Summer presents the perfect opportunity to sit outdoors rediscover the simple joy of reading. Here, Edinburgh-based writer, Claire Maxwell, shares the novels and memoirs she’ll be poring over this season.

Blue skies, round yellow suns that lightly burn our noses, and frosty drinks to sip as we read a pile of stonkingly good books make for a blissful summer.

These are not all books I read while lying on a beach. Some I even read in the winter. But they are all books that transport me to lush green meadows, dusty hot streets, hotel terraces, a highland loch in the pouring rain. They are books that evoke such a sense of place you can smell the protagonist’s sun cream on their warm, salty skin. They are books that are so compulsively readable you need a day with no interruptions to get the full immersive experience.

The Vacationers by Emma Straub

This is one of those books that leaves you remembering not just the story (in fact, I often forget plots) but how it made you feel and where you were when you read it. I was lying on a beach towel by the side of a beautiful lake in Switzerland, and I remember it being a perfect day.

The Vacationers is a drama set in Majorca where a New York family have gone on holiday. It is full of gorgeous descriptions of food and summer alongside masterfully drawn characters and a plot as charming as it is absorbing.

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

This book is perfect to pack for your holiday, not just because it’ll wrap you up in an intricate mystery, but also because it’s so complicated it really needs to be read in one big gulp. It’s been criticised by some for its complex plot, but I loved that about it—it made me feel clever and smug when I saw something coming (a rare occurrence) and winded when I didn’t. A dark and witty full-cast murder mystery set in a manor house that no one’s escaping from.

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

The book that made Cheryl Strayed’s name, and for good reason: Wild is the beautifully told story of her journey – literal and figurative – through grief and along the Pacific Crest Trail. The way she describes her relationship with her beloved mother, her spiral into addiction, and what the painful exercise of walking 1000 miles taught her is profound and deeply moving. You feel as though you are in the woods with her, that you are sleeping under canvas, and when she takes her first sip of Snapple lemonade after days without water, you feel quenched right alongside her.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanigahari

This isn’t your typical ‘summer read’. It is dark and traumatic. I read it on holiday in Italy in 2017, and though my surroundings contrasted so dramatically with the bleakness of what was unfurling in the pages before me, I was pleased to have the time to devote to those special characters. Because they are—so special. Although the book is perhaps the most painful I’ve ever read, I didn’t want it to end. By the time I finished the 700 pages, I truly felt I knew Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm – that they were dear friends I couldn’t bear to part with. Some people find the story of A Little Life gratuitous in its darkness—I couldn’t disagree more. I find it the most exceptionally realised portrait of trauma, love, and loyalty I’ve ever read.

Summerwater by Sarah Moss

Set in a Scottish chalet park: families, couples, groups of friends are enduring the rain and grey skies huddled in their cabins overlooking the choppy waters of a loch. Summerwater is an exploration of community and all the good, bad, and ugly that comes with it. Sarah Moss manages to so perfectly encapsulate the excruciating but ever relatable dynamics of family life. This is a dark but moving summer holiday in Scotland with a killer ending.

Things I Don’t Want to Know by Deborah Levy

Levy’s writing is always so perfect you want to savour it: sipping it like that first cold glass of white wine on a hot day. Perhaps most appealing to writers (and readers of books about writing), this is something of a response to George Orwell’s Why I Write, and in it, she moves between three different countries: Mallorca, South Africa, and England, musing on her career, her life, and her capacity to communicate. The Mallorcan chapters are full of wine and dinners on hotel terraces, and I just think it would be a wonderful companion to a summer’s evening when one is feeling ponderous.

Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic

I was lucky enough to read a proof of Asylum Road, and I loved it so much I had to buy myself a hardback copy of it, too. Set in London, Cornwall, Provence, and Sarajevo, this book will hold you in a vice-like grip until the very end. The seemingly low-stakes premise of a couple newly engaged but struggling with their relationship becomes a menacing, propulsive, and wicked road-trip of a novel. It is about identity, home, and trauma, and it will stay with me for a very long time.

Hood’s Favourite Seven Summer Reads