There is exactly one good way through a day like this: go somewhere frozen.

There is nothing like a good Nordic thriller to drop the temperature of a room. While the rest of the world melts, you can be curled up somewhere with a body in the ice, a detective who has not slept in three days, a killer who only strikes under the cover of snow, and a plot that gives you actual chills.

So here are ten of the best Nordic thrillers I can point you to, one from each corner of the map. All of them are certified ice cold.

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I hope to have you at the smaller table in the back, where we get to know each other a little better.

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A note on links: I’m an advocate for library books, but I also love to buy a book or audiobook sometimes. If you want to support indie bookstores and my work, consider using the affiliate links in this post. Thank you!

The Snowman by Jo Nesbø 🇳🇴

Oslo, the night of the first snow. A boy wakes to find his mother gone and a snowman standing in the garden, facing the house, wearing her scarf.

This is the Harry Hole novel most people start with, and for good reason. It is grim, addictive, and genuinely unsettling. Nesbø is not gentle with his characters, so consider this your heads-up that it earns its darkness. There is a reason this is the first book that comes up when you search for “Nordic Noir.”

(book / audiobook)

Freyja by Margrét Ann Thors 🇮🇸

A single mother in Reykjavík has spent her whole life not thinking about the summer her childhood friend Freyja vanished from a black-sand beach in a remote Icelandic valley. Then the photographs start appearing under her door.

I just finished this one, and I could not put it down. It is atmospheric in the best possible way, and the story literally made my stomach drop and twist multiple times. Margrét Ann Thors just might be one of my new favorite authors!

Note: this is a debut that releases on August 4, so you get to be the friend who found it first.

(book / audiobook)

The Chestnut Man by Søren Sveistrup 🇩🇰

A killer is loose in Copenhagen, leaving a small figure made of chestnuts at every crime scene. When one of them is linked to the year-old disappearance of a politician’s daughter, two mismatched detectives realize the cases are tangled together.

This is by the creator of The Killing, so you already know the atmosphere is going to be immaculate and the plotting airtight. It became a Netflix series, but as always, the book is better.

(book / audiobook)

Hidden in Snow by Viveca Sten 🇸🇪

In the Swedish mountain resort of Åre, a teenage girl vanishes on her way home. A detective who has just fled her own life to hide out up north gets pulled into the search.

Sten built her reputation on the Sandhamn Murders, but this newer series trades the summer archipelago for deep alpine snow. This small-town mystery is deliciously immersive and will have you shivering in no time.

(book / audiobook)

The Witch Hunter by Max Seeck 🇫🇮

A bestselling author’s wife is found dead in their home, frozen in a grotesque smile, posed exactly like a murder from his own occult thriller novels. Then, the killings keep coming, each one staged from his books.

Our Finland pick is dark, cinematic, and impossible to put down, with a genuinely creepy thread of witchcraft running underneath for those of you who can’t wait until October to get your witch lit fix. Seeck is Finland’s biggest crime export at the moment, so this feels like the right time to meet him.

(book / audiobook)

I’m Traveling Alone by Samuel Bjørk 🇳🇴

A 6-year-old girl is found hanging from a tree, dressed for travel, with an airline tag around her neck that reads “I’m traveling alone.” To crack the case, a detective has to coax his brilliant, self-destructing former partner back from the remote island where she went to disappear.

This is the darker, more emotional end of the Nordic spectrum, and is genuinely disturbing. Mia Krüger is one of the great detectives of the genre, and this is where you meet her.

(book / audiobook)

Quicksand by Malin Persson Giolito 🇸🇪

A teenage girl sits in a Stockholm courtroom, on trial after a shooting at her elite prep school. What actually happened, and how a privileged golden life curdled into that morning, unspools slowly and devastatingly across the book.

I read this one and thought about it for weeks afterward. It is less whodunit than how-did-we-get-here, offering sharp insights about class, wealth, and the stories we tell ourselves. It was later turned into a Netflix series, if you finish the book and need more.

The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen 🇩🇰

A burned-out Copenhagen detective gets shunted into a basement to run “Department Q,” the office of cold cases nobody wants. His first file: a politician who vanished five years ago and is presumed dead.

This is the launch of the beloved Department Q series and the perfect entry point. It was also loosely adapted into a big Netflix show, so now is a great moment to say you read it before you watched it ;)

(book / audiobook)

The Mermaid by Anki Edvinsson 🇸🇪

Up in the frozen north of Sweden, in Umeå, a woman’s body surfaces in the river, and a young suspect turns up in the town square wearing a bomb vest. Detectives von Klint and Berg have to work out whether the two horrors are connected. This is a gritty, twisty procedural novel with a genuinely jaw-dropping ending.

Note: this is book two in the series, so if you like starting at the beginning, grab Snow Angel first.

(book / audiobook)

The Golden Cage by Camilla Läckberg 🇸🇪

A woman who gave up everything to build her husband’s empire is traded in for a younger model. So she does the only rational thing: plan out cold, meticulous, deeply satisfying revenge.

I am ending on this one because it is the odd one out, and I mean that as a compliment. It is less detective and more ice-cold domestic thriller, a razor-sharp study of a scorned woman with nothing left to lose. This is the perfect palate cleanser after getting to know all those homicide cops.

(book / audiobook)

Stay Cool Out There

Every one of these takes place somewhere dark, frozen, and slightly sinister, which is exactly why they are the perfect antidote to a heat wave. There is nothing like reading about someone trudging through a blizzard toward a crime scene to make you feel almost grateful for the sun.

Almost.

If you build yourself a stack of the best Nordic thrillers this year, I hope a few of these make the cut.

Now I want to hear from you! What is the coldest, creepiest book you have ever read?

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Not because the Odyssey needs much defending as source material, but because half the pleasure of seeing a film like this is bringing the rest of your reading life into the cinema with you.

Every adaptation is in conversation w…

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This year, my word came from a creator named carmscrolls: unoptimized. We’re tired, she said. We don’t want to streamline. We don’t want to do it better, faster, with goals to check off.

There is a particular kind of tired going around right now. Not the kind that a good night of sleep resolves. This exhaustion is the kind that comes from years of treating yourself like a project with a deadline. We have optimized our mornings, our workouts, our grocery runs, and even our sleep. We’ve turned hobbies into side hustles and side hustles into brands.

An unoptimized summer is the opposite of all that.

Here is the part that surprised me. When I heard unoptimized, I did not immediately picture a wellness trend. I pictured being 7 years old. The summers of my childhood had goals, technically. Make a new friend. Don’t get sunburned. Be home by dark. But nobody was tracking anything or asking me to become a better, more productive human. The days were long and shapeless, yet we have spent the years since slowly forgetting that a summer is allowed to be exactly that.

We did not optimize those summers, we just lived them.

Unoptimized does not mean lazy or that you stop caring. It means you stop measuring. There is a difference between a summer you turn into a self-improvement project you complete on the way to something else and a summer you actually live inside of as a real person.

I will admit, I am a little conflicted here because I run a summer reading challenge. A list with a goal can give a shapeless season some spine, and reading challenges encourage me to read outside of my comfort zone. A challenge is one good way to spend a summer. It is just not the only one. Not everyone needs a project, and no one needs one every single year.

This list is for the other kind of summer, the kind with nothing to prove and nowhere to be.

Of course, I can’t not give you a reading list, but this isn’t a 20-book homework assignment. It’s just 9 books that linger and wander and refuse to hand you a finish line. Abandon one on your picnic blanket, and reach for another. Reread the same one all summer if it is the only thing that sounds good. Just please, don’t optimize anything.

A note on links: I’m an advocate for library books, but I also love to buy a book or audiobook sometimes. If you want to support indie bookstores and my work, consider using the affiliate links in this post. Thank you!

A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

A shell-shocked veteran spends one golden summer uncovering a medieval mural in a country church. Nothing in particular happens, but the emotion and the vibe are intense. Whenever I need a break from real life, I close my eyes and let my mind wander to Oxgodby. (book / audiobook)

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

A prickly scholar holes up in a freezing village to study the fae, recording it all in field journal entries. This book is cozy, funny, and faintly mysterious. The pleasure lives in disappearing into a world where the line between real and fantasy is precariously thin. (book / audiobook)

To celebrate the launch of my paid tier, you can get a full year of Elle Reads Library books for just $20! That’s $1.67 (less than a cup of coffee!) I’d love to have you join us for exclusive subscriber challenges, access to paid posts, and more.

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The City in Glass by Nghi Vo

A demon haunts the ruins of a city she loved and rebuilds it slowly, across centuries, beside the angel who destroyed it. A story of devotion stretched over time, which is about as unoptimized a premise as it gets. I wish this book got more hype. (book / audiobook)

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

A retired man posts a letter, then keeps walking the length of England in his yachting shoes instead of going home. One of the least efficient journeys in fiction, and all the more moving for it. May this book inspire a few of your own destination-less meanderings. (book / audiobook)

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

A mother tells her grown daughters the story of an important summer in her life while they pick cherries on the family orchard. Tom Lake is slow by design, gorgeous. It’s more about the people than the plot and rewards those who are in no hurry to arrive. The audiobook is read by Meryl Streep and is an experience unto itself. (book / audiobook)

Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan

A teenage girl idles away a hedonistic summer and ruins everything she touches. Feels like The Great Gatsby on the French Riviera. It’s also compact enough to carry along and read anywhere you go this summer. (book / audiobook)

Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh

A Wild Man has lived in the deep of the wood for centuries, alone with his cat and his dryads, until a curious folklore scholar buys the hall nearby and starts digging up what should have stayed buried. A slim novella, this one is lush with Green Man myth and old English forest. This is the first in a duology, so if you love it, there’s more to read. (book / audiobook)

Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics by Ina Garten

Hear me out. Nobody has ever made a stronger case for unoptimizing than Ina, whose whole philosophy is that store-bought is fine and the point of dinner is the people at the table, not the performance. Flip through it for the gorgeous photos in the hammock. Make one easy thing for yourself. Have people over without making it a whole to-do. (book)

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Tom Ripley talks his way into a summer on the Italian coast and simply declines to ever work or earn his place again (that not work part is goals…). Think languid sun, crisp linen, and a slow beat of menace underneath. Tom is proof that optimizing your life and improving your character are entirely different things. (book)

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That’s All

The goal this summer is the same one you had when you were 7. Don’t get sunburned, maybe stop for ice cream, and find something nice to read. And I think that’s enough.

Tell me what kind of summer you’re having. Are you a challenge person, or are you opting into a more relaxed season?

While you’re here, give me your most unoptimized book, the one where almost nothing happens, yet you loved every page, so we can all check out your recommendations!

I read most of these from the library, as usual. But if one of them grabbed you and you’d rather own it, here’s a link for 20% off at Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores instead of you-know-who. The complete list of books mentioned in this post is here. Happy reading!

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There is no honest way to fit the whole sto…

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The strawberries, the royal box, the whites, the hush before serve, the aristocratic exhaustion of caring about something while pretending not to. It’s a fortnight built on atmosphere, and atmosphere is what books do best.

I’ve organized this list into four categories because Wimbledon itself is doing so many things at once. There’s the actual sport, the rivalry, the spectacle, and, of course, the English summer itself.

Sixteen books. Read one. Read all of them. Read none and just watch the tennis. I’ll never know.

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The Court

Simply put: excellent books with tennis itself as a main driving force.

A note on links: I’m an advocate for library books, but I also love to buy a book or audiobook sometimes. If you want to support indie bookstores and my work, consider using the affiliate links in this post. Thank you!

Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

A retired tennis champion comes out of retirement at 37 to defend her grand slam record from a younger player about to break it. The story is told across her final season on tour.

This is the rare contemporary novel centered around women’s tennis. Carrie is unlikeable in the ways athletes can often be, and the book respects that. This is one of my all-time favorite books.

Book / Audiobook

Open by Andre Agassi

Agassi’s autobiography opens with an admission that he hates tennis and spends the next 400 pages explaining why a man who hated his sport became one of the best to ever play it.

This is probably the best sports memoir of the last twenty years. It reads like a novel, and the Wimbledon chapters alone are worth the price of admission.

Book / Audiobook

All In by Billie Jean King

The memoir of the woman who won 39 Grand Slam titles, founded the WTA, beat Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes, and dragged women’s tennis into pay equity essentially by force of will. King also writes openly about coming out, her marriage, her eating disorder, and the cost of carrying a movement on her shoulders.

If Open is the great memoir of one player’s relationship to the sport, All In is the great memoir of one player’s relationship to history. You cannot understand modern tennis without her.

Book / Audiobook

String Theory by David Foster Wallace

Five essays on tennis, including “Roger Federer as Religious Experience,” one of the most famous pieces of tennis writing in the last century. Wallace was a junior tennis player himself and writes about the sport from inside its mechanics.

This is your pick if you’re looking for something a bit more literary. Reading the Federer essay during the summer is a tradition for a reason. This book makes the serious argument that tennis is worth thinking about the way you’d think about a poem.

Book / Audiobook

Honorable Mentions

A couple of books that didn’t quite fit but deserve a nod. The Island Club by Nicola Harrison is a Hamptons-tennis-club summer novel, old money and a marriage quietly coming apart, and it’s the perfect lounger read if you want tennis as atmosphere rather than subject. And with Rafa’s retirement still fresh, The Warrior by Christopher Clarey is the serious Nadal biography for anyone who wants it, even if Rafa was always more of a clay man.

The Rivalry

Two people locked in opposition for years. Federer and Nadal, Borg and McEnroe, Agassi and Sampras, and the way you can be defined by who you play against.

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Two girls grow up in a poor neighborhood in 1950s Naples. Lila is brilliant and feral, and Lenù is studious and watchful. The book tracks the friendship that will define both of their lives. The first in a quartet of books.

Lenù is the narrator, but Lila is the subject, and you cannot tell whether either of them would exist without the other. The whole quartet is essentially one long match.

Book / Audiobook

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Thomas Cromwell rises from blacksmith’s son to chief minister of Henry VIII, and the novel tracks his slow, watchful ascent through the court as Henry tries to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. The novel centers around Cromwell’s interactions with his chief rival, Thomas More, the great Catholic conscience of England.

This is the great novel of English political rivalry. Cromwell and More are rivals not just for the king’s favor but for what England should be. They circle each other with total opposition. Mantel’s prose is exquisite.

Book / Audiobook

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Levels of the Game by John McPhee

A book-length account of a single 1968 US Open semifinal between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, told point by point with the players’ biographies woven into the action. Two American men from the same generation, yet completely different worlds, meeting on a tennis court.

This is literally a rivalry rendered in book form. McPhee uses the match as a structural skeleton to argue that you can learn a lot about a person from how they play.

Book / Audiobook

The Open Era by Edward Schmit

A new pro tennis player becomes the first openly gay man to compete in a Grand Slam, and the spotlight pushes his anxiety disorder to a breaking point. Then, he trips at practice in front of the world’s number two, a charming Spaniard he can’t stop thinking about.

A rivals-to-lovers tennis romance that reads like Challengers with a softer heart. Read it next to Levels of the Game, and you can see fifty years of American culture changing across one tennis net.

