Summer Reading List 2026

25 books to take with you to the beach, the pool, the lake, the bathtub or wherever you choose to cool down this summer.

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A Zoom with a View by Jess Cannon

Leo can’t believe she’s back in Blue Oak. Her small, quirky Texas hometown feels suffocating after trying to make it big as an English professor in New York—especially due to her strained relationship with her overly hair-sprayed mother, Karina. But with Leo’s career in academia in shambles, at least she’s able to work as a photographer for her godmother’s real estate business. And her best friend, Emily, is around to help her navigate through the mess—and maybe force her to reconnect with her old high school boyfriend, Mack.

But while at work, Leo makes a grisly discovery at one of her godmother’s properties: the dead body of rival real estate agent and social media influencer Chaz. Even worse, Leo and Emily have been secretly running a snarky Reddit page making fun of Chaz’s cringe-inducing advice and duck-faced selfies. When someone she loves is accused of the murder, Leo finds herself flung headfirst into a dangerous investigation, teaming up with a local detective who is a lot more attractive than she remembered when they were both teenagers. Meanwhile, Karina has been acting stranger and stranger, as if all her hair hides a big secret …

Café Lafitte in Exile: Queer New Orleans and the Story of America’s Oldest Gay Bar by Frank Perez and Jeffrey Palmquist

Café Lafitte in Exile tells the story of queer New Orleans through the lens of its most legendary gay bar. The story begins long before the founding of gay bars, with an exploration of indigenous sexual and gender roles, colonial views on queerness, and the notable gay writers, musicians and activists of 19th-century New Orleans. Queer men played a crucial role in the preservation of the French Quarter in the early twentieth century, and the resulting “French Quarter Renaissance” deeply informed the establishment of Café Lafitte.

In 1953, in an era of aggressive anti-gay crackdowns, Café Lafitte moved to its present location. It has remained a crucial locus of queer New Orleans culture through the HIV/AIDS crisis and into the present era of more widespread acceptance.

Drawing on oral histories and newspaper accounts, as well as personal recollections, Café Lafitte in Exile is a vivid portrait of Café Lafitte and the queer community that sustains it. It’s a history of joy, a chronicle of strugglenand a reclamation of the history of Southern queerness.

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

Oxford, Mississippi, 1933.

Eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur has learned the hard way to rely on no one.

Ever since her beloved mother failed to come home last Christmas Eve, she’s been one of the “unadoptable” girls at the town’s orphanage, where she fights each day to keep her wits sharp and her spirit unbowed.

When she meets Birdie, a young woman who has come to Oxford determined to remind her socialite sister of the impoverished family she left behind, for the first time in a long while it seems someone else might care about Meg’s future.

But as the Depression tightens its grip, Birdie begins to suspect her sister’s charmed life may be founded on a tapestry of lies. Then, Birdie encounters Charlie, a woman haunted by loss who has been pushed to the brink with nothing left to lose. Drawn together by circumstance, they find unexpected kinship among a disreputable, determined band of women.

Ghost Gun by cc ECK

A multiracial family from New York returns, again and again, to Mobile, Alabama—drawn back by family ties to a place where a decades-old lynching still shapes the present. Their 18-year-old son has already begun to uncover what happened.

They arrive from the North with distance, money and the quiet protections of privilege. In Mobile, those protections begin to thin. The past feels closer here—less abstract, more lived—and the divisions it produced remain visible in ways they cannot ignore. The family itself carries its own fault lines: a white father, a Black mother and children who move between worlds, read differently depending on where they are.

At the center is 18-year-old Elijah, navigating the contradictions of identity, inheritance and rage. As he pushes deeper into his family’s past, what begins as a search for understanding starts to slip beyond his control, threatening consequences he cannot foresee. Around him, each member of the family confronts their own fracture. His father retreats into systems of control, his mother resists a life shaped by fear and distance, and his sister watches, reads and searches for meaning in what remains unsaid.

