2024 Summer Holiday Reading List
We scoured the internet, trawled the pages of Vogue, Stellar and Reece’s Book Club, got hooked on #BookTok, and browsed the shelves of our local bookshop, to bring you a summer reading list that will take you from 2023 into 2024.
The list below shares novels that range from romance, wit and friendship, to themes that explore our family roots and grief. For those looking to stray away from fiction, we’ve got you covered with business biographies and motivating reads that will start your new year on a productivity high.
If you’re looking for holiday reading inspiration, consider this the list for you!
Self-Help by Lorrie Moore
Witty, moving and glittering
Complicated, awkward, funny, cruel, heartbroken, mysterious; Self-Help forms an idiosyncratic guide to female existence which is just as relevant today as it was 30 years ago. These stories are modern America at its most real, with characters sharing thoughts and experiences they could have borrowed from our own lives. This is how to deal with divorce, adultery, cancer, how to talk to your mother or become a writer, the Lorrie Moore way.
Richard Osman – The Thursday Murder Club Series
Moving, hilarious, brilliantly suspenseful
In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron are pushing eighty… and are the Thursday Murder Club. Richard Osman’s series includes The Thursday Murder Club, The Man Who Died Twice, The Bullet That Missed, and The Last Devil To Die.
Sophie Green – Weekends With The Sunshine Gardening Society
Delightful, warm, heartwarming
Set in Noosa Heads, 1987, this story follows four women who join the Sunshine Gardening Society. Between pulling up weeds and planting natives, the women learn from each other that some roots go deep, and others shallow; that seeds can lie dormant for a long time before they spring to life, and that careful tending is the key to lives and friendships that reach their full potential.
Caroline O’Donoghue – The Rachel Incident
Unrequited love, mixed with delicious, sparkling humour
This international best-seller is a hilarious, heartfelt storu of all-consuming and unexpected love. It is a novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman – Rachel – desperately trying to manage all three. When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr Byrne, her best friend James helps her devise a plan to seduce him. But what begins as a harmless crush soon pushes their friendship to its limits. Over the course of a year they will find their lives ever more entwined with the Byrnes’ and be faced with impossible choices and a lie that can’t be taken back.…
Isobel Beech – Sunbathing
Sweet and deep, sad and funny
A novel that explores life, death and the restorative power of friendship under the warm Italian summer sun. After weeks of grieving, a woman books a plane ticket, bound for an old villa in the mountains of Abruzzo. Invited to stay with her friends Giulia and Fab – in the weeks before they marry in a village orchard – she lives for a summer in the house’s Birthing Room, where generations of women once had their babies. More often, though, she lives in her head: in the past, trying to make sense of her grief and wondering how to go on, or if she can. This stunning novel explores the workings of the self in the wake of devastation and deep regret, and reveals the infinite ways that the everyday offers solace and hope.
Lee-Geum-yi – Can’t I Go Instead
Moving, compelling, uplifting
Can’t I Go Instead follows the lives of the daughter of a Korean nobleman and her maidservant in the early 20th century. When the daughter’s suitor is arrested as a Korean Independence activist, and she is implicated during the investigation, she is quickly forced into marriage to one of her father’s Japanese employees and shipped off to the United States. At the same time, her maidservant is sent in her mistress’s place to be a comfort woman to the Japanese Imperial army.
Anna Funder – Wifedom
Exhilerating, genre-bending
Looking for wonder and some reprieve from the everyday, Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own… When she uncovers his forgotten wife, it’s a revelation. Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s literary brilliance shaped Orwell’s work and her practical nous saved his life. But why – and how – was she written out of the story? Compelling and utterly original, Wifedom speaks to the unsung work of women everywhere today, while offering a breathtakingly intimate view of one of the most important literary marriages of the 20th century. It is a book that speaks to our present moment as much as it illuminates the past.
Ann Patchett – Tom Lake
Beautiful, tender, the perfect summer novel
It’s spring and Lara’s three grown daughters have returned to the family orchard. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the one story they’ve always longed to hear – of the film star with whom she shared a stage, and a romance, years before. Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart.
Marisa Meltzer – Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier
A deeply reported, striking tell-all
Just how did a girl from suburban Connecticut with no real job experience work her way into the bathrooms and boudoirs of the most influential names in the world and build that access into the 1.9-billion-dollar business, Glossier? In Glossy, journalist and author Marisa Meltzer combines in-depth interviews with former Glossier employees, investors, and Weiss herself to bring you inside the walls of this fascinating and secretive company.
James Clear – Atomic Habits
Supremely practical and useful
One of Arianna Huffington’s all-time favourite books, Atomic Habits is a comprehensive guide on how to change your habits and get 1% better every day. James Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Just in time for those New Year goals!
Hal Elrod – The Miracle Morning
Genius, changes the way you live your life
The Miracle Morning shows you how to wake up each day with more energy, motivation and focus, to take your life to the next level. Hal condenses the ‘best of the best practices’ into a daily morning ritual. The result? Six habits that will transform your life, all before 8am.
Steven Bartlett – The Diary Of A CEO: 33 Laws of Business & Life
Profound, personal, galvanising
This new book by entrepreneur and DOAC podcaster Steven Bartlett, shares a set of fundamental principles – laws – that Steven has learned as a result of his own entrepreneurial journey and the thousands of incredible interviews conducted on his podcast. Whether you’re in search of building something great, or becoming someone great, you’ll find yourself compelled by the laws shared in this book.