My 15 Most Anticipated New Summer Books

Check out my most anticipated summer books of 2025.

I’m always excited about the big new releases each year, and summer books are some of my favorites. So if you’re as ready as I am for new summer reads, here are the best upcoming releases. I’ve already read My Friends by Fredrik Backman and Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Both were amazing. I’m hoping to read even more great books this summer. I’ve shared a few reasons why I want to read each one, along with the blurb so you can see what the plot is about.

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I’ve already read two books from the list, so I’m sharing my thoughts. In the description for each book, you’ll see what got me interested in the first place.

• My Friends by Fredrik Backman : This was such a beautiful story. It reminded me of A Little Life, but it felt more whole-hearted and not as sad. It’s probably one of the best books I’ve read in 2025 so far.

• Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid : Taylor Jenkins Reid always writes the best female characters. I loved the plot , it felt fresh and unique, just like all her books. She really knows how to pull you into the story.

Most Anticipated Summer Books of 2025

My Friends by Fredrik Backman

My Friends follows Louisa, a young artist who becomes excited about a famous painting. The painting shows three small figures on a pier. Now Louisa goes on a trip to find out what really happened and how the painting connects to their lives.
What I’m excited about : It mixes art, friendship, and mystery. It sounds sad and beautiful. I’m curious how the painting ties the lives together.

Here is the blurb, it’ll really make you want to read the story : Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of a wide expanse of sea. But Louisa, soon to be eighteen years old and an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise. She is determined to find out the story behind these three enigmatic figures.

More than two decades before, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days on an abandoned pier telling silly jokes, sharing secrets, and committing small acts of rebellion. These lost souls find in each other a reason to get up every morning, a reason to dream, a reason to love.

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that, after a chance encounter in an alleyway, will unexpectedly be placed into Louisa’s care. She embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to discover how the painting came to be and to decide what to do with it. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more anxious she becomes about what she’ll find. Louisa’s complicated life is proof that happy endings are sometimes possible, but they don’t always take the form we expect them to.

Fredrik Backman’s signature charm, humor, and attention to the poignant details of everyday life are on full display in this funny, moving novel. His most heartfelt and personal tale yet, My Friends is a stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of art and friendship.

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What Will People Think? by Sara Hamdan

What Will People Think? centers on Mia, a woman trying to balance two lives. By day, she works as a fact checker at a job her family approves of. By night, she sneaks out to perform stand-up comedy, chasing her real dream. When her secret comedy life is exposed, she has to face the judgment of her strict family and deal with a romance she didn’t plan for.
What I’m excited about : I want to see how Mia stays true to herself.

Take a look at the blurb : Mia’s secret comedy career, forbidden office crush, and a long-guarded family secret take center stage, threatening her newfound confidence and her one shot at fame in this hilarious, heartfelt coming-of-age story perfect for fans of Curtis Sittenfeld and Etaf Rum.

Mia Almas has a secret. By day, she works at a respectable job as a media fact checker—a position her conservative, Arab grandparents approve of—and, by night, she takes to the stages of New York City comedy clubs. She holds herself back in a lot of ways, especially in the romance department, but being on stage lights her up and makes being a wallflower the rest of the time more bearable. That is, until Phaedra, her stylish and bold new neighbor, inspires Mia to take a few risks.

As Mia pursues a forbidden romance with her boss, her standup gets better and bolder, leading to a surprise spotlight that exposes her secret gig. Horrified and worried that her rebellious act could mean big consequences for her reserved Palestinian-American family, Mia frantically dives into damage control. But all of her efforts to pull back from the spotlight expose a family scandal from the 1940s that could change everything…

Equal parts funny and tender, What Will People Think? is a heart-bursting exploration of what it means to discover and embrace the hidden parts of yourself, and how love in all forms can make you whole.

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Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Atmosphere follows Joan, a quiet professor who has always loved the stars. When NASA opens up spots for women scientists, Joan applies and is chosen. She trains alongside other astronauts and finds new friendships and love. But when a mission goes wrong, Joan must face hard choices about her future and what really matters to her. The story shows how far people will go to chase a dream and how that dream can change when tested.
What I’m excited about : I’m a huge fan of the author. Also I love novels about strong women.

I already loved the book just by reading the blurb. Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s Space Shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.

Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easy-going even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warm-hearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.

As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.

Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything changes in an instant.

Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, with complex protagonists, telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love, this time among the stars.

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Flashlight by Susan Choi

Flashlight centers on Louisa, a ten-year-old girl whose father disappears one night during a walk on the beach. Her father is thought to have drowned, but no one knows for sure what happened. The story moves through different times and characters, showing how this event shapes their lives.
What I’m excited about : I love family stories with secrets. I want to see how they face the truth and heal after loss.

