Wondering what to read this Summer? Here are 12 of my absolute favorite Summer Reads for 2015!
There are few things I love more than a glass of wine and a good book! Since finishing up Carson’s Rustic Bedroom, I’ve been trying my best to make some time to relax, sometimes even enjoying Carson’s nap times curled up with my newest book (you know, between catching up on the housework and tackling all sorts of DIY’s!).
I’m the type of gal that enjoys the feeling of having just finished a fabulous book for about a second (maybe a day if I’m lucky!) before I’m looking for my next fix. So, you can imagine my disappointment when I turned the last page in my latest read with absolutely no idea what to pick up next. After wandering around my favorite bookstore for the most glorious hour ever while Hubs was shopping for golf clubs next door and of course, perusing Pinterest for inspiration (follow along with my Books to Read board for more ideas), I came up with about a zillion must reads to add to my list … here are twelve of my faves:
What Amazon has to say about it:
Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck. Sheโs even started to feel like she knows them. โJess and Jason,โ she calls them. Their lifeโas she sees itโis perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost.
And then she sees something shocking. Itโs only a minute until the train moves on, but itโs enough. Now everythingโs changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel offers what she knows to the police, and becomes inextricably entwined in what happens next, as well as in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good?
What Amazon has to say about it:
In love we find out who we want to be.
In war we find out who we are.
FRANCE, 1939
In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France โฆ but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When a German captain requisitions Vianne’s home, she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive.
Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old girl, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gรคetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can โฆ completely. But when he betrays her, Isabelle joins the Resistance and never looks back, risking her life time and again to save others.
What Amazon has to say about it:
Anna was a good wife, mostly.
Anna Benz, an American in her late thirties, lives with her Swiss husband, Brunoโa bankerโand their three young children in a postcard-perfect suburb of Zรผrich. Though she leads a comfortable, well-appointed life, Anna is falling apart inside. Adrift and increasingly unable to connect with the emotionally unavailable Bruno or even with her own thoughts and feelings, Anna tries to rouse herself with new experiences: German language classes, Jungian analysis, and a series of sexual affairs she enters with an ease that surprises even her.
But Anna canโt easily extract herself from these affairs. When she wants to end them, she finds itโs difficult. Tensions escalate, and her lies start to spin out of control. Having crossed a moral threshold, Anna will discover where a woman goes when there is no going back.
What Amazon has to say about it:
In 1987, Miri Ammerman returns to her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to attend a commemoration of the worst year of her life. Thirty-five years earlier, when Miri was fifteen, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving a community reeling. Against this backdrop of actual events that Blume experienced in the early 1950s, when airline travel was new and exciting and everyone dreamed of going somewhere, she paints a vivid portrait of a particular time and placeโNat King Cole singing โUnforgettable,โ Elizabeth Taylor haircuts, young (and not-so-young) love, explosive friendships, A-bomb hysteria, rumors of Communist threat. And a young journalist who makes his name reporting tragedy. Through it all, one generation reminds another that life goes on.
What Amazon has to say about it:
Imagine that your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secretโsomething with the potential to destroy not just the life you built together, but the lives of others as well. Imagine, then, that you stumble across that letter while your husband is still very much alive. . . .
Cecilia Fitzpatrick has achieved it allโsheโs an incredibly successful businesswoman, a pillar of her small community, and a devoted wife and mother. Her life is as orderly and spotless as her home. But that letter is about to change everything, and not just for her: Rachel and Tess barely know Ceciliaโor each otherโbut they too are about to feel the earth-shattering repercussions of her husbandโs secret.
What Amazon has to say about it:
Nora Eldridge is a reliable, but unremarkable, friend and neighbor, always on the fringe of other peopleโs achievements. But the arrival of the Shahid familyโdashing Skandar, a Lebanese scholar, glamorous Sirena, an Italian artist, and their son, Rezaโdraws her into a complex and exciting new world. Noraโs happiness pushes her beyond her boundaries, until Sirenaโs careless ambition leads to a shattering betrayal. Told with urgency, intimacy, and piercing emotion, this New York Times bestselling novel is the riveting confession of a woman awakened, transformed, and abandoned by a desire for a world beyond her own.
