10 Best Books for Summer Reading in 2023

I’m always daydreaming about summer books to read and the best summer reads of all time—because, honestly? I tend to find my favorite books in the summer. I can be a seasonal reader, and summer romance books and other cozy, fun page-turners make their way to my TBR during those summer months.

The Best Books for Your Summer Reading List

Here are the 10 best books for your summer reading list, as well as new summer fiction on my personal reading list.

The Guest List by Lucy Foley

This is a Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick and a New York Times Bestseller. The Guest List was published in February of 2020, but this book is perfect for summer. A wedding celebration off the coast of Ireland turns dark and deadly. Need I say more?!

Here’s the synopsis:

On an island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather to celebrate two people joining their lives together as one. The groom: handsome and charming, a rising television star. The bride: smart and ambitious, a magazine publisher. It’s a wedding for a magazine, or for a celebrity: the designer dress, the remote location, the luxe party favors, the boutique whiskey. The cell phone service may be spotty and the waves may be rough, but every detail has been expertly planned and will be expertly executed.

But perfection is for plans, and people are all too human. As the champagne is popped and the festivities begin, resentments and petty jealousies begin to mingle with the reminiscences and well wishes. The groomsmen begin the drinking game from their school days. The bridesmaid not-so-accidentally ruins her dress. The bride’s oldest (male) friend gives an uncomfortably caring toast.

And then someone turns up dead. Who didn’t wish the happy couple well? And perhaps more important, why?

The Guest List was published on February 20, 2020, from William Morrow.

Nora Goes Off Script by Annabel Monaghan

I thought Nora Goes Off Script was the perfect contemporary romance! It’s a little cheesy but very self aware. If you need a palate cleanser from more hard-hitting books this summer, this is the perfect summer book to pick up next. I pretty much smiled the entire time I read this one.

Here’s the synopsis:

Nora’s life is about to get a rewrite . . .

Nora Hamilton knows the formula for love better than anyone. As a romance channel screenwriter, it’s her job. But when her too-good-to work husband leaves her and their two kids, Nora turns her marriage’s collapse into cash and writes the best script of her life. No one is more surprised than her when it’s picked up for the big screen and set to film on location at her 100-year-old-home. When former Sexiest Man Alive, Leo Vance, is cast as her ne’er do well husband Nora’s life will never be the same.

The morning after shooting wraps and the crew leaves, Nora finds Leo on her porch with a half-empty bottle of tequila and a proposition. He’ll pay a thousand dollars a day to stay for a week. The extra seven grand would give Nora breathing room, but it’s the need in his eyes that makes her say yes. Seven days: it’s the blink of an eye or an eternity depending on how you look at it. Enough time to fall in love. Enough time to break your heart.

Filled with warmth, wit, and wisdom, Nora Goes Off Script is the best kind of love story—the real kind where love is complicated by work, kids, and the emotional baggage that comes with life. For Nora and Leo, this kind of love is bigger than the big screen.

Nora Goes Off Script was published on June 7, 2022, from G. P. Putnam’s Sons

Book Lovers by Emily Henry

If you somehow haven’t read Book Lovers yet, it needs to be on your best summer reads 2023 romance list. As far as easy summer reads go, Emily Henry is always a great choice. I found this to be the perfect rom-com, especially for (duh) book lovers. It has everything you could want in a summer book, in my opinion.

Here’s the synopsis:

One summer. Two rivals. A plot twist they didn’t see coming. . . .

Nora Stephens’ life is books—she’s read them all—and she is not that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. In fact, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients, for whom she lands enormous deals as a cutthroat literary agent, and her beloved little sister Libby.

Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters’ trip away—with visions of a small-town transformation for Nora, who she’s convinced needs to become the heroine in her own story. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor or bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city. It would be a meet-cute if not for the fact that they’ve met many times and it’s never been cute.

If Nora knows she’s not an ideal heroine, Charlie knows he’s nobody’s hero, but as they are thrown together again and again—in a series of coincidences no editor worth their salt would allow—what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves.

Book Lovers was published on May 3, 2022, from Berkley.

Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane

If you’re looking for more hard-hitting literary fiction in the summer—but still something that’s compulsively readable—I would suggest Ask Again, Yes. I was obsessed with this book. It really, really touched me. This book is like rich chocolate cake you’ll want to savor slowly, so if you have more time in the summer months, put this on your good reads for summer 2023 reading list.

Here’s the synopsis:

How much can a family forgive?

Francis Gleeson and Brian Stanhope, rookie NYPD cops, are neighbors in the suburbs. What happens behind closed doors in both houses—the loneliness of Francis’s wife, Lena, and the instability of Brian’s wife, Anne, sets the stage for the explosive events to come.

