Summer Reading List 2026 || Ten books worth every hour of your vacation
The beach bag is packed. The out-of-office is on. All that's left is deciding what goes in your hands for the next two weeks, and we've done that part for you.
Here are 10 summer reads that you wouldn’t want to put down.
1. Dungeon Crawler Carl — Matt Dinniman
The addictive LitRPG series with a cult following
If you've been sleeping on this series, now is the time to wake up. Dungeon Crawler Carl is the New York Times bestselling first book in Matt Dinniman's wildly addictive LitRPG series, and at 43% off the paperback, there has never been a better moment to start. Coast Guard vet Carl is minding his own business when an alien invasion demolishes every structure on Earth and conscripts the survivors into an 18-level underground dungeon crawl, broadcast live as intergalactic reality television. His only companion is Princess Donut, his ex-girlfriend's prize-winning show cat, who turns out to be an extraordinary asset. Think The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy meets a very dark, very funny video game, with exploding goblins and drug-dealing llamas thrown in for good measure. Survival is optional. Keeping the viewers entertained is not. Fair warning: readers consistently report finishing the first book and immediately ordering the next seven. Consider yourself warned.
2. Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir
Now a major motion picture starring Ryan Gosling
You may have already seen the film—and loved it. But if you haven't read the book, this summer is your moment to find out what the fuss is really about. Project Hail Mary follows Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher who wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is, how he got there, or what he is supposed to do. As his memories slowly return, he pieces together a devastating truth: the sun is dying, Earth is running out of time, and he is the planet's last, imperfect hope. Andy Weir's genius is in making hard science feel like pure adventure, and this book delivers that in full force. The Ryan Gosling film has earned an extraordinary 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, but as Weir himself has noted, Gosling added layers of complexity to the character that only the novel fully earns. Read the book, see the film, then argue with someone about which is better.
3. Strange Pictures — Uketsu
Translated from Japanese by Jim Rion
This is the book that made a UKETSU devotee out of one of our editors, and it is not hard to see why. Strange Pictures is the internationally bestselling debut from a genuinely mysterious figure: a Japanese YouTuber who appears only behind a white mask, his voice electronically disguised. His fiction is just as unsettling. The novel unfolds through a series of linked stories spanning decades, each anchored by strange, childlike illustrations: drawings made by victims, perpetrators, and bystanders that the reader must interpret alongside the characters. A pregnant woman's sketches that seem to predict her own murder. A child's drawing of his apartment building with one room deliberately smudged out. A mountain scene sketched by a murder victim in his final moments. The mystery reveals itself chapter by chapter, illustration by illustration, building to a finale that left readers, including this one, sitting quietly with their jaws on the floor. If you love Japanese mystery and haven't yet discovered UKETSU, start here.
4. Piranesi — Susanna Clarke
Winner of the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction
Read this many years ago, and the concept has never left. Piranesi is set in a labyrinthine House of infinite halls, flooded lower levels, and cloud-filled upper stories, lined with thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. The narrator, who goes by the name Piranesi, has always lived there, or so he believes. He keeps meticulous journals of the tides, the statues, the skeletons of long-dead inhabitants, and his twice-weekly meetings with the only other living person: a man known simply as the Other. Then evidence of a third person begins to appear, and the careful, orderly world Piranesi has built around himself unravels. Susanna Clarke's novel is formally unlike almost anything else in contemporary fiction, written in journal entries, full of quiet wonder and building dread. It is short, it is strange, it is completely unforgettable, and it asks one of literature's most resonant questions: what do we do with the truth when it disturbs everything we thought we knew?
5. Atmosphere — Taylor Jenkins Reid
The biggest book of summer 2025
You have definitely heard of this one. If it has been sitting on your TBR, summer is absolutely the time to finally read it. Set in the early 1980s, it follows Joan Goodwin, a reserved physics professor who becomes one of the first women to join NASA's Space Shuttle program. Told across a dual timeline, the novel moves between Joan's years of training and an unfolding space crisis in December 1984, building a portrait of found family, forbidden love, and what it costs to be first. Reid is known for crafting heroines you fall for completely, and Joan is among her best. Book Riot called it the biggest book of summer 2025, and Goodreads readers voted it the top summer read of the year. Prepare to stay up too late, cry in unexpected places, and spend days thinking about the ending.
