My summer reads: 2025 edition

Trust me, I'm a super successful glamorous novelist but was also a nerdy teenager with a fear of enjoying herself who spent summers indoors with the curtains drawn reading. Like I say. Trust me.

Escapist Summer Reads: a definite list

Harriet Evans

My favourite time to read is the summer.

evidence that i like to read in summer

A few years ago I did a list of my favourite summer reads, on Twitter, before Twitter was mad, and it was honestly one of the most joyful few days I’ve had online. A) I read Ann Patchett for the first time as a result B) people love giving book recommendations (almost as much as they love giving unwarranted childcare advice). The great thing about book recs is they do demystify good books for people. When I was a book editor what I was always looking for then was the kind of book I’ve tried to write with the Treasures - big, juicy, unputdownable, absorbing stories about families, places, secrets, but also the sense of escaping your life to another world. That’s my number one consideration with a summer read. When I was asked to come up with some recommendations this summer by a friend, I veritably jumped at the chance again and then I thought, hang on. So here is:

My Summer Reads: a definite list (bookshop.org list here)

Best 2025 prize shortlisted books

The Safekeep and All Fours

I was happy with my choice. But then came… (there’s a lot of coming in both books) (sorry for this awful pun)

I read The Safekeep just before it won the Women’s Prize for fiction last week and I highly, hugely recommend it, it is beautiful and curious and fascinating, very Dutch in its spare beauty and craftsmanship and all of that. But it is a little flat for me in the middle even though the final third is a proper third act like they often don’t do any more - POW. Still I would highly recommend it. (I’m not putting books on here that I don’t adore, so this is just a comment not a criticism.) Still, I feel very fond of it, like a special warm little memory that’s yours alone. I love it when books do that for you. I feel like that about eg A Month in the Country.

But then I read Johanna Thomas-Corr, chief lit critic of the Sunday Times saying she wished All Fours had won and why and then unusually for me based on that (but she is pretty wise) I read All Fours.

shoutout to the cover designers of both these novels please, absolutely stunning

I love this book. I want to discuss All Fours with everyone. It’s about a woman who blows her life up and goes on a roadtrip across America, although it is about far more than that obviously. From the opening pages even as she’s bouncing from making waffles with extra egg yolks in there for her non gender-specific child so they get extra protein then detailing her best friend’s incredible humping sex with her wife, there is a looseness and confidence about the voice that I adored and FWIW think is done with huge skill. It’s also really funny and she is geeky and odd and pretentious but loves details & facts. It’s full of off the cuff remarks that are chilling too. ‘I passed teenage girls wearing backpacks, their breasts inflated by the hormones in cow’s milk and barely covered by tank tops’ A playing with reality and narrative form that for me works incredibly well but I know other people really DID NOT like it. The narrator is also a creator and wants her identity back and perhaps I related to that whereas other people who have less egotistical jobs are like ‘back in your box love, pipe down’ and that’s OK. On a separate note though I am fascinated by how annoyed people get by women who write about women’s desires and women breaking the mould and doing what they want, far more than they do with men (although one of my friends who really hated it is literally the person least likely to mind any of that, she just didn’t buy it / the heroine, and once you stop buying into a book it’s game over).

I have a theory that all great American novels (see also: American Wife, East of Eden, Little House on the Prairie, The Underground Railroad, Commonwealth) tell the story of America in some way through landscape and this totally does from the cover to the road trip to the characters. Anyway. I would 100% passionately recommend it, just for the ride *ahem* and please come back here and we can discuss it more fully, as I could basically write a whole post about it.

Best series

The Cazalet Chronicles Elizabeth Jane Howard (Book 1 is The Light Years)

FWIW I do not like this cover. These books are not Laura Ashley in novel form.