Book / Audiobook

The Spectacle

Performance, watching, the public self. Wimbledon’s about the millions of people who have paid to look. These books are about what happens to people who are looked at.

The Lowe Job by Grace Alexander

When Lili Lowe is caught having an affair with her married boss, a beloved British politician, the resulting scandal threatens to dismantle her life. She turns to her mother, Lydia, a former talent agent, who doesn’t console her so much as devise a strategy. What follows is a family of sisters expertly transforming a tabloid scandal into a media empire.

This is a book about contemporary spectacle in its current form: scandal as career launchpad, family-as-media-empire, the Kardashianization of being looked at. It’s a funny, sharp, and incisive look at how ambitious women get watched.

Book / Audiobook

Trust by Hernan Diaz

The story of a 1920s Wall Street tycoon and his wife, told four times in four contradictory accounts. Each version revises the last.

This is a book about how public stories get manufactured and who gets to manufacture them. Spectacle is always someone else’s version of you, and Trust is about reclaiming the narration. Bonus points: this is a Pulitzer Prize winner and one of my all-time favorites.

Book / Audiobook

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

June, a white writer, steals her recently deceased Asian American friend’s manuscript, publishes it as her own under a racially ambiguous pen name, and rides it into bestseller status. The novel then tracks her slow online unraveling as people start to suspect her.

This is internet-era spectacle in its purest form.

Book / Audiobook

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Darkening Song by Delphine Seddon

An eighteen-year-old intern at a London record label discovers a sixteen-year-old singer and offers, on instinct, to manage her career. The novel tracks their parallel rise into fame.

A 2026 debut, marketed for fans of Daisy Jones, but with a sharper edge: the dual POV gives you both the watched and the watcher, and the book is honest about how spectacle eats young women.

Book / Audiobook

The English Summer

The weather as a character. These are books where the English summer is doing the heavy lifting, and underneath the beauty, there is always something quietly going wrong.

Atonement by Ian McEwan

On a hot day in 1935 at an English country house, a thirteen-year-old girl misinterprets something she sees and tells a lie that destroys two lives. The novel then follows the consequences across the next sixty years.

The opening section is the platonic English summer novel. In Atonement, beauty is the setup for something terrible.

Book / Audiobook

The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley

An old man remembers the year 1900, one that ultimately scarred him. During that fateful summer as a thirteen-year-old, he was a houseguest at a Norfolk estate and was used to carry secret letters between a couple forbidden to love each other.

This book has class, secrecy, and a heatwave that builds and builds across the novel.

Book / Audiobook

A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr

A young veteran returns from the trenches of the First World War and spends a summer in an English village restoring a medieval mural in a country church. Almost nothing happens externally. Internally, it’s about the specific ache of a season you know is ending.

This is one of my favorite books. It does atmosphere better than almost any other book on this list. The kind of book you finish in an afternoon and think about for years.

Book / Audiobook

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

An aging English butler takes a trip through the West Country in the summer of 1956. As he drives, he reckons with his decades of service to a man who turned out to be more than he seemed and with other relationships he built over time.

Full disclosure: this one didn’t fully land for me. But this is the canonical pick that had to be on the list, and that may absolutely work for you.

Book / Audiobook

The Fortnight, in the End

Here is what I think Wimbledon is, after sixteen books’ worth of thinking about it. It’s the only sporting event that admits, at the level of pageantry, that watching is the point. The all-whites are about the watching. The royal box is about the watching. The match is the smallest thing inside an enormous structure built around watching it.

Read one of these on a Saturday afternoon while the matches are on in the background. Read four of them across the fortnight, one per category. Or read all sixteen and spread that Wimbledon spirit out across the year.

The tournament will be on. The strawberries and cream will be consumed. Someone will win, someone will lose, and the curfew will be enforced. You’ll have a book in your lap.

I read most of these from the library, as usual. But if one of them grabbed you and you’d rather own it, here’s a link for 20% off at Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores instead of you-know-who. The complete list of books mentioned in this post is here. Happy reading!

Any tennis-themed books I missed? Let me know in the comments!

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Like me, you watched all eight episodes of Off Campus in a single weekend. The romcom nostalgia got you. The hockey and amazing friend group got you. Garrett looking at Hannah like she invented oxygen? Yep, that got you, too.

Off Campus was never really about hockey. It was the fake dating, the dorm-room ecosystem, the way a team turns into a family, and a sweet-yet-swoony romance. Season 2 got renewed before season 1 even aired, which sounds like good news until you learn it won’t be out until 2027.

That leaves you with a long wait and a very large Garrett Graham-sized hole in your life. These twelve books are sorted by which part of Off Campus you miss most. Find your symptom, pick your book.

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If What You Miss is the Nostalgic Romcom Vibe

Watching Off Campus reminded me of the incredible romcoms of the early 00s. The uncomplicated rush of a first crush, the kind with low stakes and a guaranteed happy ending. These books bring the same vibe.

A note on links: I’m an advocate for library books, but I also love a good hardcover. If you want to support indie bookstores and my work, consider using the affiliate links in this post. Thank you!

Better Than the Movies by Lynn Painter. Liz has narrated her whole life like a rom-com, so when her childhood crush moves back to town, she ropes in Wes, the neighbor she claims to hate, to help her land him. Wes is, obviously, the actual love story. It has the fake-ish setup and the slow realization that made the show so easy to devour in one sitting. (book / audiobook)

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han. Lara Jean writes a secret love letter to every boy she has ever had a crush on. None of them are ever meant to be sent, but, of course, get mailed out by accident. To survive the fallout, she strikes up a fake relationship with Peter Kavinsky. This is the book that taught a whole generation how to feel about a boy in a varsity jacket, and the fake-dating-to-real-feelings pipeline runs straight through it. (book / audiobook)

The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot. Mia Thermopolis is a mostly invisible ninth grader in Manhattan when she learns her absent father is the ruling prince of a small European country, which makes her the heir. Princess lessons with a grandmother who terrifies her ensue. It is told entirely through Mia’s diary, so it reads fast, funny, and very fifteen. Pure throwback comfort. (book / audiobook)

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If You Need More Campus/Sports Romance

If you do not want a substitute and just want more of the campus, the team, and the athlete who is gruff with everyone but her, start here.

The Off Campus series by Elle Kennedy. This is the source. The show is adapted from these books, beginning with The Deal, where star player Garrett bribes the one girl immune to his charm, Hannah, into tutoring him. The price she names is that he fake date her to make another guy notice her. The arrangement goes exactly where you think. The books carry through the whole Briar University hockey team, one couple per installment, which means you can read ahead of the show and feel delightfully smug about knowing what happens next. (book)

Icebreaker by Hannah Grace. Anastasia is a figure skater whose Olympic shot depends on the rink time she suddenly has to share with the university hockey team. Nate is the team captain who becomes the reason she keeps showing up. It is college and forced proximity with a male hockey player lead who is soft about exactly one person. If the Garrett and Hannah dynamic is the thing you cannot stop replaying, this is the closest match on the list. (book / audiobook)

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell. Cath arrives at college as one of the most popular fan fiction writers on the internet and one of the most anxious freshmen on campus. The slow, tender romance with Levi, the impossibly friendly guy always hanging around her dorm, builds underneath all of it. This is the campus-as-terrifying-then-home arc, and it is the one most likely to make you cry in a good way. (book / audiobook)

If What You Miss is the Group

Half of what made the show so good was the friend group and how they show up for each other. These are the books where the group is the whole point.

Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid. The four Riva siblings are the children of a famous, mostly absent singer. The novel unfolds over the twenty-four hours leading up to their legendary annual end-of-summer party in 1983 Malibu. Throughout the book, you get the whole history of how these four raised each other. If the part you loved was a found family that closes ranks, this one is for you. (book / audiobook)

Red White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. Alex, the son of the first woman president, gets into a very public spat with Prince Henry of England. Their handlers force the two of them to stage a friendship for the cameras, which becomes a real friendship, which becomes something neither of them planned. The banter is the draw, and so is the crew around Alex, the little West Wing found family that has his back. Warm, funny, high stakes, and a romance you root for from page one. (book / audiobook)

The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun. Dev is the relentlessly upbeat producer on a Bachelor-style reality dating show, and Charlie is the season’s leading man, a burned-out former tech wunderkind who is anxious, awkward, and terrible at performing romance on cue. The chemistry, of course, is between the two of them, off camera. It is soft and handles mental health with real care. The behind-the-scenes crew gives it that same ensemble warmth that Off Campus has. (book / audiobook)

If You Need a Good Happily Ever After

Sometimes, you just want a sweet romance with a happy ending. These are the guaranteed soft landings, the ones where you already trust the ending.

The Hating Game by Sally Thorne. Lucy and Joshua are executive assistants to the two co-CEOs of a merged publishing house. They sit at facing desks, locked in a daily war of staring contests and petty games they both pretend to hate. Enemies to lovers, executed so cleanly that the book basically wrote the modern blueprint. This is the comfort rewatch of romance novels, and it never misses. (book / audiobook)

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry. A sunny journalist named Alice and a brooding Pulitzer winner named Hayden are both summoned to a small Georgia island where they are given one month to audition for the same prize: the right to write the life story of a reclusive heiress from one of the most scandal-drenched families of the last century. The rivalry curdles into something else, the way it always does. This is the newest Emily Henry, which means the swoon comes with real emotional weight underneath it. (book / audiobook)

One Golden Summer by Carley Fortune. Alice is a Toronto photographer who has spent her life behind the lens, letting other people shine. When her grandmother breaks her hip, she brings her to a lake cottage in small-town Ontario for the summer. There she keeps running into Charlie, the charming local she once photographed from a distance years before. The two of them agree to stay just friends, which lasts about as long as you would expect. Lake town, golden light, slow burn, happy ending. (book / audiobook)

We’ll Get Through This

None of these will be Off Campus, because nothing is Off Campus except Off Campus. What they’ll do is hand you back the exact feeling that hooked you in the first place: the swoon, the slow burn, the friends who turn into family.

By the time season 2 finally airs, you’ll have a brand-new stack of comfort reads to your name, which is honestly the best way to spend a wait this long.

I read most of these from the library, as usual. But if one of them grabbed you and you’d rather own it, here’s a link for 20% off at Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores instead of you-know-who. The complete list of books mentioned in this post is here. Happy reading!

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Now I want to hear from you! What did I miss? If there’s a book that filled a Garrett-sized hole for you, leave it in the comments.

It turns out, we have a lot in common. My whole thing is building a rich reading life without having to buy a single book. Hers is building a rich drinking life without a single drop of alcohol. What we have in common is that we are both a little obsessed with the idea that you don’t have to give anything up to have it all. Add in a shared love of travel and a soft spot for America’s national parks, and a post like this was basically inevitable.

Laura here. I’ll admit I’m a bit of an Elle Reads Library Books fangirl right back. This whole collab post came to be because I was so entranced by her book flights, grouping books together by a theme, that I started thinking about drink flights and wondering if there was a way to pair them together.

You probably also know that I’m a BIG travel fan, and you might also know that a few years ago, I went on a cross-country road trip — visiting non-alcoholic bottle shops and national parks along the way. This book/drink/national park flight is inspired by that trip, the gorgeous NA drinks that continue to push the boundaries of innovation, the joy of reading, and the beauty in our own backyards.

Here’s how it works: for each park below, Laura has poured the perfect NA drink, and Elle has packed the perfect book. Find a comfortable seat and come along for the ride!

Acadia National Park (Maine)

Rocky beaches, glaciers, lakes, mountains, islands, and lowbush blueberries. Take a hike and work up an appetite for a lobster roll sandwich. Dessert? Those blueberries, naturally.

Sip: All That Razz by 1820 Brewing

Maine’s own non-alc brewery, 1820 Brewing, delivers on a beautiful fruited/sour brew with All That Razz. Bright raspberry and earthy malts pair beautifully with the captivating panorama that Acadia delivers.

Tasting notes: tart, malty, bubbly, #madeinMaine vibes, raspberries

Read: The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters

A Mi’kmaq family travels from Nova Scotia to the Maine blueberry barrens every summer until the youngest daughter vanishes from the edge of a field. It carries the same rugged, coastal melancholy as Acadia: beautiful, haunted, and impossible to shake.

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Everglades National Park (Florida)

The land is all coastal mangroves, sawgrass marshes, and pine flatwoods at Everglades. Stay alert because you might just see a leatherback turtle, Florida panther, or West Indian manatee. But explorers beware — there are gators out there, and they’re hungry.

Sip: St. Ember by Little Saints

Miami-based Little Saints is one of the most mystical functional NA brands out on the market. If you ever see founder Megan Klein out and about, chances are she’s wearing full-on plant and mushroom regalia. St. Ember marries functional mushrooms (lion’s mane, cordyceps) with the spiciness of ginger and cardamom, making for a perfect NA Paloma or Margarita with a side of magical vibes.

Tasting notes: Palo Santo, ginger, cardamom, magic

Read: The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean

The true story of a man who stole rare ghost orchids from a Florida swamp, and the obsession that pulled Orlean after him. It’s as lush, strange, and subtropical as the Everglades themselves.

Shenandoah National Park (Virginia)

Shenandoah is the gentlest of the great parks, with the Blue Ridge Mountains rolling soft and blue into the distance, layer after hazy layer. In the summer, the meadows fill with wildflowers, and the whole place hums with life. This is the park that reminds you that beauty doesn’t have to overwhelm you.

Sip: Hoppin’ Orange by Blue Ridge Bucha

Hops and juicy orange shine in this bev from Appalachia’s own kombucha brand, Blue Ridge Bucha. Refreshing after a vigorous hike through the mountains or a lazy bike ride on the winding trails of the park.

Tasting notes: juicy orange, bitter hops, bubbles, bluegrass

Read: Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

Three love stories unfold across one humid Appalachian summer, threaded through with coyotes, moth pheromones, and the quiet machinery of the natural world. It’s lush, sensual, and teeming with life, just like a Virginia mountainside in bloom.

Congaree National Park (South Carolina)

Congaree is the park people forget exists, and that’s part of its strange magic. It protects the largest stretch of old-growth bottomland forest left in the Southeast, a flooded world of black water where Spanish moss still hangs in the air. It’s the kind of quiet that feels slightly like being watched.

Sip: Lemon Cucumber Serrano by Amethyst NA Spirits

South Carolina’s own Amethyst makes the perfect clear NA spirit to match Congaree — lemon cucumber serrano. The deep, murky forest pairs with the botanical and citrus top notes, and then the serrano jump scares you out of your reverie. Watch out.

Tasting notes: lemony citrus, pepper, refreshing cucumber, ghost stories

Read: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Jesmyn Ward braids a family’s grief with literal ghosts in a luminous Southern gothic story about what the land remembers. Like Congaree’s ancient bottomland, it’s eerie, deep-rooted, and impossible to walk through without feeling watched.

