Get Ready For Hot Book Summer: A Reading List
It’s that glorious time of year again to leave your worries behind and do more of what you really love (ahem, reading). Whether on vacation or a staycation, or relaxing at the beach or pool, summer is the perfect time to get lost in a book. And remember, a “beach read” is simply any book you take to the beach. To help kickstart your summer reading adventure, we’ve assembled the ultimate reading list of eleven titles so you can live your best hot book summer! Trust us, you’ll want to add these books to your beach bag this season.
PS) As a bonus, we’re having a flash sale. That’s right, our Summer Vibes Only sale is now on! We’ve got some hot savings on some seriously cool books for you to fill your summer days with.
Save 25% off all available books from July 16-20, 2025.*
Redeem the discount code SUMMER25 at checkout to save.
*Sale excludes all forthcoming titles and subscription packages.
Without further ado, here’s our Hot Book Summer reading list:
Swim by Marianne Apostolides
Kat, the protagonist in Marianne Apostolides’s 2009 novel Swim, has travelled to the Greek mountain village where her father was born. Kat swims laps while her fourteen-year-old daughter reclines poolside, reading a book. Without ever leaving the pool we enter discrete scenes with Kat’s parents, daughter, husband, and lover. Each new lap moves Kat closer to her impending decision: whether she will leave her husband. But the deeper tension within this innovative novel derives from the writing itself—its vital urgency that extends the possibilities of narrative beyond the fixed and into the fluid.
Double Teenage by Joni Murphy
Double Teenage, Joni Murphy’s acclaimed 2016 debut novel, tells the story of Celine and Julie, two girls coming of age in the 1990s in a desert town close to the US–Mexico border. Starting from their shared love of theatre, the girls move into a wider world that shimmers with intellectual and artistic possibility, but at the same time, is dense with threat. Part bildungsroman, part performance, part passionate essay, part magic spell, Double Teenage ultimately offers a way to see through violence into an emotionally alive place beyond the myriad traps of girlhood.
Bunny and Shark by Alisha Piercy
Alisha Piercy’s middle-aged coming-of-age story-cum-shark-adventure reveals and celebrates women’s power in the trenches. Plunging into the first thirteen days after the ‘bastard’ pushes his ex-Playboy wife ‘Bunny’ (one of the great heroines of contemporary fiction) over a cliff in the Caribbean, Bunny and Shark is a fable about island survival, and the perils and potentials of being exiled from one’s identity.
The Legend of Baraffo by Moez Surani
In Baraffo, a town gripped by revolutionary fervour, a boy named Mazzu grapples to understand the motivations of Babello, a man imprisoned for an act of arson. When Babello begins a hunger strike and another building is set ablaze, tensions mount among the citizens and Mazzu considers a risky solution. Within an extraordinary world, Moez Surani’s sweeping and mythical novel asks prescient questions about the nature of social change: is it better accelerated by those who seek total transformation or attained by those trying to work within the system?
Coconut Dreams by Derek Mascarenhas
The seventeen linked stories about the Pinto family in Derek Mascarenhas’s Coconut Dreams examine the new immigrant and the South Asian experience in Canada. Starting with a ghost story set in Goa, India, in the 1950s, the collection weaves through various timelines and perspectives to focus on siblings Aiden and Ally Pinto, and their experience of growing up in a predominantly white suburb with innocence, intelligence, and a timid foot in two distinct cultures.
Wave Archive by Emmalea Russo
Emmalea Russo’s Wave Archive moves between essay and poetry while also pondering the mind-body connection and the unreliability of thought patterns and histories. Here, Russo invokes her own experiences with seizures, photographs and art-making, archival and indexical processes, brain waves, and the very personal need to document and store while simultaneously questioning the reliability of memory and language. Drawing upon the history of epilepsy in both ancient and modern brain treatments, Wave Archive disrupts and restores the archive over and over again, exploring the very edges of consciousness.
Iris and the Dead by Miranda Schreiber
Weaving personal memory with magic realism and folklore, Iris and the Dead asks: What if you could look back and tell someone exactly how they changed the course of your life? For our narrator, that someone is Iris, the counsellor with whom she developed an unusual, almost violent bond. There are things she needs to tell Iris: some that she hid during the brief time they knew each other, and some that she has learned since. She was missing her mind the autumn they spent together and has since regained it. Miranda Schreiber’s debut novel unfurls the hidden power dynamics of abuse, offering a beguiling inquiry into intergenerational trauma, moral ambiguity, and queer identity.
The Fun Times Brigade by Lindsay Zier-Vogel
Amy is a new mother, navigating the fog of those bewildering early days and struggling with a role she feels ill-prepared for. It’s the first time in a decade that she hasn’t been living the busy life of an acclaimed children’s musician, and her sense of self is unravelling. To make matters worse, her bandmates have seemingly abandoned her. In flashbacks, we see Amy’s journey to success—her stumblings as a solo singer-songwriter and her eventual rise to fame as a member of the Fun Times Brigade. But as Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s sophomore novel progresses—and Amy grapples with a devastating loss—we come to understand how precarious definitions of artistic success can be.
Sludge Utopia by Catherine Fatima
Using her compulsive reading as a lens through which to bring coherence to her life, twenty-five-year-old Catherine engages in a series of sexual relationships, thinking that desire is the key to a meaningful life. Yet, with each encounter, it becomes more and more clear: desire has no explanation; desire bears no significance. From an intellectual relationship with a professor, a casual sexual relationship, to a serious love affair, to a string of relationships that take Catherine from Toronto to France and Portugal and back again, Sludge Utopia presents the perspective of a young woman’s punishing though intermittently gratifying sexuality and profound internalized misogyny, which causes her to bring all of life’s events under sexuality’s prism.
I Remember Lights by Ben Ladouceur
In summer 1967, love is all you need…but some forms of love are criminal. As the spectacular Expo 67 celebrations take shape, a young man new to Montreal learns about gay life from cruising partners, one-night stands, live-in lovers, and friends. Once Expo begins, he finds romance with a charismatic visitor, but their time is limited. When the fireworks wither into smoke, so do their options. A decade later, during the notorious 1977 police raid on a gay bar called Truxx, he comes to understand even more about the bitter choice, so often made by men like him, between happiness and safety. I Remember Lights is a vital reminder of forgotten history and a visceral exploration of the details of queer life: tribulation and joy, exile and solidarity, cruelty and fortitude.
You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. by Sheung-King
Sheung-King’s highly acclaimed debut novel, You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked., is an intimate novel of memory and longing that challenges Western tropes and Orientalism. A young translator living in Toronto frequently travels abroad—to Hong Kong, Macau, Prague, Tokyo—often with his unnamed lover. In restaurants and hotel rooms, the couple begin telling folk tales to each other, perhaps as a way to fill the undefined space between them. Theirs is a comic and enigmatic relationship in which emotions are often muted and sometimes masked by verbal play and philosophical questions, and further complicated by the woman’s frequent unexplained disappearances.