Check out this blurb to read more about the book. A novel tracing a father’s disappearance across time, nations, and memory, from the author of Trust Exercise.

One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone, presumed drowned. She is ten years old.

In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi’s Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to the DPRK. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her family after a reckless sexual adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.

What really happened to Louisa’s father? Why did he take Louisa and her mother to Japan just before he disappeared? And how can we love, or make sense of our lives, when there’s so much we can’t see?

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A Family Matter by Claire Lynch

A Family Matter centers on two timelines. In 1982, Dawn is a young mother who falls in love with another woman. This changes her life in ways she never expected. In 2022, Heron is hiding a serious illness from his daughter, along with other secrets from the past.
What I’m excited about : I want to see how the characters deal with love, regret, and honesty. It sounds emotional and powerful.

I absolutely loved the blurb : An exquisite and revelatory debut novel about the devastating consequences of one woman’s affair.

1982. Dawn is a young mother, still adjusting to life with her husband, when Hazel lights up her world like a torch in the dark. Theirs is the kind of connection that’s impossible to resist, and suddenly life is more complicated, and more joyful, than Dawn ever expected. But she has responsibilities and commitments. She has a daughter.

2022. Heron has just received news from his doctor that turns everything upside down. He’s an older man, stuck in the habits of a quiet existence. Telling Maggie, his only child—the person around whom his life has revolved—seems impossible. Heron can’t tell her about his diagnosis, just as he can’t reveal all the other secrets he’s been keeping from her for so many years.

A Family Matter is a heartbreaking and hopeful exploration of love and loss, intimacy and injustice, custody and care, and whether it is possible to heal from the wounds of the past in the changed world of today.

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What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown

What Kind of Paradise follows Jane, a teenager who grows up isolated with her father in the woods. She knows nothing else, but as she gets older, she starts questioning their life. When she uncovers a terrible secret, she runs away to find answers about her mother and her past.
What I’m excited about : I like books about self-discovery. I want to see how Jane’s journey changes her.

When I read the blurb, I knew I had to read it this summer: A teenage girl breaks free from her father’s world of isolation in this exhilarating novel of family, identity, and the power we have to shape our own destinies—from the New York Times bestselling author of Pretty Things and Watch Me Disappear

The first thing you have to understand is that my father was my entire world.

Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence existence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Thoreau-like utopia.

As Jane becomes a teenager she starts pushing against the boundaries of her restricted world. She begs to accompany her father on his occasional trips away from the cabin. But when Jane realizes that her devotion to her father has made her an accomplice to a horrific crime, she flees Montana to the only place she knows to look for answers about her mysterious past, and her mother’s San Francisco. It is a city in the midst of a seismic change, where her quest to understand herself will force her to reckon with both the possibilities and the perils of the fledgling Internet, and where she will come to question everything she values.

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The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley

The Girls Who Grew Big centers on Adela, a sixteen-year-old girl sent to Florida after she becomes pregnant. There, she meets other young moms who are trying to survive and support each other. Together, they face the struggles of motherhood, friendship, and growing up too soon in a tough world.
What I’m excited about : I want to see how these girls stay strong and help each other. Also such a unique plot.

This blurb grabbed my attention immediately : From the author of Oprah’s Book Club pick and New York Times best seller Nightcrawling, here is an astonishing new novel about the joys and entanglements of a fierce group of teenage mothers in a small town on the Florida panhandle.

Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone’s red truck.

The town thinks the Girls have lost their way, but really they are finding it: looking for love, making and breaking friendships, and navigating the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood.

Full of heart and life and hope, set against the shifting sands of these friends’ secrets and betrayals, The Girls Who Grew Big confirms Leila Mottley’s promise and offers an explosive new perspective on what it means to be a young woman.

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The Ghostwriter by Julie Clark

The Ghostwriter follows Olivia, who is asked to write her father’s last book. Her father is a famous horror writer, but this time, he wants to tell the truth about a family crime. Olivia must face old pain and long-buried secrets as they work on the book together.
What I’m excited about : I love stories about family secrets. I want to see what truth Olivia uncovers.

I loved the plot already, read the blurb: June, 1975.

The Taylor family shatters in a single night when two teenage siblings are found dead in their own home. The only surviving sibling, Vincent, never shakes the whispers and accusations that he was the one who killed them. Decades later, the legend only grows as his career as a horror writer skyrockets.

Ghostwriter Olivia Dumont has spent her entire professional life hiding the fact that she is the only child of Vincent Taylor. Now on the brink of financial ruin, she’s offered a job to ghostwrite her father’s last book. What she doesn’t know, though, is that this project is another one of his lies. Because it’s not another horror novel he wants her to write.

After fifty years of silence, Vincent Taylor is finally ready to talk about what really happened that night in 1975.

