With summer fast approaching and the potential for reading in a park, or even by a pool, getting ever more tangible, here is a list of books to turn to as the weather gets warmer. My spring picks were about movement and place, but this season’s reads focus on people, and the way that they love each other. There’s a true range of relationships within these pages, moving from sibling dynamics to childhood friends, from newly emerging loves to the way that grief can shape us. Each is relatable in their own way, and are both devastating and joyous in turn. These books will take you to a place of longing.
Land by Maggie O’Farrell
O’Farrell’s latest novel, Land, is highly anticipated, and for good reason. Set in mid-19th century Ireland, we follow a family torn apart as their father, Tomas, maps the country, beginning to lose his grip on reality when he discovers a copse untouched for years. This is a story infused with folklore and magic, interrogating just what endures in ancient spaces after humanity moves on, and just how strong family ties can remain.
Land publishes on 2 June
People in Love by Claire Daverley
If you’re searching for a love story this summer, look no further. People in Love centres around Nora, enamoured with Robin and engaged to him after a surprise proposal. Things seem perfect, until the night of their engagement party, when Bren shows up at their door after years apart. Bren, her estranged best friend, who she always swore she’d end up with.
And as their spark reignites after twelve years, Nora is going to have to choose between her past and her present. Both heartbreaking and tongue in cheek, Daverley’s follow up to the much-loved Talking at Night is not one to miss.
People in Love publishes on 4 June
Nymph by Sofia Montrone
Set over two long summers in Northern Italy, Sofia Montrone’s Nymph follows Leo, working in her grandmother’s hotel. When we first meet her, she’s ten, inseparable from her brother, and spends the days tidying rooms and collecting keepsakes that guests have left behind. Her nights are spent listening to her liquor-soaked father spin myths and tales out of thin air. Years later, Leo’s still at the hotel. Tragedy has struck, yet when outsider Dolores arrives for the summer, something is set alight in Leo that she didn’t know was possible. Immersive and erotic, this is a sensual tale of first love that will totally transport you.
Nymph publishes on 4 June
A Real Piece of Work by Freya Bromley
Following the publication of a memoir about her beloved late sister, Darina, Nola has finally made it as a writer. Everyone loved the memoir, and there’s even talk of film rights. But when her publisher receives an anonymous complaint just before a family trip to commemorate Darina’s anniversary, Nola is certain it was one of her relatives, and becomes determined to find out which of them did it. Bromley’s sparkling debut novel, which follows on from her luminous memoir The Tidal Year, is a spiky, intricate portrait of a family navigating grief in all its complexity.
A Real Piece of Work publishes on 11 June
The Leveret by Anna Goldreich
When Clare and Phoebe move to the countryside, reeling from their lost pregnancy, it’s meant to fix their relationship. But whilst Phoebe is suffocated, burying herself in work, Clare takes to wandering, looking for solace. That’s when she comes across Isla, a leveret (a.k.a. a young hare). She grows to love Isla like she would her own child, but when Phoebe doesn’t feel the same, questions of bereavement, resentment, and survival bubble to the surface. Bruisingly poignant and quietly uneasy, this is a story of loss and isolation that will stay with you long after reading.
The Leveret publishes on 18 June
Bait by Eugenia Ladra
Eugenia Ladra’s Bait is a coming-of-age story set in a small fishing village in Uruguay. Marga has grown up there, and she’s bored. That is, until her thirteenth birthday, when Recio comes to the village. Disturbing the silence and the dust that’s settled, his arrival brings out the true colours of the village’s inhabitants – and of Marga. Dark and hypnotic, Bait has been translated from the Spanish by Miriam Tobin, and it’s a translation that powerfully brings to light the evocative, claustrophobic nature of Ladra’s writing.
Bait publishes on 18 June
Long Wave by Daisy Johnson
Lyrical and hypnotic, Daisy Johnson’s latest novel is a haunting tale of families and loss, spanning generations of women, each in turn fearful yet drawn to their own motherhood. Johnson is always expert at interweaving the mythical and the mundane and this book is no exception; with folklore threaded throughout, Long Wave is an unsettling, propulsive read that doesn’t shy away from the complexities of both being a mother, and a daughter.
Long Wave publishes on 2 July
Family Friends by Chlöe Ashby
Chlöe Ashby’s Family Friends is a gorgeous, sun-soaked novel set over one eventful holiday in the south of France, shared between old university friends with a host of secrets ready to break the surface. This is quintessential summer reading, with decadent, idyllic settings that bring out the characters’ true colours, heightened with a healthy dose of unreliable narration and tense conversations over dinner.
Family Friends publishes on 9 July
It Will Come Back To You by Sigrid Nunez
From the award-winning, bestselling author of The Friend, with a career spanning three decades, Sigrid Nunez’s It Will Come Back To You is a collection of thirteen stories. Philosophical yet bitingly funny, each new story will whisk you into a totally different world: from a disastrous party, to a hotel where anything goes, to a woman struggling to come to terms with her mother’s dementia, and an inappropriate crush.
It Will Come Back to You publishes on 14 July
Cosmos by Lucia Odoom
Lucia Odoom’s Cosmos follows our protagonist of the same name, a Ghanaian refugee living in Copenhagen. By day, Cosmos collects bottles to earn a living, by night sleeping in parks with his chosen family, and writing WhatsApps to his family. Everything changes when he meets Elizabeth, and as they grow closer, through basketball games and swims in the sea, Cosmos falls in love. Set over five months, Odoom’s epistolary novella is a fragmented, moving account of diaspora, and what it means to belong not only to a place, but to a person.
Cosmos publishes on 30 July