7 Books to Read This Summer (If You Love Beautiful Places)
We read all year round, but summer has always felt different.
Maybe it's because we finally have the time to disappear into a story. Or because some books seem impossible to imagine anywhere other than on a beach or a slow afternoon with nowhere else to be. We leave them open on bedside tables and return to them after dinner when the windows are still open.
This isn't a list of new releases or books everyone is talking about. It's simply a collection of novels we've loved over the years and keep recommending to friends.
Some are set along the Mediterranean and others unfold in cities that feel suspended in the August heat. But all of them have a strong sense of place and leave behind something that lingers long after the last page.
Play It as It Lays, Joan Didion (1990)
There are books you admire and books that change your life. This is the latter.
Joan Didion has an extraordinary ability to make landscape feel emotional. Los Angeles becomes dry, quiet and unsettling; every motorway, motel and swimming pool seems to mirror the people moving through them. Sparse, sharp and unforgettable.
Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan (1954)
This is the quintessential summer novel.
A villa on the French Riviera, long afternoons by the sea and the particular carelessness of being young. Beneath its effortless elegance lies something much darker, making it one of those books that becomes richer every time you return to it.
L.A. Woman, Eve Babitz (1982)
If Joan Didion observed Los Angeles with distance and restraint, Eve Babitz threw herself into it.
Her city is sensual, glamorous and gloriously excessive. It lives through parties, artists, friendships and long afternoons by the pool. Where Didion finds unease beneath the Californian light, Babitz finds pleasure. Reading them side by side feels like discovering two entirely different versions of the same place.
If this literary rivalry fascinates you, we also recommend Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik — a portrait of two women who defined Los Angeles in radically different ways, and of the city that shaped them both.
Lie With Me, Philippe Besson (2017)
Lana del Rey sang beautifully about Summer sadness. There’s something nostalgic and melancholic about this season. Lie with Me evokes this feeling. It is quiet, intimate and devastating.
Set in provincial France during the 1980s, Lie With Me explores memory, desire and the relationships that continue to shape us decades later.
Last Summer in the City, Gianfranco Calligarich (1970)
Rome has rarely felt so alive on the page.
There is something beautifully cinematic about this novel: late nights, fading glamour, empty streets in August and characters drifting through the city in search of meaning.
A perfect book for anyone who believes cities can become characters themselves.
August Blue, Deborah Levy (2023)
Like all great Deborah Levy novels, this one refuses to rush.
It moves through Europe with curiosity rather than certainty, asking quiet questions about art, identity and reinvention. The kind of book best read slowly, with nowhere in particular to be.
The Trio, Johanna Hedman (2022)
A beautifully observed novel about friendship, desire and the people who change us without meaning to.
Elegant, intimate and quietly nostalgic, it captures that strange period of early adulthood when everything still feels possible, even if nothing feels entirely certain.