The Summer’s Essential Books

2026 has already had its share of blockbuster releases. In fiction, Caro Claire Burke’s tradwife satire Yesteryear and Ben Lerner’s autofictional Transcription have dominated literary conversations, while Patrick Radden Keefe’s sprawling London Falling and Lena Dunham’s memoir Famesick have fuelled ever-churning discourse cycles.

This season’s books take readers from London’s 1990s art scene to the highways of rural Brazil, from a surreal, otherworldly Dublin to a grand tour of Europe and the Middle East in the company of one of Britain’s most infamous outsider artists. With new works from Pulitzer-winning heavyweights to cult favourites and emerging talents, these  are the books that are set to shape the conversation this summer.

June

What better way to start your summer reading than with Allie Rowbottom’s new novel, set against the backdrop of Los Angeles’s burgeoning pornography industry in the early 1980s? Following two friends, Jude and Winnie, as they transition from strippers to porn actors, Lovers XXX (available now) centres on Jude’s mysterious disappearance and Winnie’s attempts to uncover the truth 30 years later. 

On a slightly different note, Keith Ridgway also returns this month with his new novel, Dooneen. A surreal and otherworldly novel, it follows a man, known as Mew, who disappears “amongst the bushes and the undergrowth” of a London park and stumbles out moments later in an alternative Dublin. There are no cars or buses, the grass is greener than ever, and everything feels completely off. Critics have often compared Ridgway to James Joyce and in Dooneen, it feels like he’s playfully embracing this. 

Philippe Besson’s latest novel, The Summer Boy (available now), comes to English-language readers in a translation from the original French by Sam Taylor. Following a group of teenagers on a resort island during the summer of 1985, the novel is a sun-soaked, nostalgic take on burgeoning adulthood and first love. That is, until a tragedy pulls everyone back into reality. 

For some nonfiction, Jack Parlett casts his analytical eye over Oscar Wilde, Lil Nas X and Toni Collette in Muriel’s Wedding in Flamboyance: The Art of Burning Brightly, out now. Parlett’s previous book, Fire Island: A Queer History, marked him as a leading voice in a new generation of queer scholarship. In Flamboyance, he casts his net even wider, exploring representations of flamboyance throughout popular culture and investigating its divisiveness.

July

Alex Hyde takes us back to 1990s London and the irreverence of the Young British Artists scene in Exhibition (available from July 2). A young photographer rents a room in the home of an artist who recalls figures such as Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas. Together, they throw themselves into London’s boozy art world, flitting between parties and gallery openings. In the present day, however, their lives have taken very different paths. One has become wealthy and famous, while the other spends her time caring for multiple family members. 

The winner of the 2025 Strega Prize, Andrea Bajani’s The Anniversary (available from July 2) arrives in English hot on the heels of its bestseller success across Europe. Told from the perspective of a son reflecting on the abusive family in which he was raised, the novel has already garnered pre-publication accolades from heavy-hitters like Colm Tóibín, Jenny Erpenbeck and Emmanuel Carrère. 

The Australian art historian Jennifer Higgie is seeing her debut novel, Bedlam (available from July 14), enjoy a second lease of life as Verso brings it back into print after years of relative obscurity following its original publication in 2006. A fictionalised account of a year in the life of Richard Dadd as he travels around Europe and the Middle East with his patron. Best known for his ethereal fairy paintings, many of which were created while he was a patient in some of London’s most infamous sanatoriums, Dadd was a true outsider artist. 

And in what is sure to be one of the landmark publications of the summer, Colson Whitehead returns with Cool Machine (available from July 21). Set in 1980s New York, the novel follows Ray Carney, a Harlem businessman trying to stay on the straight and narrow, only to find his murky criminal past repeatedly catching up with him. Already a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, could this be the book that earns Whitehead a third?

August

August is a big month for new books from recently acclaimed writers. Following her celebrated third novel, The Anthropologists, Ayşegül Savaş releases her first work of non-fiction on August 6. The Wilderness is a treatise on the first 40 days of motherhood, interrogating the significance of that oft-mythologised period and its resonance across a range of religions and cultures. 

Fresh from this year’s International Booker Prize shortlist with On Earth As It Is Beneath, Ana Paula Maia returns with Bury Your Dead (available from August 11). The novel centres on Edgar Wilson, a man whose job is to collect roadkill from the highways of rural Brazil so it can be processed into fertiliser. One day, however, his routine is altered when he discovers not the carcass of an animal, but the body of a woman. 

Dahlia de la Cerda follows up her acclaimed debut story collection, Reservoir Bitches, with a new novel, Medea Sang Me a Corrido (available from August 13). Set in Mexico’s cartel lands, a maternal spirit named Medea watches over the area’s young people, using her powers to intervene in proxy wars and challenge the cycle of violence. 

Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance also appeared on the 2025 International Booker Prize longlist, and her new novel, The Sleep Thief (available from August 25), now arrives in English. Told in an experimental style, it follows a protagonist known as the “Stranger,” a Palestinian living within Israel. As he comes of age, he is drawn into acts of resistance, pushing back against the commodification of his identity and the narratives of sorrow imposed upon him.