Readers, 2026 marks FIFTEEN YEARS of our annual Summer Reading Guide! I’m excited to put the brand new guide in your hands, but as a reflective reader, I’m also enjoying a look back at how this guide has grown and changed since its first iteration in 2012.
That inaugural guide included timeless classics like Pride and Prejudice and Brideshead Revisited, along with buzzy new releases hitting bookstore shelves that first summer. But it wasn’t long before I was reading advance review copies to sift through summer’s most anticipated releases so I could recommend my personal favorites.
Today I’m sharing 15 backlist favorites from our past Summer Reading Guides—the standout books that have stuck with me years later. Since the first Guide dropped in 2012, I’ve returned to many of the books on this list for a reread (and not just in the summertime!).
While many of us love reading new releases during summer reading season, those new books can also force an exercise in patience—whether due to long library holds or simply waiting for publication dates for hotly anticipated titles to arrive. Thankfully, we can always turn to the backlist for plentiful great options. “Backlist” simply means “not newly published.” Because backlist books have been out for awhile, they’re often available in paperback and have shorter wait times at the library.
Your bookish enthusiasm has helped our annual summer reading tradition grow from a blog post to a beautifully published digital magazine—and I can’t thank you enough for your support. I’m excited to share our 2026 guide next week and look forward to hearing how it shapes your reading life this summer.
In the meantime, I hope you find a few promising backlist Summer Reading Guide titles to add to your library tote, beach bag, or e-reader for the months to come.
15 backlist favorites from 15 years of the Summer Reading Guide
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What Alice Forgot
This 2013 Summer Reading Guide pick may still be my favorite Liane Moriarty novel. Alice is 29, expecting her first child, and in love with her husband—or at least she thinks she is, but then she bumps her head and wakes up on the gym floor, to find that she’s actually a 39-year-old mother of three who’s in the middle of divorcing the man she apparently hates. She doesn’t know what’s happened to her these past ten years, or who she’s become. She’s about to find out. Interesting, readable, and surprisingly thought-provoking. I inhaled this in one sitting, but found myself mulling it over for ages after I finished. More info →
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
A wonderful, riveting story of resilience and redemption. This 2012 Summer Reading Guide selection tells the true story of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic athlete turned World War II bombardier. Hillenbrand has called Zamp’s life “almost incomprehensibly dramatic,” and she masterfully unfurls his story, which begins with his plane failing and crashing into the Pacific during a routine search mission. He's captured as a POW and survives against nearly impossible odds. More info →
The Language of Flowers
The title of this 2014 Summer Reading Guide selection comes from the Victorian Era's literal language of flowers, which they relied on to convey feelings rarely spoken of: ardor and friendship, jealousy and envy, infidelity and grief. We meet Victoria Jones on her eighteenth birthday: the day she is emancipated from foster care. Though fluent in the meaning and the messages of the blooms she cultivates, Victoria uses her flowers to communicate not love and friendship, but distrust and discord. But as she strikes out on her own, she comes to learn that the language of flowers is more complicated than she was taught to believe. This beautiful debut is easy-reading, yet has depth and feeling. Ultimately, it's a redemption story—and who doesn't love a good redemption story? More info →
Run for the Hills
Wilson deftly combines the heavy and the light in this found family story of four scattered half-siblings who meet for the first time and then pile into an old PT Cruiser to go find the father who abandoned them long ago. Wilson’s stories often feel larger than life, yet the emotional heart feels real and relatable. Quirky, warm, and bighearted, with a multigenerational cast and road trip hijinks galore. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s no spoiler to say I found this coast-to-coast adventure and 2025 Minimalist Summer Reading Guide pick to be an utter delight. I thoroughly enjoyed this on audio as read by Marin Ireland. More info →
The Martian: A Novel
Think Cast Away, in outer space. Funny, thrilling, and surprisingly plausible. When a deadly dust storm cuts their mission short, astronaut Mark Watney’s crew makes an agonizing decision to return to earth without him. They saw his biosigns go flat: they believe they're leaving his body behind. But Watney is very much alive, and now he must find a way to survive on Mars, in a damaged station, with limited food and no communication. Next step: to cobble together a rescue plan. Audiofile alert: Wil Wheaton’s narration for this 2015 Summer Reading Guide selection is pitch perfect, as is the movie adaptation. More info →