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Zion National Park (Utah)

It’s no mistake that the name Zion has biblical roots. This truly majestic park is a little slice of heaven on Earth, so expect to be wowed by all the different landforms: canyons, buttes, mesas, monoliths, rivers, slot canyons, and natural arches.

Sip: N/Alien Church by Tired Hands Brewing

There’s something almost alien about the Utah landscape, and even though Tired Hands is out of Philly, their N/Alien Church (the non-alc version of one of their flagship beers) feels like the perfect fit for Zion National Park. There’s a sweetness to the beauty, just like there’s a sweetness to the beer, but then BAM, oats and experimental yeast tell you you’re not in Kansas anymore. #livelongandprosper

Tasting notes: lemon/lime, peach, pineapple, aliens

Read: A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.

In a desert monastery in the post-apocalyptic Southwest, monks spend centuries preserving the scraps of human knowledge while civilization slowly rebuilds and destroys itself again. It has Zion’s exact energy: vast, reverent, and humbling - the kind of place that makes you think in millennia.

Joshua Tree National Park (California)

U2 isn’t the only one inspired by Joshua Tree. The tree got its name thanks to the 19th-century Mormon settlers who thought the eponymous tree looked like the prophet Joshua with his arms outstretched. Larger than the state of Rhode Island, the park’s 429,690 acres are filled with desert wilderness and gorgeous sunsets. You’ll find what you’re looking for here.

Sip: Desert Margarita by Parch

Inspired by the botanicals of the southwest Sonoran Desert, this bright orange-y lime margarita from functional darling Parch delivers on keeping you cool in the desert. It’s the perfect thirst quencher to bring with you to take in the gorgeous Joshua trees. Just remember: leave no trace.

Tasting notes: sweet orange, lime, tamarind, desert sunsets

Read: Take Me With You by Steven Rowley

A husband vanishes into the night sky over the desert, and the man he left behind has to reckon with love, loss, and what’s actually real. It’s as surreal and cosmic as a night under Joshua Tree’s stars.

Olympic National Park (Washington)

Mount Olympus is the park’s most towering, otherworldly peak, rising 7,965 feet from the ground, and aptly named after the legendary home of the Greek gods. It’s almost mythical, then, that you should find four vastly different regions in this exquisite park: Pacific coastline, alpine areas, temperate rainforest, and other forests.

Sip: Riverine by AMASS (with Dappled Tonic)

It’s like drinking the Pacific Northwest: juniper, sumac, sorrel, lemon peel, apple, thyme, mint, parsley, and rosemary are just some of the botanical highlights you can expect to smell/taste with AMASS’ Riverine. You’d better balance it out with a bittersweet tonic water, preferably also from the PNW — I’m thinking Dappled Tonic.

Tasting notes: juniper, rosemary, pine trees, rain

Read: Bog Queen by Anna North

A forensic anthropologist is called to a peat bog to examine a body that turns out to be a 2,000-year-old Celtic druid. It’s set an ocean away from Olympic, but the energy is identical: ancient, wet, green, and humming with everything the Earth has quietly held.

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Glacier National Park (Montana)

Going-to-the-Sun Road climbs past hanging valleys and turquoise lakes so vibrant they look lit from below, while impossibly sharp mountain peaks rise on each side. You come around a bend, and the whole valley opens up in front of you, as though you’ve arrived somewhere you didn’t know you were looking for. There’s a reason they call this the crown of the continent.

Sip: Lupujūs ZERO by Imagine Nation Brewing Co.

Montana’s own Imagine Nation is the first brewery in the state to brew a non-alc beer. Ironically, the Lupujūs ZERO is a New England style hazy IPA – but it’s the pine notes here that feel most like Montana’s lush green valleys.

Tasting notes: citrus, pine, hops, mountain peaks

Read: The Last Green Valley by Mark Sullivan

As WW2 closes in, a family flees across Europe toward a “green valley” the mother has only seen in her dreams, and finally finds it in Montana. It’s a story about believing a place is waiting for you, which is exactly what Glacier feels like: somewhere you recognize before you’ve ever arrived.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park (Tennessee/North Carolina)

The Smokies earn their name. Morning fog pools in the hollows and drifts up through the trees until the whole range looks like it's breathing. It's the most visited national park in the country, but get out early, before the crowds, and you'll find something older underneath: blue ridgelines fading into haze, the hush of the deepest forest in the East. In the summer, whole hillsides flickering with synchronous fireflies. This is a landscape thick with story, the kind of place where the past never quite lets go.

Sip: Ginger Beer w/Scotch Bonnet Peppers by Devil’s Foot Beverage Co.

Made in Asheville, NC, Devil’s Foot just sounds like it’s busting out the pages of a mysterious book. The Scotch bonnet peppers in this already spicy ginger beer add a level of smokiness that pairs beautifully with the Great Smoky Mountains.

Tasting notes: spicy ginger, lime, smoky pepper, banjos

Read: Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

A deserter’s perilous journey home through wartime Appalachia, and the woman holding on at the end of it. As misty, mystic, and mountain-filled as the Smokies themselves.

Big Bend National Park (Texas)

Big Bend is about as far as you can get from anywhere in the Lower 48. Way out where the Rio Grande makes a big, lazy turn and the desert runs straight into Mexico, the park runs across miles of untamed land. The stars at night are big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas.

Sip: Carajillo Tejas by Jas

Bring a can of Carajillo Tejas from Houston’s own Jas on your epic journey following the winding Rio Grande into the heart of Mexico. A carajillo is a coffee-based cocktail, and Jas makes a delightful NA version (taking out the booze but adding in lion’s mane mushroom for clarity). Que rico!

Tasting notes: coffee, agave, bubbles, Mèxico

Read: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Two retired Texas Rangers drive a herd of cattle from a dusty town on the Rio Grande to Montana, through some of the most dangerous and beautiful country in America. It begins right in Big Bend’s borderland: remote, sun-blasted, and wild in a way that feels older than the map.

Isle Royale National Park (Michigan)

There are no roads into Isle Royale. You have to arrive by ferry or floatplane, and the moment you do, the rest of the world ceases to exist. A remote island in Lake Superior, this is one of the least-visited national parks in the country. People who come here often come alone, or wish they had. This is the kind of quiet that changes you.

Sip: Phantura by Frinj

This made-in-Michigan botanical elixir is spiced just enough to keep you warm on your solitary trip to Isle Royale. You might just see a moose (or a ghost) as you sip Phantura, a tart cherry and vanilla liquid filled with adaptogens like Lion’s Mane and L-theanine to keep you rooted and calm.

Tasting notes: cherry, vanilla, ginger, moody vibes

Read: The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel

Michael Finkel’s quietly profound account of the North Pond hermit asks what it actually means to be alone and what a person finds in the wild when no one is looking. Like Isle Royale, it’s remote, silent, and a little haunting in its emptiness.

Hawaii Volcanoes National Park (Hawaii)

The Big Island is still being forged. At Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, lava flows where it pleases, new land pushes into the ocean, and the landscape shifts on a timeline that has nothing to do with human plans. Black sand beaches, steam vents, and craters that glow at night are proof that geology can be a live event. You aren’t just visiting history here. You’re watching it be made.

Sip: Lilikoi Guava by Tropink

Mmm. Passionfruit (lilikoi is the Hawaiian name) and guava come together for this CBD-infused seltzer, bursting with juicy, tropical flavor. It’s the perfect accompaniment to see molten lava flowing over sacred land, surrounded by palm trees, and into the ocean. You might want to grab some shades.

Tasting notes: passionfruit, guava, bubbles, chill

Read: Eruption by Michael Crichton and James Patterson

Mauna Loa is days from its most violent eruption in a century, and the only thing worse than the lava is what the lava might unleash. Set right on the Big Island, it turns Hawaii Volcanoes’ live-geology danger into a breathless, ground-trembling thriller.

Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve (Colorado)

The Great Sand Dunes shouldn’t exist. Towering dunes, some reaching 750 feet, rise improbably against the backdrop of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southern Colorado. A seasonal creek runs along the base of the dunes in the spring. The whole scene is so unlikely that it feels like a mistake. Or a dream.

Sip: Zero by FABRIC

You’ll need something refreshing after a day at the dunes, and what better way to quench your thirst than Colorado’s own FABRIC, maker of Australian-hopped waters. Whether you choose their non-infused or infused (with THC) seltzers, there’s a hop fizz for everyone.

Tasting notes: hoppy, citrus, bubbles, sand surfing

Read: Plainsong by Kent Haruf

Kent Haruf’s quiet masterpiece unfolds in a small Colorado prairie town, where ordinary people extend each other unexpected kindness. Like the dunes rising improbably against the Sangre de Cristos, it finds something vast and moving in a landscape most people would drive right past

Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming/Montana/Idaho)

The very first national park in the USA, Yellowstone is also believed to be the world’s first designated protected land. Spanning 2,219,789 acres, you’re likely to see not only gorgeous forests and volcanic lakes but also close to 60 species of animals, including wolves, coyotes, cougars, bears, goats, sheep, deer, moose, and, of course, bison. And if you look closely enough, you’ll find Yogi Bear and Boo Boo sharing a picnic lunch.

Sip: The Pathfinder Hemp & Root Spirit

There’s something so mystical, eerie, and transcendent about Yellowstone. The moment I saw those infamous deep blue lagoons bubbling over with seismic activity, I surely thought I was in a Dr. Seuss book. There’s only one beverage that can match this park’s vibes: The Pathfinder Hemp & Root Spirit. This dreamy amaro-like spirit is dark, luxuriously bittersweet, and almost medicinal. It’ll open your third eye.

Tasting notes: wormwood, ginger, orange peel, Ouija boards

Read: American Buffalo by Steven Rinella

Part adventure, part history, Rinella’s hunt for a wild buffalo becomes a meditation on the animal that shaped America and was nearly wiped off the map. Yellowstone is one of the last places bison still roam wild, which makes it the perfect lens for the park’s prehistoric pull. Yes, bison and buffalo are different! But they are similar enough that I feel this recommendation works :)

Let’s Get Roadtripping!

Whether you are planning an actual road trip this summer or just traveling from the couch, we hope this left you with a few new places to dream about, a few new books to check out from the library, and a few new bottles to track down.

There is a whole country worth seeing out there, and you can toast to every mile of it with a clear head and a good story in your bag.

PS: There are so many amazing national parks we couldn’t get to in this article. Make sure to check out for everything parks!

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The best part of any trip is comparing notes when you get home. Which national park have you visited and loved? Tell us in the comments. We are always looking for the next one to add to the list.

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Best of all, they can rescue a doorstopper you would never have finished on the page :D

These are the ten that did exactly that for me. I am not ranking them so much as handing them over, the way I would if you climbed into my car for a long drive. The thing they have in common is that every single one is better heard than read.

To celebrate my new paid tier, I’m offering a crazy deal until Aug 1! You’ll lock in a 60% discount, paying just $1.67/month!! Get access to special paid posts, paid-only printables and challenges, and help me continue creating content like this.

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A note on links: I’m an advocate for library books, but I also love a good hardcover. If you want to support indie bookstores and my work, consider using the affiliate links in this post. Thank you!

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

A lone astronaut wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory of who he is or why he’s there, and slowly realizes he is humanity’s last shot at survival.

Why it’s a must-listen: Ray Porter’s narration is the one people cite when they want to convince a skeptic that audiobooks can outdo the page. There is a thread in this story that simply cannot work in print, and the audio production solves it with sound design so clever that it gave me chills. I have both read and listened to this book, and the audiobook wins.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

During the pandemic, a mother tells her three grown daughters about the long-ago summer she spent acting in a small-town play and falling for a man who later became famous.

Why it’s a must-listen: It is narrated by Meryl Streep. If you need more than that, know that this is not a gimmick. Her reading turns an already lovely book into something you will not want to end. Some people complain that Tom Lake is too slow-paced. Streep’s narration helps turn that bug into a feature, making it genuinely feel like your mom sat down to tell you a story about her younger years.

Get the audiobook here.

The Wager by David Grann

The true story of an 18th-century British warship wrecked off Patagonia, the starving castaways who survived, and the explosive court-martial over who told the truth.

Why it’s a must-listen: Dion Graham is a Golden Voice narrator for a reason. His commanding, measured delivery makes the shipwreck feel like it is happening to you, all salt and creaking timber and dread. The Wager is from the same author as Killers of the Flower Moon and is just as gripping.

Get the audiobook here.

Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

The actor’s freewheeling memoir, drawn from decades of journals, is about luck, loss, and learning to chase the green lights in life.

Why it’s a must-listen: This shows up on every audiobook list for a reason. McConaughey reads it himself, and the voice is the whole point: his drawl, timing, and easy charisma. This is one of those rare memoirs where listening is so clearly the superior choice that reading the print version feels like watching a concert with the sound off. I wouldn’t dare.

Get the audiobook here.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

A small-town teacher discovers a portal to 1958 and takes on an impossible mission: live in the past long enough to stop the Kennedy assassination.

Why it’s a must-listen: This is thirty hours long, and it flies. Craig Wasson lives inside the character of Jake Epping for the entire run, nailing the period accents and the slow ache of a man building a life he knows he may have to leave behind. King can be quite long-winded, so I personally find his work much nicer to consume in audio format.

Get the audiobook here.

The Ratline by Philippe Sands

A lawyer and historian traces the fate of a high-ranking Nazi fugitive and his postwar escape route, working in part through the man’s own devoted son.

Why it’s a must-listen: Sands narrates his own investigation, and the book grew out of his work in audio, so the documentary intimacy is built right in. Hearing him follow the trail in his own voice gives it the pull of the best true-crime podcast, with far deeper stakes. It feels like a podcast in book form in the best possible way.

Get the audiobook here.

The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown

A New York bookseller inherits a mysterious book that can turn any door into a portal to anywhere before discovering that she’s not the only one who knows it exists.

Why it’s a must-listen: Miranda Raison, who also narrated Lessons in Chemistry, gives this one a propulsive, atmospheric energy that feels like flying through a Bourne movie. The story races from Venice to Paris to New Orleans, and her performance keeps every thread taut. This is an audiobook that will genuinely have you on the edge of your seat.

Get the audiobook here.

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Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson

A young girl stows away on a pirate ship to sail a deadly ocean of spores and rescue the boy she loves from a fearsome sorceress.

Why it’s a must-listen: Think The Princess Bride in fantasy form, complete with a wry, knowing narrator telling you the tale. That voice is the magic of the audio. It’s whimsical, warm, and the perfect escapist audiobook.

Get the audiobook here.

What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo

A radio journalist’s memoir of being diagnosed with complex PTSD and her unflinching, often funny search for healing.

Why it’s a must-listen: Foo spent years as a producer at This American Life and Snap Judgment, and you can hear that craft in every beat. She reads her own story with a rawness and control that a stranger never could have matched. This is the one on the list that genuinely stayed with me.

Get the audiobook here.

Episode Thirteen by Craig DiLouie

A ghost-hunting reality TV crew investigates a derelict mansion with a history of disturbing experiments, told entirely through their tapes, journals, and transcripts.

