The Next Heatwave Will Be Here Before You Know It—Here's Your Reading List

It’s a hot, muggy day in Falls Landing, Florida, and Sammy Liu-Lou is missing. The younger teenagers in the neighborhood idolize Sammy and together tell the story of Sammy, her older friend Mia, Eddie Suarez and Star Search. This highly atmospheric novel features low-humming surrealism, teenage hormones and the thick haze that can blanket a community.

From the balconies of their adjacent apartment complex, the girls watch as Sammy and Eddie get together at night, breaching the walls of her gated community. While ice cubes clink in their mother’s cocktails, the girls trail the older kids from blazing parking lots to a swampy lake near their complex. They’re especially fascinated by Mia. Slightly older than Sammy, her mother runs scouting competitions for Star Search. Pressured to enter a competition, Mia acts out, rebelling against her mother and putting the girls in harm’s way. Meanwhile, Sammy vanishes. Though Sammy’s parents are in a frenzy to find her, the girls aren’t totally surprised by Sammy’s disappearance.

With choral narration reminiscent of The Virgin Suicides, Brutes is a story about a hot summer in Florida and the ripples it sent through each of the girls’ lives. With a setting so realistically rendered you can hear the cicadas sing, Brutes is Florida gothic at its best.

At the start of the game show, 20 young women await the men’s arrival. They also take stock of how terribly the previous contestants cared for the estate. The girls make quick work of whipping the grounds into shape, despite the blistering heat of the surrounding desert.

Then the men appear like a mirage in the distance. Once they’re inside the gates, the competition officially kicks off. The rundown: Contestants must complete challenges to earn necessary products, including sunscreen, nails, and wood. Individual contestants can partake in personal challenges to receive things like makeup and nail clippers, and, as the contest continues, expensive jewelry. Lily knows all of this because she’s been a devoted fan of the show before getting cast herself. That means she also knows that when the guys are one short, it’s bad news for the women because every night a guy and gal must share a bed, and if someone is left without a bed partner, they’re eliminated.

As couples form and alliances shatter, the competition thickens as weeks progress. The heat, a simmering reminder of their vulnerability, only adds to the strange sense of living in a mirage, especially as wars rage in the real world. But when a different kind of fight implodes within the estate—and with violence conservatively permitted—there’s no telling how the game will end.

The ultimate beach read and reality-TV-inspired novel, you’ll likely burn your fingers for how quickly you'll race through the pages. With drama that makes Love Island look like child’s play and an unforgiving setting only heightening the stakes, this book cooks with tension.

It’s the summer of 2019, and London is melting in an excruciating heatwave, turning the city on its head. So much so, a whale has gotten beached on the shores of the Thames. But the soaring temperature isn’t the only thing that’s bogging down Oisín McKenna’s linked cast of characters. Take Maggie, for example, who’s recently discovered she’s pregnant with the guy she was considering leaving. Or Maggie's best friend, Phil, who’s recovering from an assault and grappling with his feelings for a housemate. Or Phil’s brother, Callum, who’s on the brink of getting married and carrying a dreadful secret he can barely contain. Or Callum and Phil’s mother, Rosaleen, who has arrived in London to tell Phil some bad news.

Over the course of the weekend, the efforts to help the whale progress and friction between characters become frenetic. It reaches a boiling point during a warehouse party (and its aftermath), when confrontations occur, the truth comes out, and futures are irrevocably altered. A banger of a debut, McKenna renders characters caught under the pressure of expectations, financial insecurity and identity with precision. Evenings and Weekends will stick with you well into sweater season. Fans of Bernardine Evaristo, Ben Lerner, and Sally Rooney will relish the interwoven perspectives and plot.

If you’re a true crime girlie with a soft spot for cults, you’ve come to the right place. In the summer of 1969, Evie notices a group of young women in her Northern California neighborhood. By chance, she helps one of them, Suzanne, at the general store, and the two become friends, leading them to invite her into their tight-knit circle.