I can’t believe it when people haven’t read the Cazalet Chronicles and yet so many people haven’t, still. I sort of feel they should be part of a government-sponsored advertising programme. Because they are about life. The are absolutely the pinchpoint of why books by women are dismissed as smaller or lesser than books by men. They are about an upper middle class English family from the 30s to the Second World War, their lives, marriages, affairs, jobs and houses in London and Sussex. These books! they are on a grand sweep but in fact what EJH does better than almost anyone is put you in a character’s shoes so you feel what they are going through - however big or small - with sometimes visceral empathy. Some parts are heartbreaking. The humanity is astonishing. The plotting, pacing, the characters, the DETAIL. Do not think because these are relatively privileged people that things are easy for them. In their granular character detail, structure, subtlety and scope they outshine Anthony Powell and other similar books by a country mile. You have such a treat in store.

Best London in Summer read

Consider Yourself Kissed - Jessica Stanley I am allergic to yummy mummy books YET want intelligent funny sympathetic books that talk about the shit-show of early motherhood and people wandering around East London drinking good quality coffee. I loved this warm clever kind totally gripping book. It’s unusual and yet like being with an old friend. It’s got a sort of French vibe, if that makes sense. Everyone is elegant and yet likeable at the same time.

In waterstones piccadilly. I liked this book so much even though I have a proof of it I nearly bought this signed copy.

A special mention to Sarra Manning’s The End of Summer which is everything a rom-com needs to be and more. Sharp, sweet, sad, Emily-Henry levels good.

As ever marian K says it best: I loved it very much.

Best Paris in summer read

This morning, in a bakery, something reminded me of The Way I Found Her and I realised no summer reading list is complete without this exquisite book. Dame Rose Tremain (YES DAME) is one of the best novelists there is full stop but also one of the best for details - the Danish court in Music & Silence, the nature of Charles II’s England in Restoration, and this absorbing, heat-filled vibe of a book is… gah, it’s so good. It’s weird and strange and unexpected and please, do read it if you haven’t.

I love this image. Don’t you feel you’re in Paris just looking at it.

Best quality family drama

terrible photo which does not do justice to this amazing cover. the cover is genius, you read the book thinking ‘why has it got this - OOOOHHHHHH’

The Homemade God - Rachel Joyce – for the 50 millionth time, I adore this book. It’s got everything you need for a summer read. I lent it to my mother (who edited Jilly Cooper amongst others, don’t question my mother). She slapped it back down on the table when returning the proof and simply said: ‘Well Harrie, all I can say is thank you for this’). It’s dark, thorny, funny, wise, shocking, so cleverly written, with a beautiful Italian lake setting thrown in for good measure, the story of four siblings and their artist father who suddenly marries a much younger woman they’ve never met. it’s also UNPUTDOWNABLE. Properly ‘i will wake up early to read a few more pages’ unputdownable. Happy summer reading.

Best historical summer read

It is both these things, it is also UNPUTDOWNABLE

Half A Yellow Sun – Because this novel was garlanded with awards and praise I thought it wouldn’t be a ‘good’ read until a friend pressed it on me. This is the sweeping, all consuming story of five characters caught up in the Nigerian Civil War of the late 60s, of what the country was like before, of normal lives, minds, families torn apart by war and the choices you do (or don’t) make. You’ll want to go to Nigeria and find out more about it after reading it; it’s a classic but I also really love it as a book if that makes sense.

Best summer mystery read

My Cousin Rachel Daphne du Maurier

I wish I could read this book for the first time again. That’s the headline.

Obviously ideally you should read this in a shaded Cornish creek, toes dipping in the water, but really anywhere will do. There is a dark, swirling uncertainty at the heart of this fiendishly clever novel; every time I reread it I marvel at how clever she was. When his older cousin Ambrose marries a mysterious cousin of his in Italy and then dies Philip Ashley is convinced something suspicious has happened and then Rachel, the widow, returns to Cornwall… Du Maurier is remembered for Rebecca, rightly, but I think this is even better. It is very weird, and absorbing, and so damn unputdownable: it’s a good companion piece to The Homemade God.