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With a Vengeance by Riley Sager

With a Vengeance centers on Anna, who invites people who hurt her family onto a train. She plans to get justice, but before she can act, someone else starts killing the passengers. Anna must figure out who the real killer is while trying to survive the night.
What I’m excited about : I love thrillers with revenge and surprises. I want to see how Anna’s plan turns out.

Check out the blurb to see why I’m excited for this one : One train. No stops. A deadly game of survival and revenge.

In 1942, six people destroyed Anna Matheson’s family. Twelve years later, she’s ready for retribution.

Under false pretenses, Anna has lured those responsible for her family’s downfall onto a luxury train from Philadelphia to Chicago, an overnight journey of fourteen hours. Her goal? Confront the people who’ve wronged her, get them to confess their crimes, and deliver them into the hands of authorities waiting at the end of the line. Justice will at last be served.

But Anna’s plan is quickly derailed by the murder of one of the passengers. As the train barrels through the night, it becomes clear that someone else on board is enacting their own form of revenge—and that they won’t stop until everyone else is dead.

With time running out before the train reaches its destination, Anna is forced to hunt the killer in their midst while protecting the people she hates the most. In order to destroy her enemies, she must first save them—even though it means putting her own life at risk.

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Welcome to Murder Week by Karen Dukess

Welcome to Murder Week follows Cath, who travels to England to join a fake murder mystery her late mother had signed up for. While trying to solve the fake crime, Cath finds out real secrets about her mom and makes new friends who help her along the way.
What I’m excited about : It sounds like a fun mix of mystery and humor. I want to see what Cath learns about her mom.

Check out this blurb to find out more : In this delightfully funny and heartfelt new novel from the author of the “bittersweet page-turner” (The New York Times) The Last Book Party, an American woman travels to the English countryside when she discovers tickets her late mother had purchased for a murder mystery simulation in a small British town.

When thirty-four-year-old Cath loses her mostly absentee mother, she is ambivalent. With days of quiet, unassuming routine in Buffalo, New York, Cath consciously avoids the impulsive, thrill-seeking lifestyle that her mother once led. But when she’s forced to go through her mother’s things one afternoon, Cath is perplexed to find tickets for an upcoming “murder week” in England’s Peak. A whole town has come together to stage a fake murder mystery to attract tourism to their quaint hamlet. Baffled but helplessly intrigued by her mother’s secret purchase, Cath decides to go on the trip herself—and begins a journey she never could have anticipated.

Teaming up with her two cottage-mates, both ardent mystery lovers—Wyatt Green, forty, who works unhappily in his husband’s birding store, and Amity Clark, fifty, a divorced romance writer struggling with her novels—Cath sets about solving the “crime” and begins to unravel shocking truths about her mother along the way. Amidst a fling—or something more—with the handsome local maker of artisanal gin, Cath and her irresistibly charming fellow sleuths will find this week of fake murder may help them face up to a very real crossroads in their own lives.

Witty, wise, and deliciously escapist, Welcome to Murder Week is a fresh, inventive twist on the murder mystery and a touching portrayal of one daughter’s reckoning with her grief, her past—and her own budding sense of adventure.

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Don’t Let Him In by Lisa Jewell

Don’t Let Him In centers on Nina, a widow who meets a charming man after her husband dies. Her daughter thinks the man is hiding something. As they get closer to him, so many dark secrets come out.
What I’m excited about : I am a huge fan of Lisa Jewell’s books. Her creepy characters always make the story so gripping.

This blurb is what made me want to read it : From #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Jewell, three women are connected by one man in this kaleidoscopic thriller.

He’s the perfect man. It’s a perfect lie.

Nina Swann is intrigued when she received a condolence card from Nick Radcliffe, an old friend of her late husband, who is looking to connect after her husband’s unexpected death. Nick is a man of substance and good taste. He has a smile that could melt the coldest heart and a knack for putting others at ease. But to Nina’s adult daughter, Ash, Nick seems too slick, too polished, too good to be true. Without telling her mother, Ash begins digging into Nick’s past. What she finds is more than unsettling…

Martha is a florist living in a neighboring town with her infant daughter and her devoted husband, Alistair. But lately, Alistair has been traveling more and more frequently for work, disappearing for days at a time. When Martha questions him about his frequent absences, he always has a legitimate explanation, but Martha can’t share the feeling that something isn’t right.

Nina, Martha, and Ash are on a collision course with a shocking truth that is far darker than anyone could have imagined. And all three are about to wish they had heeded the same warning: Don’t let him in. But the past won’t stay buried forever.

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The Woman in Suite 11 by Ruth Ware

The Woman in Suite 11 follows Lo, a journalist invited to a fancy hotel in Switzerland. She gets pulled into a dangerous situation when a woman asks for her help. Soon, Lo is running for her life across Europe, unsure who to trust.
What I’m excited about : I am a huge fan of fast-paced thrillers. So this one looks really good.

