Look, I love to read year-round, but there’s something extra delicious and restorative about reading on the beach, or on the dock at the cottage in the summer. Your hands are a little sticky with sunscreen, your beverage is sweating in the sun alongside you, everything smells like salt and smoke and sunscreen, the sun is beating down on your face, someone is playing music in the background, fat bees are buzzing around in the background, and naps come easy in the heat. 

Summer reading is a glorious experience, and I want to help you heighten that experience by sharing 10 books to bring with you to the beach (or the dock) this summer.

I’ll Tell You When I’m Home by Hala Alyan

I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is the brand-new, stunning memoir by Hala Alyan, the award-winning Palestinian American author. After a decade of yearning for a child, years that have been marked by multiple miscarriages, Hala Alyan makes the decision to use a surrogate. As her baby grows in the body of another woman, in another country, Hala finds her own life has started to unravel — her husband wants to leave, her mental health is getting worse, and Beirut, the city she grew up in, is collapsing. During this time, as the baby starts to grow bigger, Hala turns to stories of her family — of people and places long gone, or ravaged by invading armies and wars. Through fragmented narratives, Alyan takes us through Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon, and the American Midwest in this  powerful, vulnerable story about home, identity, love, motherhood, and legacy. 

Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert

Sophie Gilbert’s Girl on Girl is the book you won’t be able to stop talking about — I know, because I haven’t been able to shut up about it. This book is an immersive critique about how early-aughts pop culture and media turned women and girls against each other, and themselves, with disastrous consequences. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the energy of third-wave and “riot girl” feminism collapsed, giving way to a regressive period of sexualization, infantilization, and objectification. In this collection, Gilbert mines the darker side of nostalgia, diving into music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more — recounting a harrowing and devastating era, when American excess, materialism, and thirst for power collided with the culture’s reactionary, chauvinistic, and puritanical sensibilities. Girl on Girl is a fast-paced, unflinching portrayal of a culture that shaped so many of us. 

Audition by Katie Kitamura

Katie Kitamura’s Audition feels like the book everyone is talking about right now. It’s a short and strange story that sticks with you long after you read it. Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant — she’s an elegant, accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive and young — young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In Audition, we are presented with two competing narratives which rewrite our understanding of the roles we play every day (partner, parent, muse) — as well as the truths that are hidden beneath every performance. Strange and gorgeously written, this is one of those books you’ve got to let happen to you.

Three Days in June by Anne Tyler 

Anne Tyler’s Three Days in June is a short, sensitive, and beautiful novel following a socially awkward mother of the bride who navigates the days before, during, and after her daughter’s wedding. Gail Baines is having a bad day. For starters, she’s either lost her job, or quit it (depending on who you ask). Tomorrow, her daughter, Debbie, is getting married, and she hasn’t even been invited to the spa day organized by the mother of the groom. Then, her ex-husband, Max, arrives unannounced on her doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay or even a suit to wear to the wedding. But the true crisis lands when Debbie tells her parents a secret she’s just discovered about her husband-to-be. Not only will it throw the entire wedding into question, but it also stirs up Gail and Max’s past. Told with care and tenderness, as well as a sense of humour, this book had me both tearing up and laughing out loud as it explores the joys and heartbreaks of love, marriage, and family. 

A Forgery of Fate by Elizabeth Lim

A Forgery of Fate is the latest by the bestselling young adult author, Elizabeth Lim. It’s a sweeping romantic fantasy, inspired by Beauty and the Beast, about a girl who paints the future and a cursed dragon lord, bound together by love and deception in a plot to bring down the gods. Truyan didn’t choose to become a con artist, but after her father is lost at sea, it’s up to her to support her mother and her two younger sisters. She’s a gifted art forger, with a unique ability to paint the future, but even that’s not enough to stave off brutal debt collectors, or to put her family back together again. Left with few options, she agrees to a marriage contract with a mysterious dragon lord. He offers elusive answers about her father’s disappearance, and a fresh start for her mother and her sisters — and in exchange, Tru must join him in his desolate, undersea palace, assisting him in a plot to infiltrate the tyrannical Dragon King’s inner circle.