The Mediator by Robert Bailey

Max Ringo was once a courtroom star at an elite law firm. Then, a car accident left her addicted to painkillers, and her life dissolved into shambles. Now fresh out of rehab and making a comeback as a mediator, she gets her shot at redemption when she is appointed to handle a high-stakes divorce. But as Max begins negotiations between the two notorious power players, the trap is already sprung. The husband kidnaps her teenage son, Nathan, and gives her a chilling ultimatum: settle the case on his terms … or the boy dies.

Over three relentless days, Max must resolve a cutthroat legal battle while pursuing a covert mission to rescue Nathan. She’ll risk everything—her career, her freedom, her life—to beat a ruthless adversary at his own game. Even when a shadowy syndicate enters the fray and bodies start to drop, only one thing matters. She must bring her son home, whatever the cost.

No Secrets in This House by Sheryl Cornett

Late matriarch Avila was 20 years old, pregnant and living on Ocracoke at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. Now her 1942-born daughter Clare, millennial granddaughter Maddie and goddaughter Trish form a present-day family in Home Waters cottage, haunted and scarred by war’s fallout—including secrets uncovered via a hidden stash of World War II letters. This history infuses their present-day losses and life-enigmas. Can the island’s magic heal these women from their pasts, and shepherd them into promising futures?

Ocracoke Island, accessible only by ferry and protected by the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, keeps its small-town ways as a refuge against the hardships of a distant mainland. It is the perfect setting for this engaging beach read. The cleansing presence of Ocracoke’s watery world offers a sweeping, yet intimate, setting for reconciling secrets with truths and old ways with the new.

On Witness and Respair by Jesmyn Ward

Beginning with her upbringing in a multigenerational household in rural Mississippi, the cradle of both her youth and her gift for storytelling, Ward brings her keen wisdom and hauntingly lyrical prose to a range of topics, following in her grandmother Dorothy’s footsteps when she promises always to “Tell it straight. Tell it all.” True to her word, in these pages Ward contemplates the writers and novels of her youth and adulthood—the transformative power of discovering Octavia Butler as a twenty-something, the mirror that Richard Wright’s novels held up to her own childhood, and of course, her lifelong love for Toni Morrison.

Ward ruminates on her approach to both fiction and life, reflecting on the power of the novel, how to raise a Black son in an era of rising divisiveness and cruelty, as well as her own personal tragedies—including the titular essay of the collection, which tells the story of her partner’s sudden death on the eve of the COVID-19 epidemic. Every bit as piercing and moving as her fiction, On Witness and Respair is a testament to Ward’s powers as “one of America’s finest living writers” (San Francisco Chronicle) and is a monument to hope, beauty and personal and collective resilience.

Returns and Exchanges by Kayla Rae Whitaker

It’s December 24, 1979, just before closing at Baker-Taylor’s discount department store, and Fran (née Baker) is surveying her domain. Her husband, Fred, is charming customers in the front of the store, while last-minute shoppers in the toy aisle are fighting over the lone remaining Atari. The older Taylor kids are on register, while the younger ones’ chaos is contained to the stockroom. All is right in the world as the new decade approaches. With four healthy children and financial stability their own parents could have only dreamed of, Fred and Fran are the picture of the American Dream—rags to riches—with a successful chain of family-owned stores built on years of hard work and long hours. Underneath the surface, however, the business is changing at a breakneck pace, and each member of the family is struggling to keep up.

Money is transforming Fred, and the extremes he will go to in order to fit in with the slicked-back, high-society crowd of Lexington, Kentucky, are embarrassing, if not downright dangerous. Josiah, the oldest son, wants nothing to do with the family business; Sam is seeing things that might not really be there; and Benny and Birdie are growing up with a fraction of the parenting that their older brothers had. Meanwhile, Fran, her family’s stable core, is falling for Wendy, a cashier at Baker-Taylor’s, risking everything along the way. While trying to maintain the facade of a perfect success story, Fred and Fran learn that in matters of love and money, once it’s gone, it’s gone—no returns, no exchanges.