Here is the blurb that got me interested: In this follow-up to #1 New York Times bestselling author Ruth Ware’s multi-million copy mega-hit The Women in Cabin 10, Lo Blacklock returns to attend the opening of a luxury hotel, only to find herself in a white-knuckled race across Europe.

When the invitation to attend the press opening of a luxury Swiss hotel—owned by reclusive billionaire Marcus Leidmann—arrives, it’s like the answer to a prayer. Three years after the birth of her youngest child, Lo Blacklock is ready to reestablish her journalism career, but post-pandemic travel journalism is a very different landscape from the one she left ten years ago.

The chateau on the shores of Lake Geneva is everything Lo’s ever dreamed of, and she hopes she can snag an interview with Marcus. Unfortunately, he proves to be even more difficult to pin down than his reputation suggests. When Lo gets a late-night call asking her to come to Marcus’s hotel room, she agrees despite her own misgivings. She’s greeted, however, by a woman claiming to be Marcus’s mistress, and in life-or-death jeopardy.

What follows is a thrilling cat-and-mouse pursuit across Europe, forcing Lo to ask herself just how much she’s willing to sacrifice to save this woman…and if she can even trust her?

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Too Old for This by Samantha Downing

Too Old for This centers on Lottie, a retired serial killer who lives quietly in a small town. When a reporter starts asking questions about her past, Lottie knows she has to do something before her secret is exposed.
What I’m excited about : I love books with dark humor. So this plot featuring a retired serial killer really made me want to add it to my list.

This is such a great blurb : A retired serial killer’s quiet life is upended by an unexpected visitor. To protect her secret, there’s only one option left—what’s another murder? From bestselling author Samantha Downing.

Lottie Jones thought her crimes were behind her.

Decades earlier, she changed her identity and tucked herself away in a small town. Her most exciting nights are the weekly bingo games at the local church and gossiping with her friends.

When investigative journalist Plum Dixon shows up on her doorstep asking questions about Lottie’s past and specifically her involvement with numerous unsolved cases, well, Lottie just can’t have that.

But getting away with murder is hard enough when you’re young. And when Lottie receives another annoying knock on the door, she realizes this crime might just be the death of her.

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Meet Me at the Crossroads by Megan Giddings

Meet Me at the Crossroads follows twin sisters who discover strange doors that lead to another world. One sister steps through and goes missing. The other must find her and face dangers along the way.
What I’m excited about : I love magical stories centered around family. So curious to see what’s beyond the doors.

Read the blurb to know more about the plot : From the award-winning, critically-acclaimed author of Lakewood and The Women Could Fly, a dazzling novel about two brilliant sisters and what happens to their undeniable bond when a mysterious and possibly perilous new world beckons.

On an ordinary summer morning, the world is changed by the appearance of seven mysterious doors that seemingly lead to another world. People are, of course, mesmerized and intrigued: A new dimension filled with beauty and resources beckons them to step into an adventure. But, perhaps inevitably, people soon learn that what looks like paradise may very well be filled with danger.

Ayanna and Olivia, two Black Midwestern teens—and twin sisters—have different ideas of what may lie in the world beyond. But will their personal bond endure such wanton exploration? And when one of them goes missing, will the other find solace of her own? And will she uncover the circumstances of what truly happened to her once constant companion and best friend?

Megan Giddings brings her customarily brilliant and eye-opening powers of storytelling to give us a story that dazzles the senses and bewitches the mind. Meet Me at the Crossroads is an unforgettable novel about faith, love, and family from one of today’s most exciting and surprising young writers.

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A Far Better Thing by H.G. Parry

A Far Better Thing centers on Sydney, who was stolen by fairies as a child and forced to serve them. Now, during the French Revolution, he plots revenge against them. His plan leads to a heartbreaking choice.
What I’m excited about : I like fantasy books that mix magic and history. So I am hoping to read a few during summer holidays.

Take a look at the blurb, it says at all : H. G. Parry’s A Far Better Thing is a standalone, portal fantasy where Jonathan Strange & Mr. NorrelI meets A Tale of Two Cities in a heart-rending fantasy of faery revenge set during the French Revolution.
I feared this was the best of times; I hoped it could not get any worse.

The fairies stole Sydney Carton as a child, and made him a mortal servant of the Faerie Realm. Now, he has a rare opportunity for revenge against the fae and Charles Darnay, the changeling left in his stead.

It will take magic and cunning—cold iron and Realm silver—to hide his intentions from humans and fae and bring his plans to fruition.

Shuttling between London and Paris during the Reign of Terror, generations of violence-begetting-violence lead him to a heartbreaking choice in the shadow of the guillotine.

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