Why it’s a must-listen: This is found-footage horror, and the audiobook uses a full cast to pull it off. The format that can feel gimmicky on the page becomes genuinely unnerving in your ears, like a documentary slowly going wrong in real time. Save this one for a dark evening when you want to be a little scared.

Get the audiobook here.

Let’s Get Listening!

Whether you are a devoted audiobook lover or just dipping your toes into the water, there’s no denying that a good audiobook has the power to transport you.

June is Audiobook Month, so put one of these on hold, press play, and let a great voice carry you somewhere.

Want to make the switch from Audible to an audiobook platform that actually supports local bookstores? Make sure you check out Libro.fm!

Now I want yours. What is the single best audiobook you have ever heard, the one you force on everyone? Tell me in the comments so I can add it to my list. I have a lot of cooking to do this weekend!

If you enjoyed this post, please consider becoming a paid subscriber! Until August 1, it’s just $20/YEAR (less than $2/month) to join and gain access to exclusive posts and paid benefits.

I want to join the inner circle :)

Read next…

Here is the idea: twelve groups, one book from one country in each group. In short? A reading bracket.

Think of it as a way to explore the countries on the screen through more than their team roster. Instead, this is a way to explore the culture of different countries, one book at a time. Most of these are translations, but a few are written in English originally.

Though I wanted to include a book from every country, I didn’t want to write the world’s longest Substack post. So I chose one country from each group and tried to give you the best possible book to explore a little bit about what life and the people in that country might be like.

Let’s kick off! ⚽️

A note on links: I’m an advocate for library books, but I also love a good hardcover. If you want to support indie bookstores and my work, consider using the affiliate links in this post. Thank you!

Group A: South Korea 🇰🇷

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo

Kim Jiyoung is an ordinary South Korean woman and a new mother who has left her job. One day, she starts speaking in the voices of other women, her own mother, a friend who died. As her psychiatrist takes down her history, the book stacks up a whole life of sexism: the brother who always ate first, the teachers who looked past her, the career she surrendered without anyone having to ask.

The book became a feminist flashpoint in Korea, a runaway bestseller that men review-bombed and that female celebrities got attacked simply for admitting they had read. Five stars from me, and a book I still bring up in conversation on a regular basis.

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Group B: Bosnia and Herzegovina 🇧🇦

The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić

A single stone bridge spans the river Drina in the Bosnian town of Višegrad, built by the Ottomans in the sixteenth century. The novel parks itself at that bridge for four hundred years and watches the town cross it: Ottoman rule giving way to the Austro-Hungarians, Muslims, Serbs, Croats, and Jews living together and then turning on each other, the wars of the twentieth century arriving at last.

Andrić won the Nobel for it, and it still explains the Balkans without ever feeling like a lesson: all those layered empires and faiths and grudges in a single place.

Group C: Brazil 🇧🇷

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

Macabéa is a young typist who has migrated from the drought-stricken northeast to Rio de Janeiro, where almost no one notices she exists. A writer narrates her story and keeps interrupting himself to wonder why he is even telling it, about a girl the country has decided does not matter.

The distance between the glamorous Rio of the postcards and the millions it overlooks is the most Brazilian thing about this slim, quietly devastating book.

Group D: Türkiye 🇹🇷

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak

A murdered woman lies in a trash bin on the edge of Istanbul, and for the ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds after her death, her brain keeps working. She replays her life in tastes and smells, from a strict childhood in eastern Anatolia to the brothels of the city. Each memory pulls in one of the five misfit friends who became her real family.

This is the Istanbul the guidebooks skip, its sex workers and runaways and outcasts, written with far more tenderness than the premise lets you expect.

Group E: Curaçao 🇨🇼

Double Play by Frank Martinus Arion

Four men sit down to a daylong game of dominoes on Curaçao. Across that single afternoon, their rivalries, debts, and marriages all come due. What looks like a game opens out into the whole island: the Black Curaçaoans, the Dutch who still hold the money, and the women keeping everything upright while the men talk.

It is the great Curaçaoan novel and my island-nation pick, taut and tragic and funnier than it sounds. Fair warning, it is a hard-to-find 1998 edition, so plan on an interlibrary loan or a used copy.

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Group F: Sweden 🇸🇪

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

A spectacularly bad bank robber botches the job, flees into an apartment open house, and ends up holding a roomful of strangers hostage. What begins as pure farce slowly becomes the story of eight anxious people quietly coming apart over money, divorce, and loneliness.

It is the most Swedish book imaginable, all that polite conflict-avoidance with an ocean of feeling dammed up behind it, funny on the surface and devastating underneath.

Group G: Iran 🇮🇷

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar

Narrated by the ghost of a thirteen-year-old girl, the novel follows a cultured, book-loving family who flee Tehran for a remote forest after the 1979 revolution. The losses come so fast that the story simply lets the supernatural in.

Under the magic is a clear-eyed account of what the revolution did to Iran’s intellectual class: the executions, the disappearances, and the books burned in the street. Azar wrote it after fleeing Iran herself, and it was shortlisted for the International Booker.

Group H: Spain 🇪🇸

The Time in Between by María Dueñas

A young Madrid seamstress is left broke and abandoned in Spanish Morocco, rebuilds her life stitch by stitch, and is eventually recruited to sew coded intelligence into her clients’ hemlines. The clients are the wives of Nazi sympathizers, and Europe is sliding toward war.

The history underneath is real: Franco’s rise, the Spanish protectorate in Tetouan (a country wrecked by civil war), and quietly choosing a side. Glamour, grit, and airtight plotting, this is a doorstopper to pack for a long flight.

Group I: Senegal 🇸🇳

At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop

Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese soldier, one of the tirailleurs France shipped in from its colonies to fight in the trenches of 1914. After his closest friend is gutted in front of him, something in Alfa comes loose, and he turns into the thing both armies come to fear.

The history here is the kind most of us were never taught: how France fed tens of thousands of West African men into its war and called it loyalty. It won the International Booker and runs under two hundred pages.

Group J: Argentina 🇦🇷

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez

A grieving father drives across Argentina with his young son, trying to keep the boy out of the hands of a wealthy occult order that wants to use the child as a doorway to the dead. The dread builds over six hundred pages and never once loosens its grip.

Enríquez ties the supernatural to the real horror of Argentina’s dictatorship, the torture and the thousands of disappeared, until you genuinely cannot tell the two apart. If you take one swing at horror this year, take it here.

Group K: Uzbekistan 🇺🇿

The Devils’ Dance by Hamid Ismailov

In a Tashkent prison in 1937, the real Uzbek writer Abdulla Qodiriy mentally composes the masterpiece that Stalin’s police will execute him before he can ever write it down. Woven through it is the story he is dreaming up, a lush nineteenth-century world of Central Asian khans and a poet-queen married to three of them.

You get both Uzbekistans at once, the Soviet machine erasing its artists and the older Silk Road culture it was trying to erase. Billed as the first major Uzbek novel translated straight into English, it is one the best of the whole list. Like the Curaçao pick, it is small-press, so reach for Kindle or your library’s loan system.

Group L: Ghana 🇬🇭

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Two half-sisters in eighteenth-century Ghana never meet. One is married off to a British officer inside Cape Coast Castle. The other is captured and shipped out through the slave dungeon directly beneath it. Gyasi follows both bloodlines down three hundred years, a new descendant in every chapter.

This is the other English-language pick, blessedly easy to find, and each chapter reads like its own perfect short story.

Let the Games Begin

Thirty-nine days, twelve groups, one book each, and nobody checking your bracket but you. Keep a game on in the background and let these carry you from the opener all the way to the final!

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Tell me in the comments where you are headed first. I will be traveling right alongside you, all tournament long.

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This month’s theme is Fractured Families, hosted by Simi Sidhu Writes. If you want to find more participants, head to her post and scroll through the comments.

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” - Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy wrote that line in 1878, and almost 150 years later, it remains the single best argument for why we keep reading and writing novels about families that don’t quite work.

The happy ones, whatever that means, blur together. The unhappy ones are unique. The shape of the fracture is the whole story.

I’ve lived enough years and known enough people to be sure of one thing: families fracture for entirely different reasons.

Sometimes the cause is external. Sometimes it’s biology. Sometimes it’s a single person’s choice. Sometimes it’s grief.

The five books below represent five different types of fractures. There is no single story of how a family breaks and no single story of how the people inside one survive. There is only this family, that family, and the one down the road.

A note on links: I’m an advocate for library books, but I also love a good hardcover. If you want to support indie bookstores and my work, consider using the affiliate links in this post. Thank you!

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

A modern retelling of David Copperfield, transplanted from Dickensian England to the Appalachian mountains of southern Virginia during the opioid epidemic.

The narrator is born to a teenage mother on the floor of a single-wide trailer and proceeds to survive every cruelty the American foster system, rural poverty, and Big Pharma can hand a child.

The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023 and shared the Women’s Prize that same year.

The fracture: systemic collapse. The family doesn’t break because of who they are. Instead, they break because poverty, addiction, and a predatory pharmaceutical industry dismantle it from the outside.

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The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne

Cyril Avery was born in 1945 to an unwed teenage mother in rural Ireland, given up at birth, and adopted by a wealthy and eccentric Dublin couple who never let him forget he is “not a real Avery.”

The novel follows Cyril every seven years across the next seven decades, through Catholic Ireland’s cruelty toward gay men, exile in Amsterdam and New York, and a long, painful path back to the country and the mother who never got to keep him.

The fracture: cultural rejection. A mother is cast out by her community. The fracture is the violence a culture does to people who don’t fit its rules.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Identical twin sisters Desiree and Stella Vignes grow up in Mallard, Louisiana, a tiny town that prides itself on the lightness of its Black residents’ skin.

At sixteen, they run away together. Years later, Desiree returns home with a dark-skinned daughter, while Stella has disappeared into a white life in California, married to a man who has no idea who she really is.

The novel spans four decades and two generations of daughters who inherit a history much larger than themselves.

The fracture: erasure. One twin chooses to pass as white and erases her family to do it. This is fracture as a deliberate act.

Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker

The true story of Don and Mimi Galvin, a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Their family became one of the first studied by the National Institute of Mental Health, and samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research into the disease. Kolker alternates between the Galvins’ story, told largely through the two youngest daughters who survived and watched everything, and the parallel history of how science has tried, and repeatedly failed, to understand schizophrenia.

It was an Oprah’s Book Club pick and a #1 New York Times bestseller. Though it’s nonfiction, it reads like the most heartbreaking page-turner you’ve ever picked up.

The fracture: illness. The story of mental illness and the way it ripples outward across siblings, parents, and generations. Nobody chose this, and nobody caused it, but it shapes every relationship in the house.

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The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin

The four Skinner siblings lose their father suddenly when they are young. Their mother retreats into a years-long depression they later call “the Pause,” and the children essentially raise each other in a state of half-feral freedom.

The novel follows them into adulthood, told mostly through the lens of Fiona, the youngest. This is the story of how absence shapes every relationship the four siblings will ever have, especially the one that defines and ultimately breaks them.

The fracture: grief and parental absence. A father dies, a mother checks out, and four children raise themselves. The fracture is what happens when the adults disappear.

Five Fractures, One Shelf

I wouldn’t recommend reading these five back-to-back unless you are particularly emotionally well-resourced. However, reading them as a group allows the Tolstoy line to begin to feel like a thesis. Five families, five fractures, none of them interchangeable.

Which is, I think, exactly the point. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Tolstoy knew it 150 years ago, and we are still working it out, one family at a time.

What’s a book about a fractured family that has stayed with you?

Tell me in the comments. I’m always looking for my next 5-star read, and I try to read everything you send me.

(And make sure to check out Simi’s post for other 5 on 5 lists for this month!)

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But they don’t tell the full story of what ends up in my beach bag.

Here is my actual definition of a beach read: a book I cannot put down. That is the entire test. A beach read is any book so good that I will sit in direct sun past the point of sunburn rather than go inside and lose my place.

After all, it was reading a 900-page English history book on a beach in the Brazilian northeast that pulled me out of a 2-year reading slump.

This list reflects all of that. It holds the books I have genuinely packed for a beach vacation or want to throw into my pool bag this summer. I’ve also included your recommendations!

Summer reading should be fun and enjoyable. Here are the books I hope check those boxes for you.

To celebrate my new paid tier, I’m offering a crazy deal until Aug 1! You’ll lock in a 60% discount, paying just $1.67/month!! Get access to special paid posts, paid-only printables and challenges, and help me continue creating content like this.

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My Top Picks

Twenty books I have read and am personally vouching for. These are all books I’ve brought to a beach/pool/river/park and loved.

A note on links: I’m an advocate for library books, but I also love a good hardcover. If you want to support indie bookstores and my work, consider using the affiliate links in this post. Thank you!

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

A Kansas farmhouse, four members of one family shot dead in a single night, two drifters, and almost no motive anyone could name. Capote spent six years reporting it, got disturbingly close to the killers, and more or less invented true crime in the process.

It is built like a novel and reads like one, except the dread never lifts because you know it actually happened. I read this the summer I was 17 and have loved true crime ever since.

Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Four famous siblings throw their massive annual party in Malibu in 1983. Over one day and one increasingly out-of-control night, every secret they have been carrying catches fire, some of it literally.

Sun, surf, fame, family, and the exact ache TJR does better than anyone alive. If you somehow have not read this yet, this is your summer.

Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

The most decorated champion in tennis history, retired and thirty-seven, watches a vicious younger rival close in on her record and decides to come out of retirement to defend it. Her father, the only coach she has ever fully trusted, comes back with her.

Read it right after Malibu Rising, where Carrie turns up at the party. I love tennis-themed books, and this is one of my favorites by TJR.

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

A sorority house, a charming young man who turns out to be a killer, and the chapter president who got one clear look at his face on the worst night of her life. It is loosely built on Ted Bundy’s final murders, told entirely from the side we almost never hear.

Knoll is furious about the way we turn men like this into folk legends, and she writes the women back into the center of their own story. If you have ever rolled your eyes at the glorification of serial killers, this is the antidote.

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Krakauer reached the summit of Everest in May 1996 and descended straight into the deadliest storm the mountain had ever seen. His firsthand account of who lived, who did not, and why is the most white-knuckle book I own. The chapter where the weather turns is one of the most genuinely tense things I have ever read.

You will look up hours later, sunburned and dehydrated, having completely forgotten where you were. My husband read this in one sitting on a beach in Mexico, so I’m counting this!

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The Wedding People by Alison Espach

A woman checks into a grand old Rhode Island hotel completely alone, at the lowest and most desperate point of her life, only to discover the entire place has been booked out for a lavish wedding she has nothing to do with.

It is much funnier and much sadder than that setup suggests, often on the very same page. This book is far funnier and deeper than I expected. One of my favorite reads in recent times.

Lyrebird by Cecelia Ahern

A documentary crew filming deep in the remote Irish mountains stumbles on a woman living completely alone, and slowly realizes she can perfectly mimic any sound she has ever heard. They bring her back to the city to make her a star, which goes about as well as you would expect.