In Mary Beth Keane’s extraordinary novel, a lifelong friendship and love blossoms between Kate Gleeson and Peter Stanhope, born six months apart. One shocking night their loyalties are divided, and their bond will be tested again and again over the next thirty years. Heartbreaking and redemptive, Ask Again, Yes is a gorgeous and generous portrait of the daily intimacies of marriage and the power of forgiveness.

Ask Again, Yes was published on May 28, 2019, from Scribner.

The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo

Oh, this book! If you love a dysfunctional families story with secrets, love, rivalries, and intensely messy but tenderhearted characters, The Most Fun We Ever Had is for you. This book is perfect for that “gossipy summer” vibe. I devoured it on a summer trip to Austin, Texas, and couldn’t put it down on the plane.

Here’s the synopsis:

A multigenerational novel in which the four adult daughters of a Chicago couple—still madly in love after forty years—recklessly ignite old rivalries until a long-buried secret threatens to shatter the lives they’ve built.

When Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s, they are blithely ignorant of all that’s to come. By 2016, their four radically different daughters are each in a state of unrest: Wendy, widowed young, soothes herself with booze and younger men; Violet, a litigator-turned-stay-at-home-mom, battles anxiety and self-doubt when the darkest part of her past resurfaces; Liza, a neurotic and newly tenured professor, finds herself pregnant with a baby she’s not sure she wants by a man she’s not sure she loves; and Grace, the dawdling youngest daughter, begins living a lie that no one in her family even suspects. Above it all, the daughters share the lingering fear that they will never find a love quite like their parents’.

As the novel moves through the tumultuous year following the arrival of Jonah Bendt—given up by one of the daughters in a closed adoption fifteen years before—we are shown the rich and varied tapestry of the Sorensons’ past: years marred by adolescence, infidelity, and resentment, but also the transcendent moments of joy that make everything else worthwhile.

The Most Fun We Ever Had was published on June 25, 2019, from Doubleday Books.

I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell

If you want to add to your best summer reads 2023 nonfiction list, I Am, I Am, I Am is the one for you. This is a beautiful, deeply personal, fast-paced, hard-hitting, refreshing memoir. Maggie O’Farrell shares snippets of her life and near-death experiences that have defined her life in one way or another. It’s absolutely lovely and precious and heavy and omg pick it up right now!

Here’s the synopsis:

We are never closer to life than when we brush up against the possibility of death.

I Am, I Am, I Am is Maggie O’Farrell’s astonishing memoir of the near-death experiences that have punctuated and defined her life. The childhood illness that left her bedridden for a year, which she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape that nearly ended in disaster. An encounter with a disturbed man on a remote path. And, most terrifying of all, an ongoing, daily struggle to protect her daughter—for whom this book was written—from a condition that leaves her unimaginably vulnerable to life’s myriad dangers.

Seventeen discrete encounters with Maggie at different ages, in different locations, reveal a whole life in a series of tense, visceral snapshots. In taut prose that vibrates with electricity and restrained emotion, O’Farrell captures the perils running just beneath the surface, and illuminates the preciousness, beauty, and mysteries of life itself.

I Am, I Am, I Am was published on August 2, 2017, from Knopf Publishing Group.

Little Weirds by Jenny Slate

Look, no one is more surprised than I am that Little Weirds has become my favorite celebrity memoir, but here we are. This is another great nonfiction book to pick up this summer if you haven’t read it (published in November 2019). It’s equal parts poetry, short story, and personal essay, and my God, I’ve become such a fan of Jenny Slate. Little Weirds is, in fact, weird—strange and rambling and perfect in its own way. If you read it, get it on audio.

Here’s the synopsis:

You may “know” Jenny Slate from her Netflix special, Stage Fright, as the creator of Marcel the Shell, or as the star of “Obvious Child.” But you don’t really know Jenny Slate until you get bonked on the head by her absolutely singular writing style. To see the world through Jenny’s eyes is to see it as though for the first time, shimmering with strangeness and possibility.

As she will remind you, we live on an ancient ball that rotates around a bigger ball made up of lights and gasses that are science gasses, not farts (don’t be immature). Heartbreak, confusion, and misogyny stalk this blue-green sphere, yes, but it is also a place of wild delight and unconstrained vitality, a place where we can start living as soon as we are born, and we can be born at any time. In her dazzling, impossible-to-categorize debut, Jenny channels the pain and beauty of life in writing so fresh, so new, and so burstingly alive, we catch her vision like a fever and bring it back out into the bright day with us, where everything has changed.

Little Weirds was published on November 5, 2019, from Little, Brown and Company.

Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Taylor Jenkins Reid is a great author if you’re looking for summer books, and Malibu Rising could not be more perfect for your summer reading list. This book is about four famous siblings throwing an epic party in the summer. Is there anything better than following the interesting lives of filthy rich and damaged young adults?!

Here’s the synopsis:

Four famous siblings throw an epic party to celebrate the end of the summer. But over the course of twenty-four hours, their lives will change forever.