What Amazon has to say about it:
What would you do if you could literally rewrite your fateโon Facebook? This heartwarming and hilarious new novel from the authors of Your Perfect Life follows a woman who discovers she can change her life through online status updates.
Kate is a thirty-five-year-old woman who is obsessed with social media. So when her fiancรฉ, Max, breaks things off at their rehearsal dinnerโto be with Kateโs close friend and coworker, no lessโshe goes straight to Facebook to share it with the world. But somethingโs changed. Suddenly, Kateโs real life starts to mirror whatever she writes in her Facebook status. With all the power at her fingertips, and heartbroken and confused over why Max left her, Kate goes back in time to rewrite their history.
Kate’s two best friends, Jules and Liam, are the only ones who know the truth. In order to convince them sheโs really time traveled, Kate offers to use her Facebook status to help improve their lives. But her attempts to help them donโt go exactly as planned, and every effort to get Max back seems to only backfire, causing Kate to wonder if itโs really possible to change her fate.
What Amazon has to say about it:
Madeline King and Grace Pancik are best friends and the envy of Nantucket for their perfect marriages, their beautiful kids, their Sunday night double dates with their devoted husbands. But this summer, something’s changed, and if there’s anything Nantucket likes better than cocktails on the beach at sunset, it’s a good rumor.
And rumor has it…
…that Madeline, a novelist, is battling writer’s block, with a deadline looming, bills piling up, and blank pages driving her to desperation–and a desperately bad decision;
…that Grace, hard at work to transform her backyard into a garden paradise, has been collaborating a bit more closely that necessary with her ruggedly handsome landscape architect;
…that Grace’s husband, successful island real estate developer “Fast Eddie” Pancik, has embarked on quite an unusual side project;
…that the storybook romance between Madeline’s son, Brick, and Grace’s daughter Allegra is on the rocks, heading for disaster.
As the gossip escalates, and they face the possible loss of the happy lives they’ve worked so hard to create, Grace and Madeline try mightily to set the record straight–but the truth might be even worse than rumor has it.
What Amazon has to say about it:
When a shocking family secret is revealed, twenty-something journalist Cat Coombs finds herself falling into a dark spiral. Wild, glamorous nights out in London and raging hangovers the next day become her norm, leading to a terrible mistake one night while visiting family in America, on the island of Nantucket. It’s a mistake for which she can’t forgive herself. When she returns home, she confronts the unavoidable reality of her life and knows it’s time to grow up. But she doesn’t know if she’ll ever be able to earn the forgiveness of the people she hurt.
As the years pass, Cat grows into her forties, a struggling single mother, coping with a new-found sobriety and determined to finally make amends. Traveling back to her past, to the family she left behind on Nantucket all those years ago, she may be able to earn their forgiveness, but in doing so she may risk losing the very people she loves the most.
What Amazon has to say about it:
Ella’s life has been completely upended. She’s young, beautiful, and deeply in love–until her husband dies in a tragic sailing accident while trying save her. Or so she’ll have everyone believe. Screenwriter Hunter needs a hit, but crippling writers’ block and a serious lack of motivation are getting him nowhere. He’s on the look-out for a love story. It doesn’t matter who it belongs to.
When Hunter and Ella meet in Watersend, South Carolina it feels like the perfect match, something close to fate. In Ella, Hunter finds the perfect love story, full of longing and sacrifice. It’s the stuff of epic films. In Hunter, Ella finds possibility. It’s an opportunity to live out a fantasy – the life she wishes she had because hers is too painful. And more real. Besides. what’s a little white lie between strangers?
But one lie leads to another, and soon Hunter and Ella find themselves caught in a web of deceit. As they try to untangle their lies and reclaim their own lives, they feel something stronger is keeping them together. And so they wonder: can two people come together for all the wrong reasons and still make it right?
