Summer reading: The 2024 list, plus some questions for you

And a new book festival! (In real life, not on Substack)

Aug 11, 2024

When I was a young reader, I loved to reread favorite books in the summer, dipping into Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter, CS Lewis’ Narnia series, and Betty Smith’s wonderful coming-of-age saga A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. And I loved picking books off school summer reading lists (who else read Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki during a middle-school summer? That’s a book I loved at the time but doubt that I’d return to or recommend today).

Later, as a young adult, I reread classics (Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird), and attempted others—Anna Karenina took me three tries before I got through it, but since then I’ve read it many times—it’s turned out to be one of my favorite rereads.

I still reread old favorites, but I also like to discover something new in the summer. And in the past few years, I’ve realized that I most love a summer book that’s big and immersive, a novel to sink into, like Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water, Britt Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, and Alice Elliott Dark’s Fellowship Point. In some way, those novels evoke the feeling of having all the time in the world to read, the way I did as a kid on a hot August day in Virginia.

This summer, I haven’t pinpointed the one summer novel of 2024, but there a few contenders on this list.

And what about you: What do you like to read in the summer? What makes a book a summer book? Recently, a couple of you mentioned that you like a lighter, breezy read in the summer, and another reader noted that she likes a novel with a beachy setting. (A couple of those titles—beachy setting and lighter read—are on my list!)

Let me know what you’re reading this summer, what “summer book” means to you, and whether you’ve read any of the books on this list!

The Cliffs, J. Courtney Sullivan

Sullivan’s latest novel follows Jane Flanagan, who’s returned to her hometown in midcoast Maine, ostensibly to pack up her dead mother’s house, but really because in one terrible drunken night, she lost both her job as an archivist at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library and her husband. Over the summer, she returns to her high-school obsession, an early-19th-C. seaside house with a long and full history.

It’s a midlife coming-of-age story, ghost story, the story of a house (somewhat in the vein of Daniel Mason’s North Woods), and the history of a place, with themes of grief, coming to terms with your flawed family and your even-more-flawed self, and who we remember and why. It also delves into a range of historical characters connected to the house and the land: a former Shaker, a mid-century woman artist, a 17th-century Native American woman. An ambitious novel, a little didactic in places, but a satisfying ending.

Same as It Ever Was, Claire Lombardo

Main character Julia Ames, a 57-year-old wife and mom in the Chicago suburbs, encounters Helen, an old friend she hasn’t seen in 20-plus years, around the same time that her straight-arrow 24-year-old son comes home with surprising news. The past timeline of the book details the tumultuous year of young-mom Julia and the much older Helen, who becomes a kind of mom substitute, and the spectacularly bad decisions Julia makes. The present timeline deals with the family’s news. Much, maybe most, of the novel’s drama is in the past timeline, but Lombardo still manages this beautifully. At 500 pages, Same as It Ever Was feels a little too long, but definitely one you can sink into. If you loved Lombardo’s first novel, The Most Fun We Ever Had, you will love this one too.

Sandwich, Catherine Newman

Where Claire Lombardo goes long, Catherine Newman goes short; you can read Sandwich in a day. Funnily enough, both novels also share a premise, the young-adult son coming home with the exact same surprising news.

Main character Rachel, called Rocky by her friends and family, narrates her week on Cape Cod with her husband, young-adult kids, and her parents (sandwich generation, get it? Also Rocky makes a lot of sandwiches over the course of the novel). Rocky is plagued by menopausal symptoms, and she loves her kids to distraction. As she slowly reveals what caused the grief and heartache that still reverberate, almost 20 years later, the reader slowly comes to understand why Rocky is so over-the-top in her frequent declarations of delight in and love for her kids and parents. Sandwich doesn’t have quite the balance of humor, grief, and surprise that Newman’s first novel, We All Want Impossible Things, has, but if you’re an Elizabeth Berg fan, you’ll find similar vibes in Sandwich. Plus wonderful evocations of the Cape’s landscape and beach.

Long Island, Colm Toibin

The sequel to Tobin’s 2009 novel Brooklyn. Long Island is set 20 years after Brooklyn, with Eilis and Tony now parents to two teens and living in a suburban cul de sac with Tony’s parents, brothers, and brothers’ wives. Some surprising news upends Eilis and Tony’s relationship, and Eilis decides to return to her small hometown of Enniscorthy, Ireland, for the summer. Like Brooklyn, Long Island is a short novel, but this new novel opens up the point of view to include Eilis’s old connections Jim Farrell and Nancy Sheridan. A lot of the same charm as Brooklyn, in Colm Toibin’s restrained style, but this time the story is even more about the power of what these characters are unable to say.