Malibu: August, 1983. It’s the day of Nina Riva’s annual end-of-summer party, and anticipation is at a fever pitch. Everyone wants to be around the famous Rivas: Nina, the talented surfer and supermodel; brothers Jay and Hud, one a championship surfer, the other a renowned photographer; and their adored baby sister, Kit. Together, the siblings are a source of fascination in Malibu and the world over—especially as the offspring of the legendary singer, Mick Riva.

The only person not looking forward to the party of the year is Nina herself, who never wanted to be the center of attention, and who has also just been very publicly abandoned by her pro tennis player husband. Oh, and maybe Hud—because it is long past time to confess something to the brother from whom he’s been inseparable since birth.

Jay, on the other hand, is counting the minutes until nightfall, when the girl he can’t stop thinking about promised she’ll be there.

And Kit has a couple secrets of her own—including a guest she invited without consulting anyone.

By midnight the party will be completely out of control. By morning, the Riva mansion will have gone up in flames. But before that first spark in the early hours before dawn, the alcohol will flow, the music will play, and the loves and secrets that shaped this family’s generations will all come bubbling to the surface.

Malibu Rising is a story about one unforgettable night in the life of a family: the night they each have to choose what they will keep from the people who made them . . . and what they will leave behind.

Malibu Rising was published on June 1, 2021, from Ballantine Books.

All Adults Here by Emma Straub

Ready for another compulsively readable, character-driven, dysfunctional family saga? All Adults Here, published in May 2020, has all of it, and it’s beautifully written. If you want to get sucked into the lives of these imperfect-but-loveable family members with heartaches and truths to tell, All Adults Here could very well be your perfect summer read.

Here’s the synopsis:

When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus accident in the center of town, it jostles loose a repressed memory from her young parenting days decades earlier. Suddenly, Astrid realizes she was not quite the parent she thought she’d been to her three, now-grown children. But to what consequence?

Astrid’s youngest son is drifting and unfocused, making parenting mistakes of his own. Her daughter is intentionally pregnant yet struggling to give up her own adolescence. And her eldest seems to measure his adult life according to standards no one else shares. But who gets to decide, so many years later, which long-ago lapses were the ones that mattered? Who decides which apologies really count? It might be that only Astrid’s thirteen-year-old granddaughter and her new friend really understand the courage it takes to tell the truth to the people you love the most.

In All Adults Here, Emma Straub’s unique alchemy of wisdom, humor, and insight come together in a deeply satisfying story about adult siblings, aging parents, high school boyfriends, middle school mean girls, the lifelong effects of birth order, and all the other things that follow us into adulthood, whether we like them to or not.

All Adults Here was published on May 4, 2020, from Riverhead Books.

The Switch by Beth O’Leary

The Switch is a sweet, charming, romantic novel that I found delightful and perfect for summer. If a book that takes place in a sweet, quiet Yorkshire cottage and a flat in London sounds good to you, check this one out. It has unlikely friendship, love, and the sweetest characters. (Can I say sweet any more here?)

Here’s the synopsis:

Eileen is sick of being 79.
Leena’s tired of life in her twenties.
Maybe it’s time they swapped places . . .

When overachiever Leena Cotton is ordered to take a two-month sabbatical after blowing a big presentation at work, she escapes to her grandmother Eileen’s house for some overdue rest. Eileen is newly single and about to turn eighty. She’d like a second chance at love, but her tiny Yorkshire village doesn’t offer many eligible gentlemen.

Once Leena learns of Eileen’s romantic predicament, she proposes a solution: a two-month swap. Eileen can live in London and look for love. Meanwhile Leena will look after everything in rural Yorkshire. But with gossiping neighbours and difficult family dynamics to navigate up north, and trendy London flatmates and online dating to contend with in the city, stepping into one another’s shoes proves more difficult than either of them expected.

Leena learns that a long-distance relationship isn’t as romantic as she hoped it would be, and then there is the annoyingly perfect—and distractingly handsome—school teacher, who keeps showing up to outdo her efforts to impress the local villagers. Back in London, Eileen is a huge hit with her new neighbours, but is her perfect match nearer home than she first thought?

The Switch was published on April 16, 2020, from Quercus.

New Books to Read: 2023 Releases for Your Summer Reading List

These are the summer books I’m hoping to tackle in 2023, if not sooner. They all seem like they’ll be perfect for summer! I am a bit of a mood reader, so I’m leaving some room for other books to read in 2023, including new-to-me backlist titles. Check out my whole list of most anticipated books of 2023, too.

My summer reading list:

• Happy Place by Emily Henry
• I Could Live Here Forever by Hanna Halperin
• Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
• The Half Moon by Mary Beth Keane
• The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei
• What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez

What’s on your summer reading list for 2023? Any summer books you’re excited to get to this year?