Summer State of Mind by Kristy Woodson Harvey

After the worst day in her professional life, burnt-out NICU nurse Daisy Stevens runs to Cape Carolina, North Carolina, looking for a new life—and possibly new romance. On her first day at her “simpler” job, high school baseball coach Mason Thaysden discovers an abandoned baby, sending ripples through the entire tight-knit town of Cape Carolina. Mason is still struggling to reconcile the scars of the injury that kept him out of the big leagues, stuck in his hometown and searching for a way out.

This newcomer and the child they’ve saved together might be just the motivation he needs to stay put. Sparks fly as Mason acquaints Daisy with Cape Carolina, introducing her to his friends and family, including his batty Aunt Tilley, who is looking for relief from long-buried family secrets and her own fresh start. But as Daisy becomes increasingly attached to this abandoned child, and begins facing her own demons in the process, a startling discovery is made that threatens to rip the entire town of Cape Carolina apart, placing Daisy, Mason and Tilley in the center of the storm.

Walk the Night by David Armand

In the 1980s, 12-year-old Matthew Cooper is experiencing some strange and terrifying events at an old rental house where he and his family have recently moved. TVs and radios click on and off in the middle of the night. Odd shapes are drawn in the foggy glass of a bathroom mirror. No one can explain these things, and as their encounters become more bizarre and intense, Matthew’s family slowly descends into darkness and paranoia, the psychological horror becoming more of a threat than what might be lurking behind their walls.

Pair Armand’s successful attempt at horror with his memoir on the craft of writing and living The Roads We Travel. He reveals where many of his influences come from, his desire to open an old-school video store in his Louisiana town and the importance of nostalgia in writing.

JUNE

Road Trip by Mary Kay Andrews (June 2)

Maeve and Therese Dunigan are sisters–but the two have been estranged for years. They could not be more opposite: Maeve, a rule-follower and Therese, a rebel. But when their mother’s death brings the family back together, the two find that they have inherited a painting that could be worth millions and could save each of them from their respective wolves at the door. The only issue is, the painting might be a fake and the only way they can solve the problem is to find the original.

This means a road trip—to Ireland, to their family roots and to a mysterious crime that occurred years ago. With tensions simmering, the two hit the road and find themselves on twisty lanes, in colorful villages, at local pubs and with handsome men whose gift of the gab is surpassed only by their charm. Can Maeve and Therese find the real painting, remove a family curse, solve a cold case and actually survive without killing each other?

A Way Home: A Memoir of Losing Yourself, and the Beauty of Returning by Cinelle Barnes (June 9)

In 2023, Cinelle Barnes is writing a travelogue about journeying home to the Philippines after a 20-year separation when she suffers a traumatic brain injury. Barnes’ story of her adoption and immigration to America as a child is not an easy one to tell to begin with. Suddenly, it seems impossible. Her memories and her connection to her husband and daughter in the Carolinas, to her own sense of self and to her past are all erased in the blink of an eye. She has to not only piece together who she used to be, but struggle to learn who she is here and now.

In this memoir of resilience and recovery, Barnes charts her way back to life. Through her unfinished manuscript, she sees a creative and vibrant former self she longs to remember and to know all over again. With the everlasting support of family and friends, she discovers that nobody heals or journeys home alone.

Dirty Myrtle by Kennedy Weible (June 9)

A few days before Thanksgiving, Sailor Cassidy is running an amateur stakeout she has no business conducting. She’s nursing a bad breakup, following a plan that’s half-baked in more ways than one and reckless enough not to care. What could go wrong?
Across town, Officer Tuscaloosa “Tusk” Knight is working an off-the-books job for his captain, tailing a drifter who, it turns out, once sat two rows over from him in high school English. It’s not exactly the glamorous step toward promotion he pictured, but it beats paperwork.