Evie is invited to the ranch where the women live, which is where she meets Russell, the charismatic leader of the group. Enthralled by her new friends, Evie does everything to spend more time at the ranch with them, especially Suzanne. But when Evie’s mother catches her stealing to support the group, she’s sent to Palo Alto to live with her father and his younger girlfriend. It’s a welcome respite, for about a minute. Soon, Evie is daydreaming about Suzanne and the exciting future that waits for them once Russell lands a record deal. But when Russell’s music career falls apart, the group becomes despondent and devises a sinister plan for revenge.

The perfect summer thriller to read on vacation, this haunting novel teems with the dry heat of a California summer. A story loosely inspired by the Manson family, with characters you root for and a plot so unputdownable you might forget to reapply your sunscreen. (Please don’t.)

Slim enough to breeze through over a long weekend, Girl’s Girl captures the drama and malaise of summer when you’re a teenager. It’s stifling in the Ohio suburbs where Mia and her best friends, Margaret and Eleanor, live. As Mia secretly pines for the latter, the three romp around, snap photos for their Instagrams, play The Sims, and prepare for night outs, no matter the destination. But when Mia is grounded and her summer is suspended, she watches as Eleanor and Margaret continue their antics. Once released from house arrest, Mia rejoins the others, but the trifecta is unbalanced, only to be rocked further by an unexpected kiss.

Seemingly quiet in plot, Girl’s Girl could have been a caricature of stereotypes many of us carry into adulthood. Instead, Feldman delivers an irreverent homage to teenage girlhood, desire, and queerness. Tenderly depicting the rituals of female friendship, there’s no question you’ll relate to one (or all) the characters. With this as her debut, Sonia Feldman announces herself as one to watch.

If you loved The Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny or devoured Arundhati Roy’s recent memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, and want more of the author’s work, pick up The God of Small Things. Roy’s astounding debut follows fraternal twins Estha and Rahel, and their expansive family living in India. Told in a split timeline between 1969, when the kids are 7, and 1993, when they’re 31—the same age their mother died—readers learn about fissures that ultimately fracture the family.

When their cousin is discovered to be engaged in an affair with a servant, cruel maneuvers and manipulations ensue, resulting in a family tragedy. The twins are falsely accused of taking part in plans that caused the event, leading to their separation, with Estha sent to live with their father. Apart for years, the two are molded by their respective upbringings. As the story unfolds, the novel draws a portrait of a family mired in resentment, loss, and misunderstandings. With beautiful prose and crisp characters, this is a book to get lost in.

When a novel begins, “The heat, the heat,” you know you’re in for a scorcher. Occurring during London’s infamous heatwave in 1976, the searing temperature is an ominous presence beating down on the Riordan family, which is already at breaking point. First, the patriarch, Robert, sets off to morning errands—and never comes back. When his wife Gretta discovers their bank account has been drained, he asks her three adult children to come home.

Each child’s life has reached a tipping point. The oldest, Michael Francis, has a marriage teetering on collapse—and his father’s disappearance might be the thing that pushes them over the edge. Aoife, meanwhile, has moved to N.Y.C., despite a secret crippling hindrance. And Monica finds herself trapped in a marriage she possibly regrets.

A lush novel that sweats with excellence, be sure to revisit this after you’ve finished Maggie O’Farrell’s latest, Land. If you’re into Jonathan Franzen, Colum McCann, or Elizabeth Strout, you’ll undoubtedly tear through this barn burner.

There comes a pivotal moment in every reader's life when they get to introduce someone to Zadie Smith. But what to choose? NW might be a good place to start. Full of Smith’s well-drawn characters in a bustling part of London overlooked by some, NW tackles themes about class, upward mobility and race. Plus, the novel’s structure demands admiration in its own right. Comprising prose, stream-of-consciousness, and screenplay dialogue, Smith expertly wields narration style to represent each character’s mindset.

