It’s not just interesting to find out what books other readers have enjoyed, it’s a great way to get ideas for your own reading list. So when the Summer Reading Challenge wrapped and a quick tally revealed ten books were popular among participants, we had to create a list to share. All are fiction except for Belle Burden’s compelling memoir, Strangers. To place a title on hold, select the link.
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Yesteryear / Caro Claire Burke
A social media celebrity, wife, and mother who sells her fantasy pioneer lifestyle to millions of followers, wakes up cold, dirty, and hungry in the year 1855. Just yesterday she was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and today she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a brutal reality show? Could it be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? She soon realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life and she must escape by any means possible. Burke’s debut novel is a gripping, darkly funny look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood. -
Dolly All the Time / Annabel Monaghan
Dolly Brick has never met a problem she couldn’t solve—not when she was twelve and her mom left and not at thirty-nine when she moves with her son back to Whitfield, Rhode Island, for the summer to keep her dad and brother from losing the family home. So when she encounters Stewart Whitfield—the annoyingly handsome scion of the Whitfield family—with a flat tire and at the wrong end of a very public, very humiliating breakup, it’s in her nature to help. But the arrangement he proposes ends up being more than either of them bargained for. -
Strangers: A Memoir of a Marriage / Belle Burden
Burden chronicles her twenty-year marriage’s sudden collapse during the pandemic, exploring themes of betrayal, self-discovery, and transformation as she finds her way and her voice. -
Atmosphere / Taylor Jenkins Reid
In 1980, a professor begins training at Johnson Space Center alongside an exceptional group. As the new astronauts prepare for their first flights and become unlikely friends, she finds a passion she never imagined and begins to question all that she thinks she knows. -
Great Big Beautiful Life / Emily Henry
Alice Scott is an eternal optimist still dreaming of her big writing break. Hayden Anderson is a Pulitzer-prize winning human thundercloud. They’re both on balmy Little Crescent Island for the same reason: to write the biography of Margaret Ives, a woman no one has seen in years—or at least to meet with the octogenarian who claims to be Margaret Ives. Tragic heiress, former tabloid princess, and daughter of one of the most storied (and scandalous) families of the 20th century has invited them both for a one-month trial period, after which she’ll choose the person who’ll tell her story. -
Hope Rises / David Baldacci
After becoming an informant for the FBI, Walter Nash is on the road to revenge. He has nothing left to lose and with long, rigorous training under his belt, the gentle and sensitive Nash has transformed into something he never thought he’d be: a physically imposing man with lethal skills. And now he has only goal: taking down an international crime organization’s leader, Victoria Steers. But while working on the inside of the operation, Nash finds himself oddly drawn to her. Book 2 in the Walter Nash series. -
Small Things Like These / Claire Keegan
It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, he makes a discovery that compels him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church. Keegan gas written a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy.
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The Calamity Club / Kathryn Stockett
Oxford, Mississippi, 1933. Abandoned by her mother one Christmas Eve, eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur has learned the hard way to rely on no one. Now one of the unadoptable ‘big girls’ at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, she fights each day to keep her spirit unbowed. Birdie Calhoun, unmarried and outspoken, has come to Oxford to ask her socialite sister to help the struggling family she’s left behind. But as the Depression tightens its grip, Birdie discovers her sister’s seemingly charmed life is a tapestry of lies. Then, Birdie encounters Charlie, a woman running low on luck with little left to lose. When their fates—and Meg’s—converge, Charlie comes up with an audacious plan to claim what’s rightfully theirs. But in a place where hypocrisy is rife and at a time when women’s freedom is fragile, even the smallest act of defiance can have dangerous consequences.
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The First Time I Saw Him / Laura Dave
Five years after her husband Owen disappeared, Hannah Hall and her stepdaughter Bailey have settled into a new life in Southern California. Together, they’ve forged a relationship with Bailey’s grandfather and are putting the past behind them. But when Owen shows up at Hannah’s new exhibition, she knows that she and Bailey are in danger again. Hannah and Bailey are forced to go on the run in a relentless race to keep their past from catching up with them. As a thrilling drama unfolds, Hannah risks everything to get Bailey to safety—and finds there just might be a way back to Owen and their long-awaited second chance.
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Theo of Golden / Allen Levi
One spring morning, a stranger named Theo arrives in the small Southern city of Golden. He doesn’t explain much about where he came from or why he’s there—but when he visits the local coffeehouse, where pencil portraits of the people of Golden hang on the walls, he begins purchasing them, one at a time, and giving each portrait to the person depicted. In exchange, he asks only for the person’s story. And so, portrait by portrait, person by person, secrets are revealed, regrets are shared, and ordinary lives are profoundly altered.
