Tiana’s Reads

I want my summer reads to feel like a long journey, because summer itself feels like one. With longer days come endless possibilities, which is why I always choose books that mirror the essence of the summer season that’s filled with chaos, adventure, fun, discovery and unexpected turns.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – L.Frank Baum

Reading this book as an adult has brought me a new perspective on the path to self-discovery through each character’s symbolic journey. 

The Whore of New York – Liara Roux

This memoir follows Liara’s transition from a restrictive childhood into sex work, with critique on capitalism and bodily autonomy.

Thirst for Salt – Madelaine Lucas

A 24-year-old college graduate having an age-gap summer romance with a 42-year-old man that eventually spirals into a consuming relationship.

Nanuka’s Reads

These days, I tend to reach for writing that is atmospheric and absorbing enough to make a long afternoon vanish. Not necessarily light reading, but books filled with landscape, memory, food, and the complicated ways people belong to one another. The kind that pairs well with the strange stillness of hot days, when even the air seems to be taking a slow, suspicious nap.

The Son of Man — Jean-Baptiste Del Amo

A father takes his wife and young son to the isolated mountain house where he grew up, and the attempted family reunion slowly becomes something far darker. Del Amo’s writing is physical, claustrophobic, and brutal, with nature itself seeming to carry the threat of inherited violence.

Two Dozen Eggs — Hugh Corcoran

Part cookbook and part collection of memories, Two Dozen Eggs moves through Ireland, France, and the Basque Country by way of kitchens, meals, and the people who prepare them. It is intimate and unpretentious, and perfect for anyone who understands that food is often just another way of remembering a place or a person.

The Summer Book — Tove Jansson

A young girl and her grandmother spend the summer together on a tiny Finnish island, swimming, arguing, exploring, and discussing the world around them. Quiet, funny, and unsentimental, it captures both the freedom of summer and the melancholy of knowing that every beautiful season is already passing.

Awa’s Reads

You can usually recognise my summer reads by their wilted pages. They’ve probably spent a little too much time beside a body of water, tucked into a beach bag or balanced on a towel between swims. I always find myself gravitating towards stories that feel light, melancholic or just a little strange when the heat gets to your head. Almost like a fata morgana, suspended somewhere between illusion and reality, carrying an existential tenderness that stays with you long after you’ve put the book down.

A Dog’s Heart – Mikhail Bulgakov

A dog becomes a man. Or maybe a man becomes a dog. Either way, Bulgakov’s satire spirals into complete absurdity while asking surprisingly timeless questions about power, humanity and ego. It’s bizarre, razor-sharp, and LOL funny in equal measure.

God’s Bits of Wood – Ousmane Sembène

I always come back to stories that remind me history is made by ordinary people. Set during the 1947 Dakar-Niger railway strike, Sembène follows the workers, families and women who carried an entire movement on their backs.

Hour of the Star — Clarice Lispector

Poor Macabéa. She eats hot dogs for dinner, works as a typist, dates the world’s rattiest boyfriend and somehow keeps drifting through life without ever really asking for more. Through her, Lispector poses one of my favourite literary questions: what does it actually mean to exist? It’s devastating, absurd and unexpectedly funny, all in fewer than 100 pages.

La Gloire de mon père — Marcel Pagnol

This book is inseparable from summer for me. My father used to read it to me during the holidays, and I still think about Pagnol’s world of long lunches, cheese soup, cicadas and endless afternoons in the South of France. Every reread feels like returning to a childhood memory that somehow still smells like pine trees and sun-warmed stone.

Blanche’s Reads

I like to think I’ll finally get through the growing pile of books on my bedside table every summer. Every summer, I also end up buying more. Still, it’s the one time of year I can spend an entire afternoon reading without feeling like I should be doing something else. The books below are the ones I’d happily lose a sunny day to.

Thousand Cranes – Yasunari Kawabata

There’s something photographic about how Kawabata writes. He’ll spend a paragraph on a tea bowl or a piece of fabric and somehow that’s where the actual feeling of the scene is sitting, not in what the characters say to each other. The people are usually holding back, working through guilt or desire or some obligation to family they never state directly. It’s a short book. I kept underlining things.

Eve’s Hollywood – Eve Babitz

This is Babitz’s love letter to 1970s Los Angeles, told through the parties, artists, and restaurants she ran around with at the time. She’s less interested in describing the city itself and more in the people in it: who’s performing for who, what everyone wants that they won’t quite say out loud. If you’re in a summer mood and want to feel like you’re the one showing up late to the party in a backless dress not caring what anyone thinks, this is the one. It reads less like a memoir and more like she wrote down everything she noticed at every party she went to that year.

Real Estate – Deborah Levy

Levy’s one of my favourite writers right now, and this is the last in her “living autobiography” trilogy, about turning fifty and wanting a house of her own after years of renting and living out of other people’s furniture. It’s got that specific melancholy of summer, when everyone’s half-fantasising about a different life: a house in Greece, a garden, somewhere to actually put down roots, even though you know most of that stays imaginary. Levy moves between her real life in London and the house she keeps building in her head.