The One-in-a-Million Boy
This Summer Reading Guide title was one of my favorite books of 2016, yet I NEVER would have read this if a trusted bookseller hadn't pressed it into my hands and said READ IT. (Thank you again, Holland and The Novel Neighbor!) I went into this novel knowing nothing and I liked it that way, so I'll just say Wood explores themes of love, loss, and identity through a quirky 11-year-old boy who loves making lists, a wily 104-year-old woman, an absentee father, a Boy Scout project, and the Guinness Book of World Records. This remains an excellent pick for fans of The Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, A Man Called Ove, and Harry's Trees. More info →
The Dry
"You lied. Luke lied. Be at the funeral." In this series opener, federal Agent Aaron Falk is summoned home with these words after his best friend Luke dies in a heartbreaking murder-suicide, turning the gun on himself after killing his wife and 6-year-old son. Falk obeys—but he can't believe his best friend could have done such a thing, and so he starts digging, dragging long-buried secrets back to the surface. The setting is the drought-ravaged Australian Outback, and the brittleness and heat are palpable. I've recommended this Summer Reading Guide greatest hit to pieces since it first appeared in the 2017 guide. Of all Jane Harper's books, her debut remains my favorite. More info →
The Wedding Date
Guillory’s debut was inspired by frustration: she wanted to read more books about people like her and her friends: single, with jobs, and living in cities. Oh, and she wanted to see Black women in the pages. Enter this 2018 Summer Reading Guide pick. Drew and Alexa meet cute in a broken-down elevator; sparks are flying within seconds. Drew’s in town to watch his ex marry his best friend (ouch). He doesn’t have a date, so he asks Alexa to come along—and pretend to be his girlfriend. Soon the fake relationship starts to feel surprisingly real. But they both have big jobs they love, in different cities. Drew’s track record with women isn’t great. Alexa is Black, and Drew is white. In short: it gets complicated. But it’s a rom-com, so they’re going to see it through. (Open door.) More info →
Ask Again, Yes
When two rookie cops who meet at the NYC Police Academy strike up a friendship, it sets in motion a tragic chain of events that echo through the decades, through the lives of their children and their children’s children. I found this book exceptionally difficult to read—it’s depressing and dark and triggers abound—yet I was eager to find out what would happen next to these doomed families, and the astonishing developments of the last 75 pages vaulted this 2019 Summer Reading Guide selection to my best-of-the-year list. A poignant story of grace, forgiveness, and redemption, for fans of Atonement and Little Fires Everywhere. More info →
The Jane Austen Society
This charming debut was a 2020 Minimalist Summer Reading Guide selection as well as the Modern Mrs Darcy Book Club August 2022 selection. Jane Austen lived out her last days in the sleepy village of Chawton, and in the days just after World War II, her legacy still looms large. Times are hard, and we meet several villagers burdened with their own private sorrows, who are doing what they’ve always done: turning to the works of Austen for solace. When a local business attempts to buy the Austen property and raze her cottage, the villagers band together to preserve her legacy. At one point, a character muses that Austen’s works present “a world so a part of our own, yet so separate, that entering it is like some kind of tonic.” The same can be said of Jenner’s wonderful book. Those on the hunt for standout audiobooks should know that Richard Armitage’s narration elevates the reading experience. More info →
Firekeeper’s Daughter
This powerfully layered YA debut and 2021 Summer Reading Guide selection adroitly balances a thrilling crime plot, a fake relationship, and a thoughtful exploration of identity and belonging. 18-year-old hockey star Daunis dreams of leaving her small community of Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and making a fresh start in college. But after she witnesses a terrible crime, Daunis is persuaded to go undercover to nail the dealers whose deadly new drugs are ravaging her Anishinaabe community. While seeking justice for her best friend, Daunis also grapples with burgeoning feelings for her handsome hockey player crush and navigates often-tense relationships within her own family. This one shines for its pulse-pounding first-person narrative drive and prolific use of Ojibwe phrases and practices. (Content warnings apply.) More info →
The Guide