Nobody talks about this book, but they should be. It is gentle and strange and quietly romantic. Underneath, it is asking what we do to rare, unspoiled people the second we get our hands on them. You might cry a little on the beach.

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

August 1975: a girl vanishes from her bunk at her family’s exclusive Adirondack summer camp, the same camp her older brother disappeared from years before. A literary mystery thick with pine, old money, and the resentments of the people paid to serve it. I kept deciding I had it figured out, and I did not.

This is the kind of book that makes you quietly cancel your evening plans and read long into the night.

The Guest List by Lucy Foley

A glossy destination wedding on a tiny, windswept island off the coast of Ireland. A guest list quietly stuffed with old grudges. A storm that cuts the island off from the mainland, and a body before the night is over.

The Guest List is narrated by a rotating cast who each have something to hide, so the suspicion keeps sliding around the room. It’s like watching a gossipy murder mystery unfold. Delicious.

The Once and Future Queen by Paula Lafferty

A modern woman slips back into Arthur’s Britain and slowly realizes she is meant to live out the legend of Guinevere. Sword fights, court politics, and a love triangle ensue.

This is Outlander crossed with The Princess Bride, and it has no right to be this fun or this moving. Lafferty does something genuinely fresh with a legend everyone assumes they already know.

It’s in the running for my Book of the Year.

The Parisian Heist by Jo Piazza

Two women a century apart: the real-life widow who fought to make Van Gogh famous after his death and a broke American art student scrubbing floors in 1990s Paris. Both of them circle the same painting.

This book is the best kind of armchair travel, wrapped around an art-world caper and two women who refuse to be erased from the story. Read it on a lounge chair and let it take you somewhere far away.

Note: This one comes out on July 14th, so already tag it in Libby to make sure you can put it on hold as soon as it’s available! I read an early copy, and it’s a good one!

The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston

A grieving young woman inherits her beloved aunt’s Manhattan apartment, which comes with one small catch: every so often, it slips seven years into the past, where a charming stranger is currently living his life.

It sounds like a gimmick, yet it completely earns itself. This book is a darling on BookTok, but it lived up to the hype for me!

Be Ready When the Luck Happens by Ina Garten

Before the Barefoot Contessa empire, Ina Garten was a nuclear-policy analyst in Washington who impulsively bought a tiny specialty-food shop in the Hamptons with no experience whatsoever. This is the whole story of how she built a life precisely to her own specifications.

It is cozy and candid and secretly a quiet pep talk about betting on yourself when it makes no sense on paper. It will also give you unbearable cravings for coconut cake.

You might not think that a memoir belongs in your beach bag, but this one does. Bonus: it was one of my top 5 books of 2025 :)

Künstlers in Paradise by Cathleen Schine

A floundering young man gets stranded by lockdown in his grandmother’s Venice Beach bungalow and falls into her stories of escaping 1939 Vienna for the strange paradise of Los Angeles.

Schine is so funny, it takes a beat to notice she is breaking your heart. I read this years ago, and the story still stays with me.

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The Devil at His Elbow by Valerie Bauerlein

A South Carolina dynasty, a boat crash, two murders, brazen financial fraud, and lots of drugs. Bauerlein covered the case for the Wall Street Journal and writes it like Southern Gothic.

The actual crime being documented in this true crime book keeps shifting, as the family can’t stop getting themselves into hot water. It’s no surprise Netflix turned this into a miniseries.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

A summer in a Michigan cherry orchard, three grown daughters, and the mother who finally tells them about the famous actor she loved one summer long before they existed. Get the audiobook if you can: Meryl Streep narrates, and it is a treat.

Bonus: Patchett’s new novel Whistler is out this month, too!

The Lady of the Loch by Elena Collins

Two sisters take a caretaking job at a remote, half-abandoned castle in the Scottish Highlands and start to feel a deep, specific grief leaking out of the old tower. Centuries earlier, in 1307, a kitchen maid lived a story there that was never allowed to end the way it should have.

It is a timeslip novel with real ghosts, romance, Highland mist, and an ending that genuinely got me. If you loved the eerier, more haunted corners of Outlander, this one is built for you.

The Shampoo Effect by Jenny Jackson

A WASPy little New England beach town, a tight circle of old-money friends who have summered together for decades, and the newcomer whose arrival quietly cracks open every fault line they have spent years papering over. Old grudges, newer money, and nobody behaving especially well. Nonetheless, the book offers a surprisingly poignant look at friendship and what it means to grow up.

This is exactly the kind of smart, gossipy book a pool chair was invented for.

The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown

A shy, kind New York bookseller is handed a mysterious book by a dying regular and discovers it can turn any door into a door to anywhere on earth. There are other magic books out there, and the people who collect them will do genuinely terrible things to add this one to the pile.

It is high-concept and pure, galloping momentum. This is the kind of book that makes a long travel day simply vanish. Bring it on the plane and watch the hours melt away.

Sarum by Edward Rutherfurd

Ten thousand years of English history, all of it rooted in one patch of ground around Stonehenge and carried by five families whose bloodlines braid in and out across the centuries.

I know. It is 800+ pages, and it sounds like assigned reading. Here is the thing: I was two years into a brutal reading slump, took this doorstopper to the beach so I’d have something to last the week, and it broke the spell completely.

If you have ever loved a sweeping family saga, start here and clear your schedule.

What’s on My Holds List

Here are the books I’m planning to read this summer, as soon as my hold comes in. One won’t be released until late this summer, but I call that delayed gratification.

28 Summers by Elin Hilderbrand

Mallory and Jake meet on Nantucket over a Labor Day weekend in 1993, fall hard, then make a quietly devastating pact: they will spend that one weekend together every single year, no matter what their real, separate lives become. Their lives become a great deal, including a presidential campaign.

A secret love stretched thin across twenty-eight summers set on Nantucket? Exactly my kind of bait.

The Island Club by Nicola Harrison

Balboa Island, 1956. Three very different women whose polished, enviable lives are quietly falling apart find one another through the island’s exclusive club and its tennis courts, and hold on for dear life.

Tennis for me has similarly been a lifeline, so this book called to me. I just hope my hold comes in before summer is over, or I might have to buy this one.

People Watching in the Desert by Cali Adeline

A young woman who has spent her entire life observing other people from the safe edges of the room comes into an unexpected windfall and checks into a luxury desert resort, where, almost against her will, she finally gets pulled into the middle of other people’s lives.

My own life changed directions thanks to a trip to a desert hotel, so this definitely piqued my interest.

The Unknown by Riley Sager

In 1926, five women vanished overnight from an island commune of spiritualists on a remote Vermont lake. A hundred years later, a struggling actress arrives on that same island to film a movie about the disappearances, and they begin again.

Note: This doesn’t come out until August 4, which is exactly why I am telling you now: tag this book with “Notify Me” right now in Libby. Sager does creepy-séance-on-an-island better than anyone, and I want to be first in line.

Beach Read by Emily Henry

A romance writer who has lost all faith in happy endings and the brooding literary-fiction golden boy in the beach house next door spend a summer daring each other to write in the other’s genre. She has to attempt Serious Literature, and he has to try for joy. I’m guessing they fall for each other ♥️

This is more or less the book that kicked off the entire modern beach-read wave, and somehow, I have never read it. I am closing it this summer, ideally with a margarita in hand.

The Au Pair by Teddy Wayne

A washed-up literary novelist in Brooklyn, his marriage to a high-powered wife crumbling, becomes infatuated with the beautiful young Norwegian au pair who happens to revere his forgotten books. What starts as a private obsession spirals into a national scandal and a tabloid trial.

Who says a sleek thriller can’t be a beach read?

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Two aging former Texas Rangers leave their dusty border town to drive a cattle herd across a frontier that is staggeringly beautiful and trying to kill them at every turn. It is widely, seriously called the great American novel.

It is 945 pages, and I am taking it to the beach anyway, because this is finally the summer I sit down to read this. I have been circling it for years, but it’s been recommended to me too many times to put off another season.

Member of the Family by Dianne Lake

Dianne Lake was handed over to the Manson Family by her own parents at fourteen, lived inside it through the murders, and eventually became a key witness against Charles Manson himself. This is the cult from the deep inside, told by its youngest member.

True crime memoirs almost never come from this far inside the story, and I have wanted to read this one for ages. Exactly the kind of dark, what-happened-to-this-person book I cannot put down.

Starkweather by Harry N. MacLean

Nebraska, 1957. A teenage couple goes on a killing spree across the plains that terrifies the entire country and goes on to seed everything from Badlands to Springsteen’s Nebraska.

MacLean spent decades on the murders that taught America to fear the open road. If In Cold Blood is the gold standard for this kind of thing, this belongs on the shelf right beside it. Reading true crime during the summer just works for me.

What Subscribers Are Bringing to the Beach Club

I asked my subscribers for their beach read suggestions, and wow did they deliver! You all made this list meaningfully more unhinged than it already was, which I mean as a sincere compliment.

Finlay Donovan is Killing It by Elle Cosimano

A broke, single-mom suspense novelist is overheard at a Panera describing the plot of her next book. The woman at the next table over assumes she is a contract killer for hire. Rather than correct the misunderstanding, Finlay sort of takes the job. It only escalates from there.

Recommended by: Rich Kacy

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Ten strangers, each hiding a guilty secret, are lured to a cut-off island mansion and then murdered one by one. Each death eerily matches a line of an old nursery rhyme. It is the best-selling mystery novel ever written and will keep you turning pages long after sunset.

Recommended by: Jamie

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Jim Hawkins discovers a map leading to the buried fortune of the notorious Captain Flint. Jim joins a perilous sea voyage, only to uncover a mutinous plot led by the cunning cook, Long John Silver. Nothing is more summer than pirates.

Recommended by: Charles Moritz

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

On the glittering French Riviera in the 1920s, a charismatic American psychiatrist and his beautiful, fragile wife dazzle everyone around them while their marriage quietly rots from the inside. It is Fitzgerald’s most personal novel, and the one many say is his best.

Recommended by: Tarik O.

June Baby by Shannon Garvey

Sent to Block Island the summer she turned seventeen, in the raw aftermath of losing her mother, a young woman has one season that changes everything, then comes back years later to face all of it again. Salt air, grief, first love, and the places that make us who we are.

Recommended by: Anne DeGumbia

The Martha’s Vineyard Beach and Book Club by Martha Hall Kelly

A dual-timeline historical fiction novel about two sisters keeping their family farm afloat during World War II, while simultaneously dealing with German U-boats, a Nazi spy on the island, and the mystery of their descendants decades later. Dual timeline and Martha’s Vineyard? Perfect for summer.

Recommended by: Sarah Fowler Wolfe

The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons

This one follows a contented couple living in an affluent Atlanta suburb. Their peaceful lives are shattered when a sinister, ultra-contemporary house is built next door. Over time, they realize the house is malevolent and is driving its occupants to tragedy and madness. Stephen King called it one of the finest and most original haunted house stories ever written. The perfect way to give yourself chills on a hot summer day.

Recommended by: Alexandra Sokoloff

Man Overboard by Kathleen Rooney

A man goes over the railing of a cruise ship in the dark, and the entire novel happens in the water as he treads and waits, confronting her life and memories, not even sure anyone has noticed he is gone. Recommending a book about possibly drowning as a beach read may be the most unhinged thing on this whole list.

Note: This book will be released on July 7, 2026.

Recommended by: Zoe Zolbrod

The Love Haters by Katherine Center

A documentary producer flies to Miami for a job that forces her into close quarters with the one person she has been dreading. All that proximity turns dread into something far more complicated and a lot more fun. Sunny and swoony, with a cover practically engineered for a beach bag.

Recommended by: Maryanne

To a Summer of Excellent Reading

Whatever you pull off this list, I hope your summer is full of the kind of reading that makes you almost forget to reapply sunscreen.

If you want a little structure with your chaos, come join my summer reading challenge. It is low-pressure, genuinely fun, and built for exactly this kind of mixed, unhinged, anything-goes reading life. Plus, there’s a surprise at the end for those who complete it!

One last thing before you close the tab. If I missed a book that you’re putting in your beach bag this summer, leave it in the comments! So many readers have told me how many amazing books they’ve found through your recommendations in the comments :)

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Like this post? Here’s more to read…

The truth is that non-fiction has a branding problem. People hear the word and picture something improving, something they should read, something that will be good for them in the way bran flakes are good for them.

The twelve books on this list are not that. They are addictive and stranger than many novels I’ve read. Several of them sound, in summary, like things someone made up. But all of them are true!

I’d put these in front of anyone who tells me they only read fiction. I dare you to read at least one of these and tell me non-fiction is boring.

To celebrate my new paid tier, I’m offering a crazy deal until Aug 1! You’ll lock in a 60% discount, paying just $1.67/month!! Get access to special paid posts, paid-only printables and challenges, and help me continue creating content like this.

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A note on links: I’m an advocate for library books, but I also love a good hardcover or audiobook. If you want to support indie bookstores and my work, consider using the affiliate links in this post. Thank you!

Endurance by Alfred Lansing

Twenty-eight men, one ship crushed by Antarctic ice in 1915, and a captain who decides his only job is to get every single one of them home. Lansing wrote this with access to the survivors’ journals.

I literally read this cover to cover in one sitting. I was so gripped by the story and the number of times I thought, “there’s no way they get out of this alive,” was mind-boggling.

I will never shut up about how much I love this book. If you only read one from this list, make it this one.

The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston

I’ve read a lot of true crime, and this one still stands out.

It tracks an Italian serial killer active across decades, an investigation so corrupted by conspiracy theories, and Italian magistrate politics (Preston himself got hauled in for questioning while researching it).

It’s little surprise this became a Netflix series, though I haven’t watched it yet. The book was too good.

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

The story of the 1996 Everest disaster, written by a journalist who was on the mountain when it happened. The chapter where the storm comes in is one of the most viscerally tense things I’ve ever read. You know it’s coming, and yet, the story of how the disaster unfolds is endlessly gripping.

My husband, who was just getting into reading at the time, spent the day reading this instead of swimming with me in Mexico. That’s how crazy the story is.

Blitzed by Norman Ohler

Literally, the Third Reich on meth.

Pervitin was handed out to Wehrmacht soldiers by the millions of pills, Hitler’s personal physician was injecting him with cocktails of God knows what, and Ohler has the archival receipts. This reframes the entire war and reads like a fever dream.

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

In the 1920s, members of the Osage Nation became some of the wealthiest people per capita in the world because of the oil under their land, and then they started dying. Grann uncovers a murder conspiracy so wide that the FBI was essentially invented to investigate it.

Scorsese made the film, but the book goes places the film doesn’t.

The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown

The Donner Party story, told from the perspective of one young bride, Sarah Graves.

You think you know this story, but you don’t. The level of visceral detail and the depth of storytelling blew me away. I read this cover to cover on an international flight.

A Taste for Poison by Neil Bradbury

Eleven chapters, eleven molecules, and the eleven killers who used them.

A cardiac physiologist walks you through exactly what each poison does to the human body and then tells you the story of someone who weaponized that knowledge. It sounds clinical, but it isn’t.