*The Stolen Child, Ann Hood

A historical novel with three timelines: The present of the novel is 1974, with main characters Jenny, a college dropout, and Nick, a sick World War I vet with a secret from a terrible day during the war, in France. The past timelines detail Nick’s long-ago war years and his brief connection with a young French artist and her baby; and a family in Naples, Italy—two brothers who carve and paint Nativity scenes, one of whom decides to create something called The Museum of Tears. In the novel’s present, Nick hires Jenny to help him return to France to see if he can make amends. Ann Hood’s gentle storytelling brings these unlikely plot threads together in a surprising yet plausible way.

Pearl, Sian Hughes

A coming-of-age story set in rural England, one that reverberates with grief and longing, but also a wry humor. As the novel opens, narrator Marianne and her teenage daughter, Susannah, are taking part in an ancient mourning ceremony and fair called the Wakes, in Marianne’s home village in Cheshire. It’s a ceremony that Marianne always attends, one that leads her to ponder the loss of her mother. When Marianne was 8, her mother walked out into the rain one fall day, forever leaving behind Marianne and the rest of their family.

Her mother’s unexplained disappearance has colored Marianne’s entire life—a mystery that she can’t move beyond. Marianne recounts her idyllic, idiosyncratic rural childhood in an old farmhouse with her creative mother, who sang folk songs and shared ancient stories. The adult Marianne narrates in an episodic, not-quite-linear fashion, looking back from early middle age, circling the mystery of her mother. The narrative is particularly strong in conveying the younger Marianne’s self-absorbed, mishap-filled adolescence and her lurch into young adulthood. It’s a tender debut novel, and for more, here’s my review for Bookpage.

And two nonfiction titles:

The Friday Afternoon Club, Griffin Dunne. Memoir. Dunne tells his own story, and that of his famous and infamous family. He’s the son of crime writer, novelist and one-time movie producer Dominick Dunne, and nephew of author John Gregory Dunne, who was also Joan Didion’s husband. The memoir delves into old Hollywood and gritty ‘late 70s and early ‘80s New York City, with a huge supply of funny stories about actors and movie starts, but it’s also a clear-eyed look at the trauma reverberating from his sister Dominique’s murder. Dunne is a wonderful writer (or he has a wonderful ghostwriter)—he can really tell a story. AND he’s a stellar narrator for the audiobook.

Chasing Beauty, Natalie Dykstra. A fantastic biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner. Historian Dykstra gives us the full story behind the eccentric Gardner, founder of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Well researched but very readable. I wrote about Isabella Stewart Gardner recently—have you visited the museum?

And these are the novels that I’m most excited to read next:

Real Americans, Rachel Khong: A family story set in three timelines (1999, 2021, 2030) with three generations of a Chinese-American family. Speculative elements, science fiction.

*This Strange Eventful History, Claire Messud. A multi-generational family saga that tells the story of the Algerian-French family the Cassars, and their disapora. Longlisted for the Booker Prize.

One of Our Kind, Nicola Yoon. A Black couple move to a Utopian black community in California, only to discover a terrible secret… Stepford Wives vibes.

*Jackie, Dawn Tripp. A fictional rendering of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, structured as her three lives, as a Kennedy wife, as an Onassis wife, and as a woman who goes to work as an editor.

*God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, Joseph Earl Thomas. Debut novel about a young Black veteran who’s a Ph.D. candidate and also working in a Philadelphia E.R. Coming of age.

The Bright Sword, Lev Grossman. A retelling of the Camelot story from the perspective of a young knight, Collum, who gets to Camelot after Arthur has died and everything is in dissaray.

Coming soon: The New Hampshire Book Festival

I’ve spent the past year helping to get a new book festival off the ground, and the inaugural New Hampshire Book Festival is coming soon, October 4-5, 2024, in downtown Concord, New Hampshire.

We have a pretty amazing roster of forty-some authors, including the authors of a few of the books on my list, above (marked with * asterisks)—Claire Messud, Dawn Tripp, Joseph Earl Thomas, and Ann Hood. It’s a free Saturday festival, with two ticketed keynote events, one on Friday night, October 4, with the bestselling Jean Hanff Korelitz, author of The Plot and the forthcoming The Sequel, and on Saturday evening, October 5, with the beloved children’s author Kate DiCamillo.

If you’re in New England, please think about checking out the festival! 📚

I’ll leave you with a few photos: a bouquet inspired by a New York florist’s arrangement of unusual blooms: dill flowers, asparagus fronds, arugula flowers, and wildflowers; and two views from Stockbridge, MA, in the Berkshires.