Seasoned wilderness writer Heller tries his hand at the thriller genre in this 2021 Summer Reading Guide selection and follow-up to The River. “The virus from three years back that kept mutating, the superbug that finally broke out of India.” Though not a sequel, The Guide picks up Jack’s story several years after The River ends, and spoilers to the previous book’s ending are embedded in the plot. Jack has graduated from Dartmouth and come home to Colorado. Now he’s taken a summer job as a fly-fishing guide at a luxe resort that caters to celebrity clientele. He’s lucky, it seems—it’s rare for a guide to leave mid-season, but his predecessor did. Jack is paired with Allison, a country music star born and raised in East Tennessee who loves to fish for the same reasons Jack does—to enjoy the full absorption the sport requires. Jack’s first clue that something is amiss is the camera, and the tension builds from there. More info →
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi
I find myself recommending this 2023 Minimalist Summer Reading Guide pick all the time, and am excited about the sequel coming out in May. This first spirited installment of a planned trilogy tells the tale of a renegade pirate captain who happens to be a middle-aged mother simply trying to enjoy her retirement. But after a former crewmate’s daughter is kidnapped, Amina reluctantly accepts one last job and pulls her long-retired crew together again to help. The historical fantasy unfolds on the high seas of the twelfth-century Indian Ocean and bursts with period detail and magical adventures. From the book’s touching dedication to the detailed author’s note and acknowledgments, I found this imaginative tale and irresistible protagonist unique, exciting, and just plain fun. The audio narration by Lameece Issaq and Amin El Gamal is superb and also incredibly thoughtful; listen to the very end and you'll see what I mean. More info →
There Are Rivers in the Sky
The award winning British-Turkish novelist Shafak delivers an ambitious and gorgeous novel revolving around three fascinating individuals, the Tigris and Thames rivers, and the ancient poem The Epic of Gilgamesh in this 2024 Summer Reading Guide selection. The sweeping narrative begins in King Ashurbanipal's Mesopotamian court and ends in modern-day London, with the central thread revolving around the life of a boy known as King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums, from his birth by the Thames in 1840 to his death by the Tigris in 1876. The memorable characters, separated as they are by time and space, may not at first seem to have much in common, but they are connected by something small, crucial, eternal: a single drop of water. More info →
Take My Hand
A timely and gripping work of historical fiction loosely inspired by the real-life groundbreaking court case of Relf v Weinberger. In 2016 Memphis, distinguished Black doctor Civil Townsend prepares to retire. First she must journey to her hometown of Montgomery to make peace with the past and tell the truth of it to her own daughter. In alternating timelines, Civil reveals all that unfolded in 1973, when she was a young and idealistic nurse, stepping into her first job at a reproductive clinic serving Black women in her community. She cared deeply for the girls under her care, but grew alarmed at what she was called upon to do: administer experimental and perhaps unnecessary treatments to young patients without their understanding or consent. When the unthinkable happens to one patient and she is sterilized without consent, Civil becomes involved in a landmark lawsuit. This 2022 Minimalist Summer Reading Guide selection is a moving story and a testament to fiction’s power to influence hearts and impact lives. More info →
What are your favorite backlist books from past Summer Reading Guides? I can’t wait to see your summer reading favorites in the comments.
P.S. 15 Backlist Summer Reading Guide favorites that are even better on audio, 15 backlist books that feel like summer, and 10 nonfiction books that read like novels to enjoy on the beach (or in your backyard) this summer.
3 comments
The Postcard by Anne Berest. I still don’t know how she managed to tell such a difficult story in such a beautiful way that you couldn’t even imagine putting it down. I just chose it for my book club’s pick in April (my first time choosing a book for it), and I was so nervous that they wouldn’t like it, but it was a massive hit and in my opinion, one of the best discussions we’ve had. The relevance to the times we are living in just added to the depth of conversation. And as a genealogist, I loved hearing the stories of how the mother was able to find so many details to fill in the stories of her ancestors. Thank you so much for bringing such wonderful and important reading into our lives!
I can tell I’ve been following the guide for a while.. I’ve read most of these! The Cartographers by Peng Shepard from 2022 has to be on my favorite list.. Sparks Like Stars by Nadia Hashimi and Crying in H Mart from 2021 as well! Oh and Shark Heart (2023) and Lessons in Chemistry (2022). So many! Thanks for putting together this incredible list every year!
Just got a couple from Libby. Thanks!