The Wager by David Grann

A British warship runs aground off Patagonia in 1741. The survivors split into factions, some of them eat each other, and the ones who make it back to England give wildly different accounts of what happened.

I’ve recommended this book to so many people, and all of them have said it instantly became one of their favorites.

Maybe I should rebrand this Substack to “Elle Won’t Shut Up About Ship Books.”

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara

McNamara spent years obsessively tracking the Golden State Killer, decades after the case had gone cold. She died before it was solved, but her work fed into the eventual identification.

The book is about the investigation and is a portrait of what it costs to look at the darkest things for a living. It’s the model for how true crime should be done.

The Devil at His Elbow by Valerie Bauerlein

A South Carolina dynasty, a boat crash, two murders, brazen financial fraud, and lots of drugs. Bauerlein covered the case for the Wall Street Journal and writes it like Southern Gothic.

The actual crime being documented in this true crime book keeps shifting, as the family can’t stop getting themselves into hot water. It’s no surprise Netflix turned this into a miniseries.

A Furious Sky by Eric Jay Dolin

Five hundred years of hurricanes along the American coast, told as the chronicle of a country that keeps building in the same dangerous places and forgetting what happened the last time.

A book about weather might sound boring, but Dolin writes with the same heavy tension of an incoming mega storm.

The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston

This book covers the search for a lost civilization deep in the Honduran jungle, found via lidar in 2012.

There are venomous snakes, flesh-eating parasites, an actual lost city, and a follow-up section about the disease most of the team brought home with them. Adventure non-fiction at its absolute purest.

Truth is Stranger than Fiction

The phrase gets thrown around so often that it’s almost lost its meaning. These twelve books are the reason it exists.

No novelist would dare invent a Reich running on amphetamines, or a serial killer who gets his investigator hauled in for questioning, or twenty-eight men surviving two years on the ice because their captain refused to lose a single one. An editor would send it back with the note: too much.

The advantage non-fiction has over the novel is that it doesn’t have to be plausible. It only has to be true.

What’s the wildest true story you’ve ever read?

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They were the stacks of books that my teachers assigned to an exhausted teenager. I had to power through, annotate like crazy, and be ready to write an essay test on them by the end of the week. So once I became an adult, I left classics behind.

In the past year or so, though, I’ve been revisiting this notion. Time and time again, I find that newly produced content feels sort of shallow, like it’s been created to be consumed while one scrolls on Instagram or plays Candy Crush.

I longed for deeper stories that reward patience and attention with a message that forever changes who I am, so I dove back into classics.

It was difficult at first. The language is stiffer. The pace is slower. I felt like someone trying to walk after being bedridden for a long period: shaky but determined. Finishing those first few classics gave me a sense of accomplishment I hadn’t felt in a long time, and I found them lingering in my mind for much longer than normal.

So, this year, I’ve decided to try to read more classics. The list below contains the 26 I’m most excited about. I hope at least one of them convinces you to give classics another chance.

A note on links: I’m an advocate for library books, but I also love a good hardcover. If you want to support indie bookstores and my work, consider using the affiliate links in this post. Thank you!

Stoner by John Williams

A quiet novel about an English professor at a Missouri university whose life is shaped by a series of disappointments.

Why I’m excited: Yes, I found this book because it’s all over social media. But the tone reminded me of A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr, which is one of my all-time favorite books.

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Ten strangers are lured to an island off the Devon coast and start dying one by one, in what is arguably the most ruthlessly constructed locked-room mystery ever written.

Why I’m excited: One of my very well-read friends recently told me that her favorite author is Agatha Christie. This book gives off great summer read vibes, so it’s a great time for me to pick it up.

1984 by George Orwell

Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting the past. He falls in love against the rules and learns what a totalitarian state will do to a person who tries to keep a single private thought.

Why I’m excited: Am I the only person who never got assigned this in school? Like Agatha Christie, I’m a bit embarrassed that I’ve never read this. I’ve bought a copy because I’m sure it deserves a place on my physical shelf.

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

A slim, strange Brazilian masterpiece about a poor typist named Macabéa whose narrator can’t quite figure out how to tell her story, which turns out to be the story itself.

Why I’m excited: So many Brazilians I meet recommend this book, and Clarice Lispector is a literary icon. I’m excited to read it both in the original Portuguese and in translation!

From Here to Eternity by James Jones

Soldiers stationed in Honolulu drink, fight, and fall in love in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor.

Why I’m excited: Sadie’s got this in her hands when she meets Jake in the 11/22/63 screen adaptation. The miniseries butchered King’s novel, but it piqued my interest in From Here to Eternity.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Two retired Texas Rangers drive a herd of cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana, and the book uses that thin plot scaffold to hold one of the great American novels.

Why I’m excited: I love a good Western. The Wild Bunch is one of my favorite movies of all time. I just haven’t read this because everyone says it’s so good, and I want to savor reading it for the first time.

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Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

A married woman in 1870s Russia falls catastrophically in love with a cavalry officer while, in a parallel storyline, a landowner named Levin tries to figure out how to live a moral life on his estate.

Why I’m excited: Does the plot particularly call out to me? No. But I feel like it’s one of the classics you sort of have to read. So here it is.

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

A retired historian, divorced and confined to a wheelchair, reconstructs the story of his pioneer grandmother’s troubled marriage in the mining camps of the American West, looking for answers about his own life in hers.

Why I’m excited: This was recommended to me by a fellow history lover. Also, the West calls me.

Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset

A trilogy following one Norwegian woman from headstrong girlhood through marriage, motherhood, and old age in fourteenth-century Norway, written with such specificity that it helped win Undset the Nobel.

Why I’m excited: I’m working on a writing project around medieval Scandinavia, and this book kept popping up. The fact that it focuses on women, who are typically left out of stories from this time period, was an instant draw for me.

Beast in View by Margaret Millar

A reclusive Los Angeles woman starts receiving threatening phone calls from someone who seems to know her too well, in the 1956 Edgar winner that helped invent the modern psychological thriller.

Why I’m excited: This book is such a vibe. I didn’t know classics could sound so cool until I came across this.

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

The novel that launched one of the most studied antiheroes in twentieth-century fiction: a charming young grifter is sent to the Amalfi Coast to retrieve a wealthy heir named Dickie Greenleaf and decides, instead, that he’d rather become him.

Why I’m excited: I rewatch the movie adaptation of this novel about once a year. Since the book is always better than the movie, this was instantly added to my list.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West

Often called the greatest travel book ever written, West’s 1,100-page account of her journeys through Yugoslavia in the late 1930s was written on the brink of World War II with the sense that the world she was describing was about to be destroyed.

Why I’m excited: I’m returning to the Balkans this year. On my last trip, I really wish I’d read this and had this context in mind, so this is very high on my list.

A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O’Connor

Ten Southern Gothic stories in which ordinary people meet violent, revelatory moments, anchored by a title story about a family road trip that has been haunting readers for seventy years.

Why I’m excited: O’Connor was one of the authors I most enjoyed reading in high school. I want to read more of her work and meet her as an adult reader.

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald’s last completed novel and the one he considered his best: a glamorous American psychiatrist and his beautiful, troubled wife slowly unravel on the French Riviera in the years between the wars.

Why I’m excited: I’ve heard this is a great summer read. It’s been on my list for years, but this year is the year! It’s got everything - glitz, glamour, and a slow unraveling.

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

The grandfather of every revenge story since: a young sailor on the cusp of marriage is framed and imprisoned in an island fortress, and spends the next twenty years and 1,200 pages becoming the patient, exquisitely cruel architect of everyone else’s ruin.

Why I’m excited: My sister and I watched the movie version of this novel relentlessly as children. I’ve wanted to read it for years. People say the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition is best.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

The 1932 dystopia that called almost everything: a future society engineered for happiness through genetics, conditioning, and a pharmaceutical called soma, where the real question isn’t whether you’d survive it but whether you’d want to leave.

Why I’m excited: Another book I’m embarrassed not to have read yet. The novel seems so ahead of its time.

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes

A noir landmark and one of the eeriest novels of the 1940s, told from inside the head of a serial killer prowling postwar Los Angeles, written by a woman who understood male menace better than nearly any of her male contemporaries.

Why I’m excited: Again, I didn’t know classics could be this cool. This is considered one of the first novels about serial killers and promises to pack a punch.

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Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

Steinbeck at his most distilled: two migrant ranch hands in Depression-era California, one of them the slow, enormous Lennie, share a fragile dream of buying a small piece of land, in a novella that takes about an afternoon to read.

Why I’m excited: I read Steinbeck for the first time as an adult and instantly realized why his books are considered classics.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The 1961 novel that gave the English language its title phrase: a bombardier named Yossarian, stationed on a Mediterranean island during World War II, tries to get himself declared insane to stop flying missions, and discovers the regulation designed to make that impossible.

Why I’m excited: Like most people, I use the phrase often. I’m itching to read the book to truly understand the underlying story.

Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan

Sagan was eighteen when she wrote this, and it became a scandal across France. A seventeen-year-old girl summers on the Riviera with her widowed playboy father and sets out, with cool teenage precision, to sabotage his engagement to a woman she finds insufferably good.

Why I’m excited: This sounds like the classics, French version of The Parent Trap.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

The book Steinbeck said he’d been preparing his whole life to write: a Cain-and-Abel story stretched across two generations of two families in California’s Salinas Valley, taking in immigration, inheritance, and what people do to each other in the name of love.

Why I’m excited: I’m grateful that I get to meet books like these as an adult. As an immigrant myself, I’m particularly excited for this one.

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

A French priest is sent to New Mexico in the 1850s to organize the new Catholic diocese, in a novel made of luminous landscapes and quiet encounters rather than plot, and routinely named one of the best American novels of the twentieth century.

Why I’m excited: My grandfather’s girlfriend recommended this as one of her all-time favorites, and she’s one of the most cultured people I know.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Wilde’s only novel and a Victorian scandal in its own time: a beautiful young man wishes his portrait would age in his place, gets exactly what he asked for, and discovers what a soul looks like when nothing is allowed to mark the face.

Why I’m excited: I hope at this point you’re not judging my high school for not having assigned all these books from the canon. I swear I got a really good education…

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré

The 1963 novel that pulled spy fiction out of Bond-era glamour and into the moral mud where le Carré preferred it: a worn-out British intelligence officer in Berlin is sent on one final operation against the East Germans, and learns what his own side is willing to spend him on.

Why I’m excited: I have loved spy novels since childhood, and this is THE spy novel. When I realized this book could be considered a classic, I was elated.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky’s final novel and, by most counts, his greatest: three brothers (the sensualist, the intellectual, the saint) and the murder of their awful father, framing a 900-page argument about whether faith is possible in a world that contains real suffering.

Why I’m excited: I bought this book because I know it’s going to take me a long time to finish, and I can’t lock my Kindle up like that. People genuinely rave about this, but it’s the most intimidating one on the list for me.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The 1899 novella that has been arguing with itself, and with its readers, for over a century: a steamboat captain named Marlow travels up the Congo River to find a company agent named Kurtz, and finds something about empire, and about himself, that he can’t quite put into words.

Why I’m excited: This is the only re-read on the list. This book did a number on me when I first read it. I still think about it frequently and want to revisit it as an adult.

Is this project actually doable?

26 in 2026 sounds catchy in a Substack post title. Do I plan to read all of them in 2026, though? Probably not.

Classics are for savoring. Once you’ve read The Brothers Karamazov, you can never read it again for the first time.

If you’d also like to slowly savor classics with me (and I always love to see what you’re reading), consider joining my StoryGraph challenge here. There’s no time limit, so if you want to take the rest of your life to complete it, please do.

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I’d love to hear from you. Which classics have you read that didn’t make this list but should have?

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I love wine, and one of my favorite ways to experience it is in flights, three or four pours arranged around a theme, each one a different expression of the same idea. You learn more about a wine when you taste it next to its cousins than you ever would on its own.

As an avid reader, I feel the same way about books. A theme is most interesting when you can see it from multiple angles, when you can hold up several iterations of the same idea and watch them refract differently. That’s what Book Flights is going to do.

Spring 2026 is a perfect season to start. Each flight in this post will explore one of the themes shaping the year through three new releases, plus a book or two pulled up from the cellar to round out the tasting.

Four flights. Four books per flight. Sixteen chances to experience this season’s reading in a way the monthly roundups can’t quite offer.

A note on links: I’m an advocate for library books, but I also love a good hardcover. If you want to support indie bookstores and my work, consider using the affiliate links in this post. Thank you!

Women Coming Undone

This isn’t a new subject for fiction; The Bell Jar turns 63 this year, and women have been losing it on the page for far longer than that. Nonetheless, the cluster this spring is striking.

Stalking, psychological fracture, identity dissolution, all from women writers, all from major imprints, all in one season. Some of these books are literary, some are speculative, some are just plain horror.

Together, they’re asking the same question: what happens when the performance of femininity finally breaks the woman performing it?

Good News by Alexa Yasemin Brahme

Maggie Arif is on the brink. Her MFA thesis painting is met with polite confusion. Her boyfriend is too consumed by his office job to notice her unraveling. With the reappearance of her ex, a smooth-talking art critic with the power to introduce her to big names, her forced composure starts to slip.

Tasting Notes: Stylish, witty, quietly devastating. Sally Rooney with a paintbrush and a terrible ex.

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Nerve Damage by Annakeara Stinson

Three years after fleeing her stalker ex-boyfriend, Clarice’s restraining order finally expires. The same week, she spots a man who looks suspiciously like him at a nightclub. Clarice takes increasingly unhinged steps to find out the truth.

Tasting Notes: Paranoid, profane, blackly funny. The spiral nobody around her can quite see, narrated from inside it.

Accumulation by Aimee Pokwatka

Tennessee Cherish, a documentary filmmaker turned stay-at-home mom, moves into the dream house her husband bought her. The longer she lives there, the harder it becomes to tell whether the house is haunted or she is.

Tasting Notes: Domestic dread, claustrophobic, undercurrent of unraveling.

From the Cellar…

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Esther Greenwood, a college student interning at a magazine in 1950s New York, descends into a depression that strips away every script she’s been handed about being a young woman.

Tasting Notes: 1963 vintage. Quiet, devastating, finishes in a long silence. Every book in this flight is in conversation with this one, whether they know it or not.

Ladies Joining Clubs

There are at least three novels coming out this season with “Club” in the title, and that’s just the ones I’m featuring. (The Calamity Club and The Island Club from April could just as easily have made the cut.) My theory: nobody knows how to belong to anything anymore, and publishing is responding with the manufactured intimacy of a small group with shared rules. They also seem perfect for book club discussions.

What’s interesting is how differently the new releases treat the premise. Same word, three different fantasies of belonging.

The Players Club by Rachel Mills

Beth Greenwood has spent her life playing it safe. Then she discovers a secret club of women who, for a price, will arrange for you to spend a day living someone else’s life.

Tasting Notes: High-concept, propulsive, the fantasy of becoming someone else.