When Sailor’s disaster and Tusk’s assignment collide, the two stumble into a life-or-death mess involving kidnapping, half-wit criminals and a tangle of small-town secrets longer than the Carolina coast. With the clock ticking, Sailor and Tusk are left trying to separate the truth from the lies, and the lies from the truly stupid decisions.

Like Snow Before Sun by Marianne Rabalais Sulser (June 9)

Which will you sacrifice—the father that raised you or the nation you adore? Acadia, 1755. Jeanne LeJeune has always lived between worlds—the fierce daughter of a French merchant and a Mi’kmaw woman, she is torn between the quiet rhythms of village life and the wild heartbeats of her mother’s people. But when her father is seized by English soldiers, her fragile peace shatters.

To win his freedom, Jeanne agrees to guide an English officer through the wilds of Nova Scotia—a choice that entangles her in the coming storm of war. What begins as a wary alliance soon becomes a journey fraught with danger, betrayal and passion. As the drums of conflict echo through the untamed heart of the forest, Jeanne must face an impossible choice: betray her heart to save her father or risk everything for the nation that shaped her soul.

Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl by Amena Brown (June 16)

Black women always find a place to meet: in the natural hair aisle, at Beyoncé concerts, even online in memes and catchphrases. This book is one of those places: a living room where readers can contemplate how a well-picked afro can defy the laws of physics and why boob sweat has to exist in the first place. Here, Black Girl is a verb. Here, Black women can Black Girl in every way we want to.

Amena Brown’s book Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl blends storytelling, humor and pop culture commentary to traverse the magic and wisdom she’s gleaned from being raised by Southern Black women and supported by the community of Black women who hold her down today. After graduating from the International Black Girl Headquarters (the renowned HBCU Spelman College), Amena has built a career telling stories and celebrating Black womanhood. In her book, she shares stories of dancing in Janelle Monae’s “Tightrope” music video and partnering with Tracee Ellis Ross to compose odes to natural hair. She imparts essential life lessons from the “Real Housewives of Atlanta” and tells hair tales, including wisdom on the ideal style for her first speaking gig at Essence Fest (box braids, 100 percent).

In the end, Brown shares that Black women are a whole world. A galaxy of customs, language, code and unspoken understandings, all explored with humor and heart in this unforgettable book.

JULY

Pretty Dead Things by Kelsey Cox (July 7)

2000: Isabelle Whitmore vanishes at Sherman Ranch in Anhalt, Texas, without a trace.

2025: The Lone Star Princess Pageant is about to begin, but this year it’s offering more than an annual dose of rhinestone heels and plunging necklines. Competition is stiffer than ever—and long-standing grudges are about to resurface. Ingrid fled Anhalt in the wake of her sister Isabelle’s disappearance and has now returned, just in time for construction crews to start digging up Sherman Ranch; the pageant brings up past traumas that nurse Melanie can’t forget; Cat, newly sober, starts to feel threatened in ways that bring back old demons; and Sarah Lynn, who comes from a long line of pageant winners, knows that losing is not an option. When old resentments and new confrontations reach their boiling point, temperatures drop to deadly degrees as a record-setting storm brings down the state’s power grid. With everyone trapped under one roof, scores will be settled, and more than one person will end up dead.

Killer Vibes: The First Peter Key Mystery by Jack Friday (July 14)

Meet Peter Key: self-proclaimed “laziest private investigator in Texas” (it’s harder than it looks), unapologetic bisexual, dedicated stoner and the surprised recipient of a windfall inheritance from an uncle he barely knew. Peter’s life was a mess before, but now—as the owner of a dilapidated house in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Austin—he has a mountain of debt to deal with and pressure to sell from every side.

But Peter doesn’t like to be pushed around. And when he discovers a bag full of cash, he starts to suspect his uncle’s death wasn’t an accident. He soon finds himself pulled into a lethal game where not everybody plays by the rules.