Best summer classic

Also a masterpiece. But also UNPUTDOWNABLE.

I read Atonement (Ian McEwan) in three sessions – one, waiting for a delayed flight at Toulouse airport 15 years ago, then on the plane, then when I got back to my flat above a fostering agency where no children were ever seen nor parents nor in fact employees and I suspect now was a front for something else and a below a heroin addict who lived with a carer who liked singing Korean karaoke at 2am in the morning (we got on well as you will know if you know me, I like people who sing karaoke at 2am in the morning. The heroin addict less so as he used to pass out in the hall and I had to slap him awake or step over him on my way to work). Anyway I got back from holiday and simply sank into my broken IKEA sofa and sat there until I had finished Atonement. I still think it is one of the best books of the late 20^th C, hugely underrated even despite all its acclaim. It is masterly, every bit of it, and the nature of what makes a novel & a story, all of that. But most of all it's just unputdownable. And it’s about a hot sweaty summer, the best summer read.

Best massive sweeping saga

Sweeping sagas are my favourite things, as you can probably tell so I have to recommend two though I would have to say The Far Pavilions by MM Kaye stands alone. It is the story of a young English boy brought up as a Hindu and an Indian Princess who meet as children and their relationship. It’s about duty, love, Colonialism (fascinating as she lived in India most of her life and loved it more than England), palaces, sometimes horrifying tradition. It is chew-your-nails-off high stress in some parts. It is a total period piece, please bear that in mind, but as a saga it is very hard to beat.

I also must mention my great lady novelist idol, Sally Beauman, and her last novel, The Visitors, about a young woman staying in the same hotel as Howard Carter as Tutankhamun’s tomb is finally opened. Ooooh, it’s a good book this. Ooh, it’s unputdownable and rich and scary and wild.

Best book about a summer holiday

The Fortnight in September - RC Sheriff

I love all of Persephone Books’ reissues but this is a particular favourite, one I only read recently. It is nothing more than the story of a family and their annual holiday in Bognor Regis. That’s it. But! it is the most gripping, tense, beautiful book. I can’t do it justice, you have to read it. The sense of place and history, the characters, the time ticking away as beloved holidays do. It’s a perfect novel.

Best escapist teenage / YA books

A special mention please for the best children’s book of all time, Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson, the Amazon, opera houses, orphans, high adventure, truly a classic and extraordinary novel.

And for teenagers, The Exiles trilogy by Hilary McKay, about four sisters and their summers together is hard to beat. My daughter has read them about 10 times.

Special mention to The Great Goddon, Meg Rosoff, a YA novel that is also a modern classic, as all three of these are, a whip-smart, beautifully written novel about summer passion.

Best children’s reads this summer, 7-12

Space Band by Tom Fletcher, which includes a QR code for a playlist of songs in the book recorded by McFly

Dragonborn Struan Murray which has a massive beautiful picture of a dragon on the front and my 9 y o is racing through

Murder Most Unladylike I always assume everyone has read Robin Stevens. Why haven’t you read Robin Stevens, young person? She’s the best.

The Land of Roar Jenny McClachlan I’m so happy when I hear other people love these books like what we have. They are properly beautifully written and funny and scary and she deserves all the success in the world.

AND FINALLY….

Maybe the best novel ever?

Commonwealth - Ann Patchett

I read this two years ago and still think about it most days. It is the most extraordinary evocation of the damage family does and the love it gives, of broken homes and mending again, and of America itself, covering east and west coast and generations. It is the most perfect summer read because it is so gripping but ultra intelligent and piercing and really rewards immersive reading. There are moments you want to hide from the pages, they are so real and beautiful. I remember reading it so long my whole body sort of ossified but I couldn’t put it down, I didn’t want to leave the characters behind. Now that my friends, is a good book.

Link to the Bookshop.org list of all these books is here