The Supper Club Saints by Claire Swinarski

Cass Simon returns to small-town Wisconsin after escaping a cult-like “Mommune,” and finds her mother and sisters waiting for her with their own complicated relationships to motherhood. The family supper club, the literal anchor of their lives, is being sold off. Everyone has something to forgive.

Tasting Notes: Warm, layered, quietly serious.

The Last Book Club by Joanne Rock

Jordyn moves to Saratoga Springs with one goal: to infiltrate her foster sister’s old book club to find out which member killed her. When the club hosts a murder mystery party, secrets start surfacing.

Tasting Notes: Twisty, soapy, mean in the best way. Real Housewives meets Knives Out.

From the Cellar…

The Book Club for Troublesome Women by Marie Bostwick

Four women in 1960s Virginia start a book club that quietly becomes a vehicle for each of them to upend her own life. Glamorous celebrity women from the era make cameos.

Tasting Notes: 2025 vintage. Warm, sharply observed, surprisingly subversive. The version of this trend that loves its women.

Inherited Land, Inherited Trauma

The historical generational saga is having a real moment this spring. Three novels, all tracing families across decades, wars, and exiles, with land or house as the constant character. These books reward immersion.

Read in proximity, they start to echo each other, asking the same questions about what gets passed down, what gets lost, and what survives across generations

Lazár by Nelio Biedermann

Inspired by the author’s own family history, this Hungarian aristocratic family saga opens at the turn of the twentieth century with the birth of a translucent, blue-eyed baby who looks nothing like his parents. The story tracks three generations of the Lázárs through both world wars, the Holocaust, and the 1956 revolution that finally drives them into exile.

Tasting Notes: Lush, slow, deeply rooted. Written by a 22-year-old who’s being called something of a prodigy.

Land by Maggie O’Farrell

On a windswept peninsula in 1865 Ireland, Tomás and his ten-year-old son Liam are mapping the country for the British Ordnance Survey. An unsettling encounter changes the course of his life and the lives of generations to come.

Note: This misses the spring mark by 2 days, but I’m counting it because it’s perfect for the theme. It’s going to be popular, so add it to your holds/notify me list now!

Tasting Notes: Elemental, ancient, heart-bursting. The kind of novel you don’t read so much as live inside.

Palaces of the Crow by Ray Nayler

In June 1941, as the German blitzkrieg crashes across Lithuania, four children from different backgrounds are driven into the primeval forest. They survive the war by forming an unbreakable bond with one another and with the colony of intelligent crows. Decades later, the cost of that survival comes due.

Tasting Notes: Bleak, philosophical, unexpectedly tender.

From the Cellar…

Sarum by Edward Rutherfurd

Ten thousand years go by on a single patch of southern English earth, from the last Ice Age to the modern day. The interconnected stories of five families, a hundred generations, and the one piece of land that holds them all.

Tasting Notes: 1987 vintage. The land-as-character novel at its purest. Patient, panoramic, finishes with the long view. Read it once, and time will never feel the same.

Iconic Women Reframed

Three novels in a single season, all built around the same act: taking a real woman who was defined by others and rewriting her story. This is women’s lit at its finest.

The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton by Jennifer N. Brown

Elizabeth Barton was real, an illiterate sixteenth-century nun whose visions condemning Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn got her executed in 1534. Centuries later, present-day NYU historian Alison Sage discovers a manuscript of Barton’s prophecies and gets invited to an academic retreat at a crumbling English manor.

Tasting Notes: Atmospheric, dual-timeline, propulsive. A prophetess given her voice back across five centuries.

Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein

Forty-five-year-old translator Jean is unraveling after receiving a retirement-party invitation from the college professor she had a destructive affair with in the summer of 1998. She prays to Monica Lewinsky for forgiveness, and Saint Monica actually shows up.

Tasting Notes: Inventive, witty, quietly devastating.

Daughter of Egypt by Marie Benedict

Two women across millennia. In 1920s Egypt, Lady Evelyn Herbert is the daughter of Lord Carnarvon and the actual reason Howard Carter found King Tut’s tomb. Three thousand years earlier, Hatshepsut ruled as Egypt’s lost pharaoh, her reign almost completely scrubbed from the record. Both refused to be forgotten.

Tasting Notes: Lush, immersive, propulsive.

From the Cellar…

Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese

Isobel Gamble, an immigrant in 1820s Salem, becomes entangled with a young customs officer named Nathaniel Hawthorne. The novel reimagines the woman who may have inspired Hester Prynne, giving her a story before the man wrote one for her.

Tasting Notes: 2022 vintage. The literary reclamation at its most pointed.

Until Next Season

If you put just one book on hold from this whole post, make it the one whose flight description made you sit forward. Then pull up one of the cellar picks while you wait, because library hold times are what they are, and some of these books are worth meeting on their own first.

These quarterly posts will keep covering everything as it lands. Book Flights is for stepping back and seeing the shape of the season.

Summer 2026 is already clustering. I’ll see you this summer.

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What patterns are you noticing? Which flight are you reaching for first? Tell me in the comments.

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Ever since I was a child, I found great satisfaction in creating the perfect list: fitting all the puzzle pieces together to combine the perfect content in the correct order with the correct descriptions.

Now that I’m working towards becoming a full-time reader, I’ve been able to turn this list-making energy towards documenting new releases.

Check out this month’s list of the new releases that most stood out to me. I hope your next 5-star read is among them!

A note on links: I’m an advocate for library books, but I also love a good hardcover. If you want to support indie bookstores and my work, consider using the affiliate links in this post. Thank you!

Contemporary Fiction

The Players Club by Rachel Mills

Beth Greenwood joins a secret club where members can temporarily be a version of themselves they’ve always wanted to be. Things take a high-stakes turn.

I love the “alternative lives” subgenre, and this promises to pack a twisty punch in that arena.

Release date: May 19

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The Supper Club Saints by Claire Swinarski

A mom returns home after escaping a cult run by a prominent “mom-fluencer” and explores the endurance of family bonds and what it means to be a mother.

Came for the “escaping an influencer cult.” Stayed for what seems to be a profound examination of what it means for women to be part of communities.

Release date: May 5

Enormous Wings by Laurie Frankel

77-year-old Pepper Mills finds out she’s pregnant. A press frenzy ensues.

I’ve never come across a book with a premise like this. The examination of ageing, bodily autonomy, and what it means to be in the public eye in today’s culture will surely make this a unique read.

Release date: May 5

Good Joy, Bad Joy by Mikki Brammer

From the author of The Collected Regrets of Clover, this novel tells the story of 80-year-old Joy Bridgport, who is confronted with the news that her best friend, Hazel, has months to live. The pair decides to make the most of Hazel’s remaining time, living adventurously and, eventually, committing crimes.

Collected Regrets was a 5-star read for me. The central question of the novel, “Is it ever too late to be who we are meant to be, and at what cost?” is a fascinating one.

Release date: May 5

Literary Fiction

John of John by Douglas Stuart

John-Calum Macleod returns home to the Hebraides after finishing art school. The town hasn’t changed, but he has.

The description reminded me of Seascraper, a quiet, meditative book on what it means to feel like you don’t belong in a place that used to feel like home. The remote Scottish setting sealed the deal.

Release date: May 5

Take Me With You by Steven Rowley

A woman watches her husband disappear into a beam of light in the desert after 30 years of marriage. Jesse has to wrestle with what it means to be left behind.

Despite the heavy premise, this book is co-tagged as comedy. This mix of a touch of sci-fi, wrestling with abandonment, and comedy of all things has put this book firmly near the top of my TBR.

Also, I try not to judge books by the cover, but wow, what a cover!

Release date: May 19

Returns and Exchanges by Kayla Rae Whitaker

It’s 1979. Fran and her family are the picture of the American dream. But brewing under the surface are societal and internal changes that threaten to shatter their “perfect family” image.

I loved this part of the Amazon blurb, “Fred and Fran learn that in matters of love and money, once it’s gone, it’s gone—no returns, no exchanges.” This one sounds like a winner for sure.

Release date: May 19

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

Artie Dam is living a double life. On the outside, he’s the picture of happiness. Inside, he’s struggling with suicidal ideation and feelings of isolation.

I have to be honest, the premise didn’t immediately interest me. But Strout is an incredible writer, and the book currently has a spectacular 4.39 rating on Goodreads, so it ended up making the list in the end.

Romance

Fever Dream by Elsie Silver

Emmett, a desperate professional bull rider, accepts a spot on a reality dating show. He meets Julia, a standoffish location consultant who has sworn off relationships. He’s supposed to fall in love with one of the contestants, but his heart starts pulling him in another direction.

I love reality dating shows. What can I say?

Another amazing cover, btw.

Release date: May 19

Our Perfect Storm by Carley Fortune

Frankie and George have been friends since childhood. When Frankie’s dumped on the eve of her wedding, George steps in with a plan to heal her broken heart.

One of the buzziest books coming out this spring, the synopsis reminded me of The Wedding People, which I loved. It’s also got a 4.40 on Goodreads!

Release date: May 5

How the Story Goes by Andrew Forrester

Whit is tasked with writing the last novel in his wife’s best-selling book series after she dies of cancer. He meets Merritt, a local bookstore employee and passionate fan of his wife’s books, who helps him finish the book.

This is a really unique romance concept. It’s also the first romance novel written by a man to ever grace my TBR. I’m curious to compare the difference with other romance novels I’ve read.

Release date: May 5

Reality Bites by Amy Mass

Grace Lambert is a scientist devoted to saving an endangered species of frog from extinction, and the only member of her family who isn’t an influencer. When her mom signs her up for a buzzy reality dating show, and her lab loses its funding, Grace reluctantly agrees to compete for the cash prize.

Another reality show romance! This one doesn’t get me quite as excited as Fever Dream, but I’m always a sucker for books about women in STEM.

Release date: May 12

Sci-Fi and Fantasy

Homebound by Portia Elan

It’s 1983, and 19-year-old Becks is grieving the death of her uncle, who left her a half-finished video game to complete. The story spans six centuries and three timelines, following her alongside a scientist in 2080, a sea captain in 2586, and a centuries-old automaton, all bound together by a search for connection.

I love multi-timeline stories and am an avid gamer, so this one really appealed to me!

Release date: May 5

Ignore All Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffmann

An AI megacorporation owns all the world’s stories, and Kelli Reynolds has a coveted job editing AI output into “appropriate” content for its massive audience. When her ex Rowan reappears, tangled up in the black market and asking for help with something illegal, Kelli has to decide whether to risk her safe, tidy life for the world she once wished for.

AI-related novels are hit or miss, but the premise sounds interesting. It’s apparently quite hyped among the Silicon Valley set, but I’ll try not to hold that against it.

Release date: May 12

The Tapestry of Fate by Shannon Chakraborty

In this sequel to The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, the infamous pirate Amina is tasked by the council of immortal peris with stealing a spindle capable of rewriting fate, guarded by a sorceress on an island no one can escape. Forced to leave her young daughter behind, she sails into deadly storms, woven enchantments, and a queen straight from legend.

I love Shannon Chakraborty, and I’ll read anything she puts out.

Release date: May 12

The Midnight Train by Matt Haig

When 81-year-old Wilbur dies, he finds himself aboard a steam train carrying him back through the most meaningful moments of his life, especially the days he spent with Maggie, the love of his life, before he gave it all away. Set in the world of The Midnight Library.

I know it’s controversial, but I really liked The Midnight Library, so I’m looking forward to this “sequel.”

Release date: May 26

Thriller

Nerve Damage by Annakeara Stinson

Clarice’s restraining order against her stalker ex-boyfriend has expired. Despite moving cross-country, she swears she starts seeing him around. She takes increasingly unhinged steps to discover the truth.

The line between vigilance and paranoia is a thin one, and this novel’s classification as thriller/mental health has my interest fully piqued.

Release date: May 12

Night Objects by Eli Raphael

After a sudden tragedy, 15-year-old Lenny Winter lands at an elite Pacific Northwest boarding school where wealth and tradition rule. She falls in with members of the secretive Pascalianum Club, and her hunger to belong sets her on a course that ends with the violent death of one of its members, a death she insists she didn’t cause.

The Secret History meets The God of the Woods meets If We Were Villains.

Release date: May 26, 2026

Artifacts by Natalie Lemle

Attorney Lena Connolly is pulled onto a case in which the Italian government is seeking the repatriation of a looted artifact: a rare dichroic glass cup. The case forces her to revisit the study abroad summer she spent on an archaeological dig in the Italian Alps, where her mentor disappeared, and her enigmatic boyfriend went dark, and where everyone she knew may now be in danger.

I love art books. If you’ve read my other posts, you probably know I will give them all a chance.

Release date: May 19

Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey

Celia is desperate for community and family, so she accepts an invitation to Kindred Cove, a remote island home to a secluded community that hosts an annual Salt Festival. They promise healing. They promise transformation. They promise no grief, because there is no suffering. But the ever-growing reef around the island holds darker secrets than Celia bargained for.

The comparisons to Shirley Jackson, Ari Aster, and Midsommar sealed the deal.

Release date: May 12

Historical Fiction

The Hope Keeper by Heather Webb

Washington D.C., 1919. After the death of her twin brother, jeweler Elisabeth Beaumont is left to save the failing family business and gets pulled into the orbit of socialite Evalyn McLean, the owner of the world’s most infamous gemstone, the Hope Diamond. Elisabeth begins to wonder whether the diamond’s legendary curse is real.

The premise reminded me of The Cloisters meets The Great Gatsby. I also haven’t read a jewelry-focused book in a long, long time.

Release date: May 19

Palaces of the Crow by Ray Nayler

June 1941, Eastern Europe. As the German blitzkrieg crashes across the border, four young teens from wildly different backgrounds are driven into the primeval forest. There they survive thanks to one another and to a flock of strangely intelligent crows protecting an extraordinary secret of their own.

This is a wildcard. The premise is weird and could either be a fantastic read or a DNF. Only time will tell.

Release date: May 19

A Perfect Hand by Ayelet Waldman

In nineteenth-century England, lady’s maid Alice Lockey has clawed her way up from a tenant farmer’s daughter through sheer wit and ambition. When she falls for Charlie, a valet on a neighboring estate, the two hatch a plot to engineer a marriage between their employers so they can be together.

With Wimbledon not too far off, I’m aching for something British to put on my list this summer. This fits the bill perfectly.

Release date: May 19

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

Oxford, Mississippi, 1933. Eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur is one of the “unadoptable” girls at the local orphanage after her mother failed to come home one Christmas Eve. When she meets Birdie, an outspoken young woman who has come to town to ask her socialite sister for help, and Charlie, a woman with little left to lose, the three women hatch an audacious plan to take control of their own lives.

This comes to us from the same author who wrote The Help. I really enjoyed that one, so this one was an instant TBR.

Release date: May 5

My poor, poor TBR list

No nonfiction caught my eye this month, but the fiction list more than makes up for it. I’m most excited about Artifacts, Make Me Better, Homebound, and Fever Dream.