Fortunately, Peter’s never been good at following rules.

Paradise Pawn by Meg Richardson (July 14)

Teenage best friends Jackie and Kayla can sell anything. Alongside their fathers, they work at a pawn shop in Cherry Beach, Florida, handling everything from luxury jewelry to chainsaws and more. When the girls learn that Kayla’s family can’t afford a private school opportunity that Jackie’s can, Jackie becomes distraught about losing her best friend. With their sharp minds but youthful lack of foresight, they scheme a way to embezzle money from the pawn shop. As the hot Florida summer unfolds, the girls steal thousands of dollars from the shop. But when their heist is discovered, Jackie is faced with a situation that no amount of negotiating or charisma can fix.

With incredible heart and wit, and based on Richardson’s own experience working behind the counter of a pawn shop, Paradise Pawn navigates current-day themes of trust, familial love, female friendship and class differences, and asks us how far we would go to protect the ones we love most.

Should the Waters Take Us by Stephanie Soileau (July 14)

In the shifting bayous of coastal Louisiana, on a rapidly disappearing spit of land, generations of Acadians have kept their heads above water any way they can. When an offshore rig explodes and unleashes a catastrophic spill, the people of Pelerin Parish face a reckoning that tests the bonds of family and the survival of their way of life.

As the toxic plume of oil advances across the Gulf, Boy Broussard, already living hand to mouth off another man’s land, finds himself raising a daughter he barely knows. His dying aunt, Rosa Terrebonne, tries to right the misdeeds of the past, yet finds herself thwarted by her husband, Jacot, a retired landman for big oil who refuses to give up claim to the plot of ground where Boy makes his living. Meanwhile, the parish priest, Father Fabian, far from his home in the Niger Delta, lends his assistance to Boy’s all-but-motherless daughter, only to be met with suspicion and hostility from the insular community. When a powerful hurricane threatens to turn an already dire situation into a total cataclysm, this sharp-edged cast of characters collides in a thunderclap of resentment and violence. Soileau unfolds a sweeping tapestry of loss, resilience and the fragile miracle of hope.

The Sins of Summer Daughters by Lo Patrick (July 14)

“Joshilyn Jackson meets the Coen brothers in this searing, Southern, soul-cracking mystery,” says Gothictown author Emily Carpenter. Meg Gregory never wanted to return to Tuskin, the small Georgia town she grew up in, but after her divorce left her wounded, she knew she had to quit running. Now, years later, as Meg watches her daughter and granddaughter navigate familiar dirt roads, Meg is bent on hiding from the memories that haunt her. Because she skipped town for a reason, and that reason runs deep.

But when Meg’s unassuming granddaughter Lucy is suddenly charged with the murder of her boyfriend, everything changes. Meg knows Lucy couldn’t have done it. Killing a boy will break a girl like that. She should know. She’s seen it happen before. As Meg fights for Lucy’s innocence, memories from the past threaten to break free, and she’s left to contemplate a different murder, a different dead boy, a different summer under the hot Georgia sun.

Destination Funeral by Paige Harbison (July 21)

When Babe—the complicated, magnetic matriarch of their teenage summers—dies, four estranged friends return to sleepy Mercy Island, a storm-swept stretch of coastal Georgia, summoned by the reading of her will.

Didion arrives at the timeworn pink house to find the friends she never thought she’d see again, along with the tensions, attractions and unfinished business that once bound them together and broke them apart.What should be a brief weekend of small talk quickly unravels when they wake up and discover … it’s Saturday. Again. And again. And again.

Trapped in a time loop with no end and no instructions, they’re forced to confront the betrayals, breakups and buried truths that shattered them all those years ago. Because maybe, just maybe, an endless weekend is exactly what they all need to save their own lives.