6. The River Has Roots — Amal El-Mohtar
A fairy tale novella with original linocut illustrations
There is something quietly rare about The River Has Roots: its illustrations are not decoration but evidence. In the small town of Thistleford, on the border between England and Faerie, sisters Esther and Ysabel Hawthorn tend the ancient willow trees along the magical river Liss, singing to them each morning as their family has always done. When Esther falls in love with a shapeshifting being from Arcadia and rejects the advances of a ruthless local landowner, both sisters are placed in terrible danger. What follows is a fairy tale grounded in murder ballads and folk song, told in prose so lyrical it borders on poetry. The beautiful linocut illustrations by Kathleen Neeley are woven directly into the mystery. Holly Black called it "half delicious murder ballad, half beguiling love story," and that is exactly right. A short, luminous read that lingers long after the final page.
7. The Kamogawa Food Detectives — Hisashi Kashiwai
Translated from Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood
If you love food and cats, this is simply your book. Down a quiet backstreet in Kyoto, with no signage on the door, sits the Kamogawa Diner, run by a retired widowed detective named Nagare and his spirited daughter Koishi, with a perpetually drowsy red tabby named Drowsy wandering among the tables. Their specialty is not just exceptional Japanese food but a particular kind of investigation: they recreate dishes that customers can no longer find, dishes tied to specific, irretrievable memories. A widower searching for the noodle dish his late wife used to make. A woman trying to taste again the beef stew she walked away from in her youth. Each chapter is a small, complete story about what food holds and what it releases. Described by NPR as "off-beat and charming, with more complexity of flavour than you might expect," this cozy Japanese series is the kind of reading experience that sends you straight to your nearest Japanese restaurant the moment you finish.
8. The Impossible Fortune — Richard Osman
Thursday Murder Club, Book 5
The gang is back, and this fifth installment in Richard Osman's beloved series is arguably the strongest yet. It has been a quiet year at Coopers Chase retirement village: Joyce is absorbed in wedding preparations for her daughter Joanna, Elizabeth is grieving, Ron is navigating family complications, and Ibrahim continues his unconventional therapeutic relationship with a favourite criminal. Then, at the wedding reception, the best man pulls Elizabeth aside with a frightening confession: someone has placed a bomb under his car. By the following morning, he has vanished entirely. What the Thursday Murder Club uncovers next involves a cryptocurrency fortune locked behind an uncrackable code, a desperate aristocrat, and a murder that must be solved before anyone else disappears. Osman's great gift has always been tucking genuine emotional depth inside impeccably constructed mysteries, and The Impossible Fortune is no exception. Readers who sped through it describe the experience as visiting old friends who never fail to surprise you.
9. Because I Killed Him — Edith Birde
Book 1 of The Nine Gentlemen series
This one has been all over social media, and if the hype has you curious, here is the verdict: it earns it. Because I Killed Him is an indie-published dystopian romance by Edith Birde (the pen name of two South African sisters), set in the "Civilized World," a society where everyone appears wealthy but real safety is purchased through alliances, and mistakes are punished by public guillotine. Low-citizen Loredana Waldsten, once a fencing prodigy, is now unarmed and legally defenceless after killing a high-citizen whose death was quietly erased to protect his family's honour. Enrolled at the elite Grandmaster University, she becomes a target until a lost bet forces the charming, ruthless Edmund Prew to bring her into his inner circle. What starts as pure strategy becomes something far more dangerous. Readers describe it as slow-burning and consuming, with world-building unlike anything they have encountered in recent memory. Consider this your invitation to find out together whether it lives up to the rave reviews.
10. Taiwan Travelogue — Yáng Shuāng-zǐ
Winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize, translated by Lin King
Book reviewers cannot stop writing about the food in this novel, and with good reason: Taiwan Travelogue, winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize, uses cuisine as both narrative glue and political revelation. It is May 1938, and young Japanese novelist Aoyama Chizuko has arrived in Japanese-controlled Taiwan on a government-sponsored lecture tour, with no interest in official banquets and every interest in eating her way through authentic Taiwanese cuisine. Her interpreter, the erudite and mysterious Chizuru, fulfills her every culinary wish, arranging journeys across the island over braised pork rice, winter melon tea, and long train rides through lush countryside. As Chizuko grows infatuated, Chizuru keeps a careful, unexplained distance, and the story beneath the story begins to surface. Structured as a fictional translation of a rediscovered text, the novel is formally inventive, quietly devastating, and absolutely brimming with food so vividly written that you will feel genuinely hungry. The 2026 Booker judges called it "a captivating, slyly sophisticated novel" that succeeds as both a delicious romance and an incisive postcolonial work. If you are trying to avoid food cravings, put this one down immediately. If you love food in any form, including the written, this is required summer reading.
