These seasonal reading lists (and book poll) are exclusively created for my seasonal book club. You can find out more about this membership HERE and click the button to join our bookish community.
Summer has become one of my favourite reading seasons.
I love jumping between feel-good romances, timeless classics and mystery/thrillers set in beautiful locations, with the claustrophobic heat of summer adding a thrilling dash of tension.
I spent last weekend putting together a list of some of the books I’m most excited to read this season, whilst still leaving space for spontaneous titles I will no doubt acquire from my local library and charity shops. Please do share any summer books you’ve enjoyed/are looking forward to reading as I get my best recommendations from this community!
The change of season also means we now need to pick a summer book that we can read along together. I’ve created a poll below so you can vote for your preferred title and, as always, I’ve tried to include a range of genres so there is something to suit everyone 😊. I will be sharing the winner in our book club chat next week!
Summer book club choices 2026 📚
A little more about each book (titles linked to Goodreads page)
The living mountain (Nan Shepard)
Nature/non-fiction/memoir
Written in the 1940s by the writer and hill walker Nan Shepard, this classic nature memoir is written as a love letter to the Cairngorms and explores the wildlife that call this Scottish Highland mountain range their home.
I capture the castle (Dodie Smith)
Classic/fiction/young adult
Cassandra (17) lives in a crumbling Suffolk castle with her eccentric family and this story follows the spring/summer of 1934, captured faithfully in the protagonist’s diary, where Cassandra faces family challenges alongside falling in love for the very first time.
The vanishing of Audrey Wilde (Eve Chase)
Mystery/historical fiction/gothic
On arriving at Applecote Manor in June 1959, 15-year-old Margot and her three sisters are expecting a gentle English countryside summer but instead become intertwined in the mystery of their missing cousin who disappeared five years before. The choices they make echo over the years, impacting a family that move into this manor fifty years later, unaware that this house might not be the quiet recluse it appears.
Writers and lovers (Lily King)
Fiction/literary fiction/romance
Still recovering from her mother’s sudden death, Casey Peabody (31) arrives in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 with no set plan but a determination to live a creative life, despite the distractions of falling for two very different men and the expectations of society that she should get a ‘real job’.
All the books I’ll be reading this summer 🌻
The books that are currently on my TBR