For this special backlist issue, we asked reviewers to choose books they find evocative of summer. The resulting titles range from iconic classics to contemporary jewels to those that sparkle somewhere in between.
Tove Jansson’s immersive The Summer Book (published in English translation in 1974) splashes into summer on a Finnish island, capturing the season’s unique qualities through the eyes of a young child and her grandmother. Akwaeke Emezi’s You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty (2022) provides the quintessential summer reading experience via a forbidden romance in the Caribbean, featuring an artist and a celebrity chef, while also exploring beauty and grief. And we take a fresh look at To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf, yet another warm-weather island novel, famous for its stream-of-consciousness depiction of a family’s holidays on the Isle of Skye in Scotland.
In legendary poet Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), summer is ever-present, but not so pleasant: the suffocating heat is just one reminder for Esther Greenwood that her magazine internship in 1950s New York City isn’t going quite as she had hoped. Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Small Worlds (2023), also about a young person at sea, follows Stephen, the London-raised son of Ghanaian immigrants, over three summers as he navigates a difficult relationship with his father and his path in life.
There’s no beach book like a great suspense novel, and Patricia Highsmith’s This Sweet Sickness (1960) delivers with a cringy tale of ill-advised romantic persistence. Accompanying our review is an article on the phenomenon of “nice guys,” with more examples from fiction.
We hope you enjoy these and additional “summer” reviews and articles, coverage of new paperbacks, previews of August releases, and more—whether at the beach, by the pool, or from the merciful refuge of an air-conditioned environment.
Stay cool, and thanks for being a BookBrowse member!
— The BookBrowse Team
