Whether you have a couple free hours by the pool, need something to do during a long road trip, or just want an excuse to sit outside in the lovely weather, summer gives you the perfect excuse to get lost in a good book.
However, summertime calls for not just any kind of book. It calls for something that will match the air, the sun and the leaves. So dig your toes into some grass and get ready to read one or two of the 10 best books set in summer.
‘Dandelion Wine’
Author: Ray Bradbury.
Publication date: 1957.
By the author of “Fahrenheit 451,” this magical realist novel is based on Bradbury’s own childhood. It follows 12-year-old Douglas Spaulding through the summer of 1928 in a small town in Illinois.
Bibliophage described “Dandelion Wine” as “a masterwork in the art of connected stories or vignettes.”
“Kids run free and adults sip glasses of dandelion wine on their porches. But there’s also an unsettling undercurrent. ‘The Lonely One’ is out there, killing town residents. The ravine is dark and foreboding. And every kid dreads the return of autumn and the end of summer.”
Notable quotation: “The grass whispered under his body. He put his arm down, feeling the sheath of fuzz on it, and, far away, below, his toes creaking in his shoes. The wind sighed over his shelled ears. The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere.”
‘The Great Gatsby’
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Publication date: 1925.
Simply put, this is “the story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan,” per Simmons University. The novel’s timeline runs through the summer, ending tragically with Gatsby taking his first dip in his pool as the leaves start to turn red.
Wesley Morris, writer for The New York Times, described this novel’s literary success, explaining why people keep coming back for re-reads. He attributes its success to its incredible writing and its quality as “a novel of ideas.”
Notable quotation: “And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’
Author: Betty Smith.
Publication date: 1943.
This semiautobiographical novel follows Francie Nolan, a girl growing up in early 1900s Brooklyn, New York. Her will to survive and grow despite her family’s poverty represented symbolically through a persistent little tree that grows in their tenement yard.
Notable quotation: “Look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory.”
‘Crazy Rich Asians’
Author: Kevin Kwan.
Publication date: 2013.
This first book in Kwan’s trilogy was adapted into a film in 2018. The book switches between five characters’ points of view and follows the romance between Rachel Chu and Nick Young. When Nick brings Rachel home to Singapore to meet his family for the first time, she’s forced to navigate being an outsider in a family that is “crazy rich.”
Notable quotation: “Just because some people actually work for their money doesn’t mean they are beneath you.”
‘Swallows and Amazons’
Author: Arthur Ransome.
Publication date: 1930.
This series follows the Walker family’s vacation to England’s Lake District in 1929. The Walker children embark on a journey, sailing a boat they name “The Swallow” to a deserted island where they meet the Blackett sisters who sail their own boat named “the Amazon.” Together, they form alliances, declare war and remind readers what it’s like to be a child.
Notable quotation: “It was like exploring a place that you have seen in a dream, where everything is just where you expect it and yet everything is a surprise.”
‘The Last Song’
Author: Nicholas Sparks.
Publication date: 2008.
After 17-year-old Ronnie’s parents get divorced, her dad moves to Wilmington, North Carolina. Sparks’ website describes, “Three years later, she remains angry and alienated from her parents, especially her father … until her mother decides it would be in everyone’s best interest if she spent the summer in Wilmington with him.”
Notable quotation: “God, he suddenly understood, was love in its purest form, and in these last months with his children, he had felt His touch as surely as he had heard the music spilling from Ronnie’s hands.”
‘News of the World’
Author: Paulette Jiles.
Publication date: 2016.
Lemuria Books describes this work set in post-Civil War Texas as an “exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel.” It tells the story of an itinerant news reader who is asked to transport a kidnapped child back to her family.
Notable quotation: “Life was not safe and nothing could make it so, neither fashionable dresses nor bank accounts. The baseline of human life was courage.”
‘The Secret Life of Bees’
Author: Sue Monk Kidd.
Publication date: 2001.
In the summer of 1964, Lily Owens runs away from her abusive father with her caretaker, Rosaleen, and is “taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters,” Monk Kidd describes.
Upon its release, “The Secret Life of Bees” “spent more than a hundred weeks on the Times best-seller list,” according to The New Yorker. It has since been adapted into a musical and a film.
Notable quotation: “Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.”
‘To Kill a Mockingbird’
Author: Harper Lee.
Publication date: 1960.
Young Scout Finch narrates this novel as her father, Atticus, defends a falsely accused black man of raping a white woman. Time magazine described “To Kill a Mockingbird” in the 1960s: “The novel is an account of an awakening to good and evil.”
Upon the book’s release, The New York Times praised Lee as an author, writing, “In her first novel, Harper Lee writes with gentle affection, rich humor and deep understanding of small-town family life in Alabama.”
Notable quotation: “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
‘The Old Man and the Sea’
Author: Ernest Hemingway.
Publication date: 1952.
Author Jim Wilbourne describes this novel’s plot, “‘The Old Man and the Sea’ follows Santiago, a fisherman in Cuba with the world’s worst luck. It has been eighty-four days since he has caught a fish. Even the father of his young companion, Manolin, is forbidden to hang around him anymore for fear his luck will rub off on him. Determined to break his curse, Santiago takes his skiff out to sea to prove to himself and his community that his bad luck days are over.”
Hemingway’s novel won a Nobel Prize in 1954 “for his mastery of the art of narrative” and “for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.”
Notable quotation: “Let him think that I am more man than I am and I will be so.”