The novel follows Natalie, Felix, Leah, and Nathan, who are from the same neighborhood in, you guessed it, northwest London. Natalie has pushed her ambition to the brim in the predominantly working-class area, striving to move up from her childhood home. Now a successful lawyer, she lives in a bougie part of London with her investment banker husband and two children. Still, she is lonely to the point of breaking. Meanwhile, her best friend Leah still lives in their neighborhood and works in social services. She’s married to Michel and generally fulfilled, yet sabotages their efforts to start a family. And then Felix, out of rehab and pursuing a clean future, steps into a muddy mess while trying to be a good Samaritan...which may or may not be tied to Nathan, an addict who’s fallen into being unhoused. Interrelated and gorgeously executed, NW traces these characters through the ebb of their thirties during a steamy summer that only three will see turn to fall.

It’s 2005, and Hurricane Katrina is brewing offshore from Southern Mississippi, where 14-year-old Esch lives with her father and brothers, Randall, Skeetah, and the baby, Junior. Esch joins Skeetah on a trip to the grocery store for supplies after his dog has puppies. There, Esch shoplifts a pregnancy test. She’s been keeping a secret: She and Manny, Randall’s friend, have been hooking up, and recently, she’s been ill in the mornings. The test tells Esch what she already knew: She’s pregnant with his child.

As the storm encroaches, she and her brothers get involved in dog fights, parties, and basketball games. But when their father undergoes a brutal accident on their tractor, the children work together to prepare for the storm. Soon, the family must take refuge in their attic as water rises. An unflinching story of resilience and family against the backdrop of Hurricane Katrina, readers will feel the tide creep up as they turn the pages. Putting a stamp on Southern Gothic, Jesmyn Ward brilliantly marries magical realism to the challenges and love shared among communities in the rural South.

You may think of Edith Wharton as a city girl, writing about the goings-on of upper-crust Manhattanites in the early 20th century. And while that’s true, she also produced a lesser-known book about living in the Berkshires, Summer. A coming-of-age novel that was hot and heavy for its time, Summer follows Charity Royall as she blooms into womanhood. Heralding from rural poverty, Charity’s mother gives the young girl to the local intellect, Lawyer Royall, who resides in a nearby small town. As Charity matures, Lawyer’s interest in her curdles into something untoward: He comes onto Charity, who turns him down. He does not take the rejection well.

Later, when Charity is 17, a chance encounter introduces her to Lucien, a travelling architect. As Charity shows him around town, the two develop feelings, and soon fall in love. Lawyer, who holds onto a grudge longer than one of the Real Housewives, does everything to sabotage the couple. But he shouldn’t stress; society may tear the lovers apart for him. That is, if Lucien is too weak to ignore the pressure to marry the perfect match, who decidedly is not Charity. Chock-full of yearning, first kisses, and heartache, Summer is exquisite for reading on a mountain getaway, or anywhere, really. Don’t sleep on this one.

After a year-long hiatus, Janie Crawford has returned to Eatonville, an all-Black community in Florida. Reuniting with her bestie, Pheoby, Janie dishes on where she’s been. But first, she needs to explain the events that drove her to leave. Janie begins to talk about her childhood with her grandmother, who was enslaved and wants nothing but stability for her granddaughter. It's what she sees in older farmer Logan Killicks, whom she arranges for Janie to marry. But when Janie realizes that Logan wants a farmhand, not a wife, she runs off to Eatonville, where she spends the next grim decades.

Eventually, Janie believes she’s met the love of her life but is skeptical of his intentions. After years of unhappiness, Janie must decide if she’s willing to take a risk for a brighter future.

We won’t hold it against you if you haven’t read Their Eyes Were Watching God since high school. To us, this is the ultimate reread, especially if you were a bit younger your first go. Digging into themes of gender roles, race, and finding one’s voice, you’ll fall in love with this classic all over again.