What the Trees Remember by Abigail Cutter (July 21)

Dora Minor, a quirky and fiercely courageous girl, grows up in a remote Virginia mountain community in a family of outliers, thanks to their Quaker beliefs that all people are born equal. After her mother’s death, her indomitable, pipe-smoking grandmother Alma—a revolutionary in her own right—becomes her primary caregiver and protector. With a fierce moral compass, Alma helps shape Dora’s worldview and guides her to question the status quo.

When Dora’s father partners with formerly enslaved Ginny Dudley to open a school for Black children in a place where none would otherwise exist, it sparks a violent backlash. After her father’s death and then a lynching, Dora, with Alma at her side, is forced to look at her community in a new light. Alongside Ginny’s husband Randolph and her closest friend Watcher James, a preacher guided by Nature spirits, Dora confronts hard truths about her neighbors, her father’s death and, finally, the mysteries of her mother’s life—all of which ultimately leads to healing.

A post–Civil War novel that opens just as Reconstruction is falling apart, What the Trees Remember depicts a time of extreme social unrest and the birth of the Jim Crow era as experienced by strong women constrained by the limitations of the time they live in.

AUGUST

The Watersmith by Yance Wyatt (August 11)

When hard-drinking handyman Jack Calloway discovers an old moonshine still behind the Smoky Mountain cabin he plans to flip, his teenage son dares him to get it running. Jack accepts—until his wife, Jolene, tries to sabotage the first batch and is horribly burned in the process. Wracked with guilt, Jack sends their son away and moves Jolene into the cabin to recover while he tries to sober up.

Doctors diagnose Jolene with a rare post-traumatic dementia that responds only to scent, smell being the strongest trigger of memory. Desperate to help, Jack begins distilling essential oils from her favorite flowers, searching for the one that might bring her back. When a fleeting moment of clarity during a visit from their son slips away again, Jack grows frantic, willing to distill anything in his grasp to reach her.

Wounded Boarders by George Singleton (August 11)

A seasoned house flipper befriends a club of hook-handed, shuffleboard-playing war veterans to deter a potential stalker. A couple in a middle-of-nowhere ghost town quells their boredom by luring would-be robbers to their house. A former yearbook photographer enacts revenge upon the students who got him fired. And a fallen-from-grace comedian pays a visit to the hypnotist looking to curb his less-desirable habits, then finds the treatment a bit too effective for his liking.

Crafted with Singleton’s distinctive mix of satire and charm, the stories in Wounded Boarders take readers from binocular-clad boyhood to the inbox of an adjunct professor and a host of others at the end of their rope. Undeniably Southern in nature, these stories capture the absurdity of the mundane, offering a glimpse into the routines and recollections of imperfect people whose lives are stranger than fiction. 

No Way Out but Through by Susan Beckham Zurenda (August 18)

When author Shannon Irwin meets Grace Ferrall and agrees to interview the younger woman and tell the story of Grace’s forced child marriage and harrowing youth, these very different women begin an unlikely relationship. Grace’s ordeal starts in Louisiana, with an alcoholic father and a mother whose mood swings are often intolerable. When Grace is barely 15 and living in Oklahoma, her mother manipulates her into marrying Rafe, a scurrilous, older man. Pregnant at 16, Grace is soon living in a truck near a river in Oregon with Rafe’s cult-like family.

After years of abuse and multiple pregnancies and miscarriages, with the help of an unlikely ally, Grace escapes. But her newfound freedom is fragile, and she is forced to make impossible choices to protect herself and her two daughters. Trust builds between the women as Grace shares details she has never told anyone, while Shannon, with a daughter Grace’s age, and ridden with guilt about her former marriage, reveals the dysfunction in her own life and the remorse she suffers. A searing and compassionate exploration set in present-day Pawleys Island, South Carolina, and 1990s rural Oklahoma, No Way Out but Through is inspired by the real life of an ordinary woman who survived extraordinary circumstances.

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