Your Summer Reading List is Here
Summer is the season that gives you permission. You have my permission to sit still, to ignore the group chat, to crack a spine on the beach or by the pool or in the airport terminal before your flight starts boarding. These are the books I’m reading and loving right now, the ones I’ve been talking about on the podcast and on Substack, and in several cases, the ones whose authors I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing, or will be sitting down with very soon. Consider this your literary permission slip.
I hope that you will share it with the people in your life.
🔪 Thrillers & Domestic Suspense
Valley of the Moms by Hannah Selinger (Mulholland Books, June 2026)
Forthcoming interview this week.
Described as Stepford Wives meets Big Little Lies, this debut novel is already the Barnes & Noble June Book Club Pick and a People must-read for summer, and it earns every bit of the buzz. Set in the wealthy enclave of Hamilton, Massachusetts, the story opens with Anna Plummer’s body found in the Ipswich River. Her husband Denny is the prime suspect, and as he sorts through her files and social media trying to clear his name, the novel alternates between his grief-soaked present and Anna’s perspective a year earlier, as she pushed back against the iron social hierarchy of her affluent town.
Very Bad Company by Emma Rosenblum (Flatiron Books, 2024)
If you haven’t read Emma Rosenblum yet, this is your summer. Her second novel is a wickedly observed satire of a Manhattan media company’s off-site retreat gone spectacularly wrong, delivers the same sharp social comedy that made Bad Summer People a word-of-mouth sensation.
Mean Moms by Emma Rosenblum (Flatiron Books, July 2025)
Rosenblum’s third novel turns her lens on a clique of wealthy Manhattan mothers whose children attend the elite Atherton Academy. The cattiness is weaponized, the class dynamics are surgical, and the formation of a school committee called Atherton Parents Against Persons Experiencing Homelessness says everything you need to know about the world she’s constructed.
The Sicilian Inheritance by Jo Piazza (Dutton, 2024)
A multigenerational mystery that opens with a recently divorced Philadelphia chef inheriting a plot of land in Sicily, and a suspicion that her great-grandmother didn’t die of illness, but was murdered. Jo weaves together two timelines and two women’s stories with the kind of propulsive momentum that makes you miss your stop. Both a feminist adventure and a family mystery, with serious heart underneath the intrigue.
Everyone Is Lying to You by Jo Piazza (Dutton, July 2025)
Jo Piazza turned her sharp journalistic eye on the tradwife influencer world, and the result is a thriller that functions as both a page-turner and a Trojan horse. Former best friends Lizzie and Bex reunite at an influencer conference, and when Bex disappears and her husband turns up murdered, the dark machinery underneath the curated domestic fantasy starts to show.
💔 Memoir & Personal Essay
Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden (Penguin Random House)
An instant #1 New York Times bestseller, and one of those books that you finish and immediately need to talk to someone about. Belle Burden grew up in one of America’s most storied families, married what seemed like the right man, built a life in Tribeca and Martha’s Vineyard, and then — without warning — had it all pulled out from underneath her.
Listen to my episode about it.
Small Town Girls by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf)
This memoir-in-essays explores growing up in West Virginia, the complicated textures of coming of age, and the way memory bends and reshapes itself over time.
✈️ Travel, Loss & New Beginnings
The Solo Honeymoon by Laura Murphy
A young woman boards a plane to Europe alone, the trip that was supposed to be her honeymoon, taken after the sudden death of her fiancé. Heartbreaking and life-affirming in equal measure, this summer release tracks a grief that doesn’t ask permission, and a journey that becomes something entirely its own.
😂 Essays & Humor
The Land and Its People by David Sedaris (Little, Brown)
The legendary humorist (and a hero of mine) is back with a brand-new collection of essays, and his passport has been stamped in some wonderfully strange places: Guatemala, Kenya, and the Vatican City. If you’ve ever loved a David Sedaris book — the absurdist eye, the family confessions, the way he finds the exact wrong thing to say in any given situation, this is everything you want.
📖 Literary Fiction
Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe (William Morrow, 2024)
You may have already watched the Apple TV+ adaptation starring Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman, and Nicole Kidman. Margo is a college freshman who gets pregnant by her married professor, decides to keep the baby despite having no money, and turns to OnlyFans with her estranged pro-wrestler father as an unlikely collaborator.
Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
Everyone is talking about this book. It is a novel about Theo, an elderly Portuguese man spending his final year in the small Southern town of Golden, tracking down residents to gift them 92 local portraits he has discovered. What begins as a simple errand becomes something far larger, a catalyst for connection, for healing, for the kind of grace that arrives unexpectedly and changes everything.
📺 Reality TV Deep Dives
Enter the Villa: The (Unauthorized) Reality Behind Love Island by Anna Peele (Atria Books, 2026)
If you are a person who has ever watched Love Island and immediately wanted to understand every single thing happening behind the scenes, this book was written for you.
💕 Beach Reads & Romance
Reasons to Be Loved by You by Hannah Brown (Forever, June 23, 2026)
Hannah Brown’s third rom-com arrives just in time for Fourth of July weekend — which is also, not coincidentally, when the book is set. Former pageant girl and reality show survivor Nikki Bennet heads home to her family’s Georgia lake house for the holiday, still not entirely over the nationally televised humiliation of discovering her fiancé had been cheating on her throughout her entire run on a dating show. Then her brother announces he’s marrying that very woman. And her only ally in stopping the wedding is the bride’s ridiculously charming brother, Nate. Banter-forward, emotionally specific, and the kind of summer book that makes a long weekend feel like a gift.
Hannah is on my is on my podcast Tuesday, and is just as sweet as you can imagine.
🔍 True Crime & Investigative Nonfiction
Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood by William J. Mann (Simon & Schuster)
Five years in the making, this is the Elizabeth Short case retold. Mann centers on the victim’s dignity, who she actually was, and not just the crime scene image that has defined her legacy for decades.
What They Stole: A Familicide Rooted in Intercountry Adoption by Paige Towers (University of Iowa Press)
Towers braids a modern-day familicide with the story of one man’s messianic mission in the 1950s to place South Korean babies with childless American couples, examining how ideology and bureaucracy and the best of human intentions c
an still produce devastating consequences. The kind of book that would make an extraordinary documentary.