Whichever one comes in at the library first, I have a feeling May is going to be a good reading month.

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Did any of these books stand out to you? Share in the comments what you’re most excited to read this month.

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But. BUT! I do like reading and thinking about the theme each year, so I thought I’d compile a list of books as a further way to examine how trends intersect with our reality. Here are 15 books, organized into the exhibition’s three categories, that engage with this year’s Met Gala theme: Costume Art.

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The Theme

Every year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute opens a themed exhibition (the Met Gala serves as the Institute’s main annual fundraiser). The theme, Costume Art, might look superficial at first blush, but it actually explores some interesting questions about how we dress the body and which bodies are allowed to be celebrated in public.

In a Vogue article, head curator Andrew Bolton said, “Fashion’s acceptance as an art form … is premised on the [fact that] aesthetics are about disembodied and disinterested contemplation.”

The exhibition is designed to encourage viewers to reflect on the lived experiences of the bodies represented, as well as their own lived experiences, and will be loosely divided into three categories: The Classical & Naked Body, The Anatomical Body, and Underrepresented Bodies.

I’ve divided my picks into the same categories below.

The Classical & Naked Body

The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant

Shelf: fiction, historical

Florence in the 1490s. The city is tilting from Medici gold into Savonarola’s bonfires. A young woman who wants to paint is married off to a much older man instead, and meets a mysterious painter brought in to fresco her family’s chapel. The Botticelli of the title is the cultural water everyone is swimming in: the female nude as the ideal art object.

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Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

Shelf: fiction, literary

A golden couple, twenty-four years of marriage, told in two halves. The first half is his version, all worship of his beautiful wife, his muse. The second half is hers. Lotto sees Mathilde the way classical art sees women, as a smooth marble surface. Groff is interested in everything underneath.

Note: This was also Amazon’s 2015 Book of the Year.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Shelf: fiction, historical, literary

Identical twin sisters from a small Black town in Louisiana run away together at sixteen. Their lives split: one lives in a Black world, while the other passes for white. The novel follows what becomes of them and their daughters across decades and coasts, and asks what it costs to edit how the body is read.

The Doll Factory by Elizabeth Macneal

Shelf: fiction, crime, historical, literary

Pre-Raphaelite London, 1850. A young woman who paints porcelain dolls for a living dreams of becoming a real artist. When a Pre-Raphaelite painter spots her in the street, he asks her to sit for him as his model and offers, in exchange, to teach her to paint. What he does not tell her is that another man has also been watching her…

Note: I personally didn’t care for this book (2 stars), but many others did, and it engages beautifully with the Met theme.

The Anatomical Body

Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh

Shelf: fiction, literary, magical realism

A medieval village in a year of drought and plague, ruled by a useless lord on the hill and tended by a deformed shepherd boy in the valley. Moshfegh moves between them with her usual pitiless eye, stripping every classical pretense off the body and showing what is actually under the gown. Not for the squeamish.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Shelf: fiction, classics, horror

A young scientist in Geneva assembles a body from parts and animates it. What happens next is the novel everyone thinks they know, yet almost no one has actually read. Shelley wrote it at nineteen and understood already that to assemble a body is to make an artwork, and to make an artwork of a body is to take on a moral debt you may not be able to pay.

Pew by Catherine Lacey

Shelf: fiction, literary

A small Southern town finds a person sleeping on a church pew. No one can tell their age, race, or gender. The person does not speak. Over the course of one week leading up to a town-wide ritual, the community tries to decide what to do with the silent body in their midst and slowly comes apart trying to read it.

The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister

Shelf: fiction, horror

The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia cranberry bog for as long as anyone can remember. The arrangement is this: each generation, the patriarch is given to the bog. In return, the bog produces a wife, made from peat and vegetation, for the eldest son. Five siblings gather at the family’s crumbling mansion to perform the ritual. The bog fails to produce a wife.

Underrepresented Bodies

Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi

Shelf: fiction, literary

A woman in a Tokyo office, sick of being asked to clean up after her male coworkers, snaps and tells them she is pregnant. She is not. She decides to maintain the lie and see how long she can keep it going.

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Shelf: fiction, literary, magical realism

A mixed-race boy in rural Mississippi, his dying grandfather, his addict mother, and a road trip across the state to pick up his father from prison. Ward lets the dead ride in the car alongside the living, and writes Black bodies, ghost and living, with the tenderness that American art history has not.

Luster by Raven Leilani

Shelf: fiction, literary

A young Black woman in Brooklyn, broke and adrift, falls into an arrangement with an older white man, his wife, and their adopted Black daughter. Edie is a failed painter. The wife is an autopsy technician who starts teaching her how to look at bodies, alive and dead. Edie spends the novel being painted, observed, posed, and studied, all while learning to look back.

Enormous Wings by Laurie Frankel

Shelf: fiction

At seventy-seven, Pepper Mills has just been moved into a retirement community by her grown children. She makes friends, falls in love with a man down the hall, and then starts feeling strange. The diagnosis is not what anyone expects: she is pregnant. As word spreads, the press and the activists and the researchers all descend, and Pepper has to figure out what she actually wants to do with a body that has suddenly become public property.

Note: This book comes out on May 5, but it was too good to ignore. Get ahead of the Libby line before it releases!

Wildcard Picks

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Shelf: fiction, classics, magical realism

The Devil arrives in 1930s Moscow with a retinue, including a giant talking cat, and proceeds to upend the city’s literary establishment. Includes one of the strangest fashion set pieces in twentieth-century literature, in which Parisian couture is handed out for free at the Variety Theatre with a mysterious twist.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Shelf: fiction, literary

A thirteen-year-old boy survives a tragedy at the Met that will shape the next decade of his life. The novel follows him around the world, through grief, addiction, and the antiques underworld. A huge part of this book takes place in the Met itself, so I sort of had to include it!

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Shelf: fiction, classics, horror

A young man in Victorian London sits for a portrait so beautiful it changes him. He makes a careless wish about staying young while the painting ages, and the rest of the novel follows what that wish costs him as he moves through the salons and shadows of fin-de-siècle London.

Is “Costume Art” relevant after all?

In the shadow of #skinnitok and the rise of GLP-1s everywhere, examining how bodies are viewed and treated in public is a more important discussion than ever. I find myself thinking about it in the gym, in the dressing room, and in conversations with friends about what their daughters are seeing online.

A reading list won’t fix any of this, but I hope at least one of the books on this list gives you a new way to think about how we think about and engage with this year’s theme.

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Any books I missed that you’d recommend? Leave them in the comments so we can chat!

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I’ve only had 2 5-star books, and one of them was non-fiction. It feels like the world is crumbling, and I want a great novel to disappear into for a while. Is that too much to ask?

The great news is that the cure for my book-slump blues might have been released this month. From buzzy books like Yesteryear to two installments in my favorite “books about cults” subgenre, April is full of 5-star promise.

Forgive me for posting this on practically the last day of the month! These are 100% still worth your attention.

Here are the 15 April new release books that most caught my eye this month.

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Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

Release Date: April 7, 2026 | Shelf: fiction, literary, thriller

A tradwife influencer with eight million Instagram followers wakes up one morning to find her Idaho ranch transported back to 1855 with no electricity, no plumbing, and four feral children she barely recognizes. As she tries to figure out whether this is time travel, a hoax, or punishment, the truth turns out to be far darker than any of those options.

Why Read: This book is EVERYWHERE. The premise is just too good, and it’s no wonder it’s already been picked up for a screen adaptation. This is the first book I’ve actually physically purchased in over a year. This is 100% the first book I’m reading off of this list, and I’m stoked.

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Love by the Book by Jessica George

Release Date: April 7, 2026 | Shelf: fiction, literary

Remy, a London novelist with paralyzing writer’s block, collides (literally) in a bookstore with Simone, a kindergarten teacher whose lucrative secret side hustle has just been cut off by her family. The novel follows their friendship as a full-blown romance arc.

Why Read: I can’t recall another novel that gives the romance treatment to platonic love. Plus, making friends as an adult is hard.

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Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth

Release Date: April 21, 2026 | Shelf: fiction, thriller

In 1959, fifteen-year-old Mabel Waller became the youngest person ever convicted of murder in Australia. Sixty-six years later, she’s living quietly in a Melbourne suburb under a different name when her neighbor turns up dead, the police come knocking, and she finally decides to tell her side of the story.

Why Read: I’m a sucker for a thriller with a good female lead. “Reformed” murderer? Count me in!

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The Oracle’s Daughter by Harrison Hill

Release Date: April 7, 2026 | Shelf: non-fiction, biography, true crime

A nonfiction account of the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, a paramilitary cult that operated out of the New Mexico desert for nearly four decades under self-proclaimed prophet Deborah Green, told through three women: Deborah, an early member named Maura, and Deborah’s daughter Sarah, who fled the compound at twenty-six.

Why Read: I can’t get enough of books on cults, cult escapees, and cult psychology, so this was an instant TBR for me. The fact that this cult was led by a woman (rare!) is a bonus.

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Go Gentle by Maria Semple

Release Date: April 14, 2026 | Shelf: fiction, literary

Adora Hazzard, a divorced fifty-something Stoic philosopher employed by a billionaire family on the Upper West Side, gives a spare ballet ticket to a charming stranger and ends up entangled in an international art-smuggling plot that takes her from Manhattan to a French chateau, while her carefully buried past resurfaces with very bad timing.

Why Read: The Thomas Crown Affair is my all-time favorite movie. I’m even putting together a list of my favorite art heist books; I love them so much. Combine that with what’s been described as literary romance, and I’m sold. I might end up buying this one, since my library currently has a 4-month wait…

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American Fantasy by Emma Straub

Release Date: April 7, 2026 | Shelf: fiction, literary

When her sister breaks a leg, newly divorced fifty-year-old Annie ends up alone on a four-day cruise reuniting the members of ‘90s boy band Boy Talk with three thousand of their middle-aged superfans. As she gets swept up in karaoke nights and shared obsession, she actually befriends one of the band members, who’s quietly falling apart under the weight of all that adoration.

Why Read: 90s nostalgia and escapism. Need I say more?

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The Radiant Dark by Alexandra Oliva

Release Date: April 28, 2026 | Shelf: fiction, sci-fi, speculative

In March 1980, a new mother in the Adirondacks watches a strange flickering light in the sky that turns out to be a message from a civilization eleven light-years away. The novel tracks her family across the next fifty years as humanity slowly figures out how to talk back.

Why Read: This book gave off “Pluribus” vibes, and that was enough to add it to my list.

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Blood Trail by Matt Query and Harrison Query

Release Date: April 7, 2026 | Shelf: fiction, horror, thriller

Clark Rickert, a former big-game poacher who lost his wife and son and now works as a Montana game warden, gets pulled onto a task force investigating a string of disappearances tied to a violent rural cult. As he closes in, he starts having visions that suggest the cult is up to something much worse than anyone realized.

Why Read: I found this by accident while looking for another book in the Libby catalog. Remember what I said about cults?

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Odessa by Gabrielle Sher

Release Date: April 21, 2026 | Shelf: fiction, fantasy, horror

In 1905 Russia, fifteen-year-old Yetta is killed during a pogrom, and her devastated father uses fragments of Kabbalistic knowledge to build a golem in her likeness and bind her spirit to it.

Why Read: I’ve read quite a few books with a “golem” premise and enjoy the magical realism mixed with violence mixed with identity struggles that always inevitably unfold. Also, that cover…

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Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein

Release Date: April 14, 2026 | Shelf: fiction, literary

Forty-five-year-old translator Jean is unraveling after receiving a retirement-party invitation from the college professor she had a destructive affair with in the summer of 1998. She prays to Monica Lewinsky for forgiveness, and Saint Monica actually shows up and walks her back through that summer in France to dismantle the story Jean has been telling herself for twenty-five years.

Why Read: Reframing Monica Lewinsky as the savior of the story? Yesyesyesthankyou

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The Island Club by Nicola Harrison

Release Date: April 28, 2026 | Shelf: fiction, historical

On Balboa Island in 1956, three women — Milly, whose Hollywood husband is barely coming home; Sylvia, whose pillar-of-the-community husband is gambling away their finances and the island club they own; and Adele, who’s hiding from her past — are pulled into an unlikely friendship through their shared love of tennis as each of their lives starts to fall apart.

Why Read: I’m an unapologetic lover of Carrie Soto. It’s been too long since we had a good tennis novel, and this is out just in time for a pre-Wimbledon read.

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The Book Witch by Meg Shaffer

Release Date: April 27, 2026 | Shelf: fiction, fantasy

Rainy March is a third-generation Book Witch who jumps into novels with her cat to fix damage caused by “Burners” trying to corrupt fictional storylines, bound by a strict rule never to fall for a fictional character. When she falls for a 1940s detective inside his own book series, and her grandfather goes missing in the real world, she breaks every rule in the coven handbook to solve both crises at once.

Why Read: I love cozy novels about books and witches. Who doesn’t? I’ll probably save this for the fall, since this is what I consider the perfect October read.

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Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker

Release Date: April 14, 2026 | Shelf: fiction, historical, horror

In October 2026, NYU student Lee Turner flees to his father’s secluded house in rural Japan after killing his college roommate. He just can’t remember committing the murder. In October 1877, in the same house, a young female samurai named Sen is hiding from imperial soldiers. The two timelines collide.

Why Read: I generally like dual timeline stories and haven’t read many books about samurai. It’s also one of the NYT’s notable books of 2026, so worth a shot!

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Lázár by Nelio Biedermann

Release Date: April 14, 2026 | Shelf: fiction, historical, literary

Inspired by the author’s own family history, this Hungarian aristocratic family saga opens at the turn of the twentieth century with the birth of Lajos von Lázár, a translucent, blue-eyed baby who looks nothing like his parents. The story follows three generations of the Lázárs through both world wars, the Holocaust, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution that finally drives them into exile.

Why Read: A friend and I set a book date specifically to discuss this one after we finish it. She’s Hungarian, and I love historical sagas. The buzz around the 22-year-old author has me extra excited.

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The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton by Jennifer N. Brown

Release Date: April 14, 2026 | Shelf: fiction, historical, mystery

A dual-timeline novel about Elizabeth Barton, the illiterate sixteenth-century nun whose visions condemning Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn got her executed in 1534, and Alison Sage, a present-day NYU historian who discovers a manuscript of Barton’s prophecies and gets invited to an academic retreat at a crumbling English manor. One of her colleagues turns up murdered, and the legend of a hidden Tudor treasure suddenly seems very real.

Why Read: I was a teen who read a LOT of Tudor history, so this immediately drew me in. Add in the thriller/mystery element, and this sounds like my perfect book. I’ve already taken out the audiobook from the library.

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April Picks Wrap Up

There was very little non-fiction on my radar this month. Yes, Famesick came out and is everywhere, but I find Lena Dunham insufferable. Sorry.

That being said, April was a powerhouse month for publishing and was the type of month that stresses me out because how can I add more books to my TBR when it’s already so long?

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What about you? Are any of these on your TBR? Did I miss any of the books you’re most excited for?

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