What Amazon has to say about it:
Born in 1941, Eileen Tumulty is raised by her Irish immigrant parents in Woodside, Queens, in an apartment where the mood swings between heartbreak and hilarity, depending on how much alcohol has been consumed. From an early age, Eileen wished that she lived somewhere else. She sets her sights on upper class Bronxville, New York, and an American Dream is born.
Driven by this longing, Eileen places her stock and love in Ed Leary, a handsome young scientist, and with him begins a family. Over the years Eileen encourages her husband to want more: a better job, better friends, a better house. It slowly becomes clear that his growing reluctance is part of a deeper, more incomprehensive psychological shift. An inescapable darkness enters their lives, and Eileen and Ed and their son Connell try desperately to hold together a semblance of the reality they have known, and to preserve, against long odds, an idea they have cherished of the future.
What Amazon has to say about it:
For the Posts, a two-week trip to the Balearic island of Mallorca with their extended family and friends is a celebration: Franny and Jim are observing their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and their daughter, Sylvia, has graduated from high school. The sunlit island, its mountains and beaches, its tapas and tennis courts, also promise an escape from the tensions simmering at home in Manhattan. But all does not go according to plan: Oover the course of the vacation, secrets come to light, old and new humiliations are experienced, childhood rivalries resurface, and ancient wounds are exacerbated.
The good news is: I’ve already started making my way through this list! Have you read any of these yet? What other books are you enjoying this Summer?
Wishing you SUCH a lovely day!
PS. You can find me sharing here and Savvy Southern Style.
These all sound awesome! I definitely need to check them out!
Thanks Christine! I’ve finished The Girl on the Train since writing this and it was fantastic! Just opened up We Are Not Ourselves this morning and hoping it’s as great as they say!
These all sound amazing!!
Thanks Christine!
Oo The Girl on the Train sounds really interesting! Which ones have you started reading?
Thanks Sam! I just finished up the Girl on the Train and it was great! Just opened up We Are Not Ourselves yesterday, hoping it’s just as great!!!
Thanks for sharing this great list. I read in English in order to be in touch with the language.
I think that I would like to read Husband’s secret the most. I really wonder what the great secret is about!
Thanks Anita! Husband’s Secret was a total page turner, I loved it!
Great list! I actually read the Jane Green one last week and it was a good fast summer read.
I’m co-hosting the #HomeMattersParty Linky party this month and would love to have to visit. This weekend’s party closes at midnight or join us again on Friday!
http://www.alaynascreations.co
Thanks Alayna! I think I’m ready for an easy, breezy one next, so that sounds perfect! Will definitely pop by ๐
I love a good book list! I’m currently reading Girl Boss and Launch. Two awesome business books if you’re looking for some non-fiction reading.
Thank you Judith! I just looked those up and they sound fantastic! Thanks for sharing!!!
These books really do look like great reads! Now, to just find the time to find or buy and then read them! ๐
Right?! That’s always the hardest part, isn’t it? Thanks so much!
Yes! I’ve been looking for some new books to read in some different genres than what I’m usually into (sci-fi and non-fiction). Thanks for the book list!
Oh good! I’m always on the hunt for great reads, so I can definitely relate! Thanks so much Gabrielle! Happy reading!!!
This is great! I am often looking for book reviews and recommendations on what to read next. I’ll be pinning this for later reference! Thanks for including the Amazon summaries. It’s nice having everything in one spot…instead of shuffling through a bunch of links. ๐
Thank you Kelli! SO happy to help! I’m always on the hunt for books to add to my must-read list too! Happy reading girl!
We will definitely be checking these out! Thank you ๐
-Sincerelyjean
Oh good! Thank you Jean!!!
I loved The Husband’s Secret! It kept me interested and guessing until the very end. I haven’t read any of these other books though. I need to look into them. Thanks for the suggestions!
Thanks Teresa! I totally agree! It was a definitely a page turner!!!