Palm Meridian by Grace Flahive

Grace Flahive’s Palm Meridian is a delightful romp. Set in 2067, with Florida partially underwater, we meet the residents of Palm Meridian Retirement Resort, a utopian home for queer women who want to live large in their twilight years. Hannah Cardin has spent ten happy years under these tropical, technicolour skies, but after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, she has decided that tomorrow morning, she will close her eyes for the very last time. Tonight, however, Hannah and her raucous friends are throwing one hell of an end-of-life party. With less than twenty-four hours left, Hannah hopes for a final chance with her great lost love, Sophie, by adding her to the guest list. But when a shocking secret from the past is revealed, Hannah must reconsider if she can say goodbye after all.

Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

You know when you have a friend whose recommendations you treat as scripture? Well, one of those friends recommended Beautyland to me, and I must say, it sounds like the kind of book I’m going to ADORE. Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a beautiful, tender story about a woman who doesn’t feel at home on Earth. At the very moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light, recognizing even as a child that she is different. Adina possesses knowledge of a faraway planet, and when a fax machine arrives, it enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives — beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings. For years, as she moves through the world, she has made a life for herself among the humans — and the joys and terrors of their existence. When a beloved friend urges her to share her messages with the world, Adina is forced to wonder if there’s a chance that she’s not alone.

The Summers Between Us by Noreen Nanja

Noreen Nanja’s debut, The Summers Between Us, is a beautiful second-chance romance about love, identity, cultural expectations, and coming-of-age. Lia Juma thought she’d buried her heart’s desires long ago, but when she’s forced to return to her family’s cottage on Pike Bay, her carefully crafted life starts to unravel. Lia has always tried to be the perfect immigrant daughter, carving out a successful career as a corporate lawyer, and dating a man who meets all of her mother’s exacting criteria for the ideal son-in-law. Underneath it all, is a secret she’s never spoken of — one that she worries could have destroyed her family a decade ago. Now, back at the bay, Lia is faced with the boy she left behind, as well as the memories she thought she’d forgotten. As old wounds and feelings surface, Lia must decide if she can heal from the past, and finally embrace the life and the love she has always craved. Is a second chance with Wes worth risking everything for?

Detective Aunty by Uzma Jalaluddin

I’ve previously raved about her romance novels, so you can imagine I was thrilled to hear that Uzma Jalaluddin was making her foray into mystery with Detective Aunty. After her husband’s unexpected death eighteen months ago, Kausar Khan never thought she’d receive another phone call as heartbreaking — that is until her thirty-something daughter, Sana, phones to tell her she’s been arrested for the murder of the unpopular landlord of her clothing boutique. Determined to help her daughter, Kausar heads to Toronto’s Golden Crescent suburb where she raised her children, for the first time in twenty years. She soon discovers that the thriving neighbourhood she remembers has changed — Sana’s landlord’s murder is only the latest in a wave of local crimes that have gone unsolved. Kausar knows there’s more to the story than seems, so with the help of some old friends, and her plucky, teenage granddaughter, she decides to try to uncover the truth of what really happened.

One Golden Summer by Carley Fortune

I cannot make a “Summer Reading” booklist without including at least one book by the iconic Canadian queen of the summer romance — Carley Fortune. One Golden Summer is Fortune’s latest, a delicious escape to the lake, a story about second chances, and feeling seen. Good things happen at the lake — that’s what Alice’s grandmother says, and Alice knows this to be true, just based on the single summer she spent at a cottage with Nan when she was seventeen. It was the summer she took that photo — the one of the three grinning teenagers in a yellow speedboat — the photo that changed her life. Now, Alice lives behind a lens, comfortable on the sidelines as a photographer. Lately, though, she’s been itching for something more, and when Nan falls and breaks her hip, Alice comes up with the perfect plan for them both — another summer in that magical place, Barry’s Bay. But nearly as soon as they settle in, their peace is disrupted by the roar of a familiar yellow boat, and the man driving it…

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Ameema Saeed (@ameemabackwards) is a storyteller, a Capricorn, an avid bookworm, and a curator of very specific playlists and customized book recommendations. She’s a book reviewer, a Sensitivity Reader, a book buyer at Indigo Books & Music, and the Books Editor for She Does the City, where she writes and curates bookish content, and book recommendations. She enjoys bad puns, good food, dancing, and talking about feelings. She writes about books, big feelings, unruly bodies, and her lived experiences, and hopes to write your next favourite book one day. When she’s not reading books, she likes to talk about books (especially diverse books, and books by diverse authors) on her bookstagram: @ReadWithMeemz