radical rethink. The Project begins as an experiment in remaking him into boyfriend material, but this clever friends-to-lovers romcom soon becomes about more than dating.
Harvill, £16.99
Country people by Daniel Mason
Miles Krzelewski follows his wife to rural Vermont, bringing an unfinished PhD on Russian folktales and a truffle-hunting dog. As local legends begin to pull him in, Mason delivers the sort of book to sink into this summer.
John Murray, £20
It will come back to you by Sigrid Nunez
This collection brings together 13 previously uncollected stories from across Nunez’s career. Moving from teenage longing to late-life love, the stories show her gift for turning apparently ordinary lives into something stranger, funnier, and more searching than they first appear.
Virago, £20
Main characters by Bobby Palmer
Seb is an actor still working out what he wants; Clara wants to direct. Their love story is told not just by them, but by the friends, flatmates, exes, and strangers who see different versions of what happens between them.
Headline Review, £20
Trouble was by Charlotte Edwardes
In 1976, Frank Dart, nine years old, is taken to North Devon with his mother and sister, where family tensions and buried secrets simmer through a suffocating summer. Edwardes’s debut is a gulpable coming-of-age novel about growing up too soon.
Bloomsbury, £16.99
The land and its people by David Sedaris
Sedaris’s latest essay collection ranges across travel, family, ageing, and the small indignities of everyday life. Whether caring for his partner Hugh after hip surgery or observing fellow passengers, he remains a hilarious chronicler of the world around him.
Abacus, £20
Hidden creatures by Dino J Martins
Who would have thought a book about parasites could be so absorbing? Entomologist Martins makes the case for the misunderstood and the overlooked, from mosquitoes and ticks to leeches and bedbugs. It will make you think about our world and its ecosystems anew.
William Collins, £22
So many ways to belong by Carol Atherton
Published in the centenary year of the Children Act, Atherton’s second book follows her journey to becoming an adoptive parent. Alongside the personal story, she explores the history, politics, and mythology of adoption, and what it means to belong.
Fig Tree, £14.99
Biological war: A scenario by Annie Jacobsen
Following her acclaimed book Nuclear War: A Scenario, Jacobsen applies the same ticking-clock approach to biological threat. Drawing on interviews with political, medical, and military experts, she imagines what might unfold after a lab accident or bio-attack.
Torva, £22