I’ve been looking for a good roundup, thanks!
Oh good! Happy to help! Thanks April!
I loved The Girl on the Train and My Husband’s Secret. I just finished reading The Silent Sister and Go Set a Watchman. I adored them both. I want to read The Silent Wife next, which is being compared to Gone Girl. Happy Reading!
Oooooo, just checked them out and they all sound fantastic! I think The Silent Wife may have to be next on my list now too! Thanks for the suggestions Ashley!
I plan on downloading it tomorrow. The Silent Sister is really good. I’m not sure if you have read other Chamberlain books but she has another one called The Secret Life of CeCe Wilkes and it is REALLY good.
I haven’t! Thank you SO much for sharing Ashley! Looks like I’ve got a few new books to add to my list! Thanks girl!
I enjoy reading, too. I recently read Murder Freshly Baked by Vanetta Chapman.
http://www.harvestlanecottage.blogspot.com/2015/07/murder-freshly-baked-by-vannetta-chapman.html
Thank you Laura! I’m always on the hunt for my next read, I’ll definitely check that one out!!!
thanks for these recommendations! Love good summer reads – Girl on the Train has been on my list for awhile already. Will have to go pick it up finally haha โฅ
Thanks Tianna! It’s so good, you’re going to LOVE it!
I read girl on the train and nightingale is on my list.. I am going to pin this since I have not seen many of these and I am always looking for a good book!!
Oh good! I’m always on the hunt too, so I’m thrilled that I’m giving you some ideas Lauren! Happy reading girl!
Ooo, I’ve read most of these but not all. I am going to feature your post on my FB page on Wednesday at 9:00. Great list!
Thank you SO much Terri! I’m thrilled that you love it enough to share!!! Happy weekend girl!
Thank you for putting a reading list together. I always need a book in hand when I crawl into bed at night. I look forward to reading a few of the books on your list.
You are so very welcome Holly! I’m thrilled that you found something you’d like to read! Thanks for popping by!
I’ve been dying to get my hands on both Judy Blume and Kirstin Hannah books this summer. Problem is, I have a pile begging for my attention already (life of a book hoarder). I’m currently reading “Orphan Train” by Kristina Baker Kline. Really good. A pleasure to find you via SITS Share fest, especially since we share the same province as home. ๐
Really?! Always fun to meet a fellow Canadian, let alone Albertan! LOVED orphan train, I gobbled it up in just a few days! I’m onto We are not Ourselves now and so far it’s really great too. Happy reading Barb!
Ooh, The Husband’s Secret and Summer Secret sound good to me. I guess it my curiosity coming out. LOL Thanks for sharing at the #HomeMattersParty – we love partying with you! Hope to see you next Friday. ๐
~Lorelai
Life With Lorelai
Thanks Lorelai! Haven’t read Summer Secret, but The Husband’s Secret definitely had me turning those pages as fast as I could! See you next week girl!
I have a feeling that we would have a ton in common!! I’d rather have a glass of wine and a book over almost anything. Seriously, sometimes it a serious struggle getting a blog post done because of it. lol.
I thought The Girl on the Train was an easy book. Not really thought-provoking but a good, easy read.
Recently, I enjoyed:
No Regrets Parenting
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
The Good Girl
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Unbroken
I couldn’t agree more! More perfect evening always involves a glass of wine and a great read! LOVED the girl on the train – easy read for sure, fairly predictable, but a great read none the less. Thanks for the new suggestions Ashley! Looks like I’ve got a few more books to add to my list ๐
What a fun list of books! Saving for later so I can find a new one to finish off the summer with ๐
Oh good! I’m so happy you found a few that you like! Thanks Alexis!!!
This looks like an awesome list, thanks for linking it up at this weeks Merry Mondays!
Thank you! I’m slowly working my way through it and so far, they’ve all been fantastic!!!
I’m hankering after the new Judy Blume. I remember reading Tiger Eyes way back when!
YES! I can’t wait to read it too Tara!!!