“Don’t you? I said you were smart, and you agreed with me. You said you were too smart for compliments.”
Looking for the perfect books to read this summer 2025? Whether you’re down at the beach, relaxing by the pool, or basking in the longer days with a great story, this list of must-read titles has you covered. From the latest pulsating thrillers to new romance stories, these are the best summer books 2025 has to offer. We here at What We Reading have curated new releases and soon-to-be favourites that belong on every summer reading list. If you’re wondering what to read summer of 2025 or need a few books to take with you on holiday, you’re in the right place. These page-turners are perfect for lazy afternoons, long flights, and sunny weekends. Whether you love beach reads, emotional journeys, or captivating escapism, there’s something here for everyone. So, let’s dive into the new books coming out in summer 2025 – and get your summer reading started right!
My Friends – Fredrik Backman
First up on our list of the most anticipated summer 2025 books is Fredrik Backman’s latest novel, My Friends. The story follows Louisa, an eighteen-year-old aspiring artist who becomes captivated by one of the most famous paintings in the world, specifically the three figures perched in its background. Two decades prior, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers found refuge from their bruising lives by spending long summer days on an abandoned pier. These lost souls find a reason to get up every morning, a reason to dream and a reason to love thanks to one another.
Out of that summer comes a work, a painting that, after a chance encounter in an alleyway, will unexpectedly come into Louisa’s care. She sets out on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to discover how the painting came to be and to decide what should be done with it next. The closer she comes to the painting’s conception, the more anxious she becomes about what she’ll discover. Louisa’s own complicated life is proof that happy endings are sometimes possible, but not always in the form we expect.
Release date: 6 May 2025
A Witch’s Guide To Magical Innkeeping – Sangu Mandanna
Sera Swan was once the most powerful witch in Britain. Then she resurrected her great-aunt Jasmine from the (very recently) dead, lost most of her magic, befriended a semi-villainous fox, and was exiled from her Guild. Now she helps her aunt run an enchanted inn, where she deals with the quirky guests’ shenanigans, attempts to keep her smart-mouthed fox in check, and yearns for a future that appears lost to her.
Enter Luke Larsen. Handsome, icy, and magical historian. After arriving one dark winter evening, Luke has no intention of getting mixed up in the madcap goings-on of the inn or the powerful spell that could bring about Sera’s powers. Yet, as time passes, Sera is surprised to discover that their time together might just be thawing this icy historian out. Whimsical, heartwarming and brimming with magic, Sangu Madanna’s new 2025 summer read is all about self-discovery, second chances and found families.
Release date: 15 July 2025
A Family Matter – Claire Lynch
1982. Young mother Dawn is still adjusting to her new life with her husband when Hazel lights up her world like a torch in the night. Theirs is the sort of connection that’s impossible to resist, and suddenly life becomes more complex, more joyful than Dawn ever imagined. But she has responsibilities and commitments. She has a daughter.
2022. Heron has just received news from his doctor that upends everything. He’s an elderly man, stuck in the habits of a quiet existence. Telling his only child, Maggie, about it seems an impossible task. Heron can’t tell her about his diagnosis, nor can he reveal all the other secrets he’s been keeping from her all these years. Claire Lynch’s A Family Matter is a poignant new book releasing in summer 2025 that bravely explores love and loss, intimacy and injustice, custody and care, and whether it’s ever possible to heal from the wounds of the past in the changed world of today.
Release date: 3 June 2025
Of Monsters And Mainframes – Barbara Truelove
Demeter just wants to shuttle humans between Earth and Alpha Centauri. Unfortunately, her passengers keep dying – and not from the equipment failures her AI medical system, Steward, would have her believe. These are paranormal murders, and they started when one nasty, ancient vampire decided to board Demeter and kill all of her humans.
To keep from getting decommissioned, Demeter is forced to team up with a werewolf, an engineer built from the dead, a pharaoh with otherworldly powers, a vampire with a grudge, and a fleet of cheerful spider drones. Together, this motley band will face the ultimate evil – Dracula. A queer love child of pulp horror and classic sci-fi, Barbara Truelove’s Of Monsters and Mainframes is a dazzling odyssey into what it means to be one of society’s monsters, the many types of friendships that make us human and are sure to be demanding a spot on your 2025 summer reading list.
Release date: 3 June 2025
Flashlight – Susan Choi
One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later, Louisa is discovered washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone, presumed drowned. She is only 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 chronicles 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 his own family when they were enticed by the promises of Pyongyang and moved to the DPRK. Her mother, Anne, is estranged from her own family. And then there’s Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose sudden reappearance promises to have astonishing consequences. But what really happened to Louisa’s father? Another one of the most poignant summer 2025 books, Flashlight traces a father’s disappearance across time, nations, and memory.
Release date: 3 June 2025
It’s A Love Story – Annabel Monaghan
Jane Jackson knows that true love is a lie. Laughter is the only truth – you can’t fake a belly laugh. Jane knows better than most. She spent most of her adolescence as “Poor Janey Jakes” in America’s fifth-favourite sitcom. Now she’s a Creative Executive living by a new mantra: fake it ‘til you make it. Only, she may have faked it too far. Desperate to get her first project greenlit, one big fat lie escapes from her lips.
She claims that Jack Quinlan, the hottest popstar of the moment, has promised to write an original soundtrack for the project. Jack might have been her first kiss – and biggest source of shame since – but the two haven’t spoken for two decades. Jane is forced to turn to pompous cinematographer Dan Finnegan for help. A week in close quarters with Dan whilst facing down her past sounds like a nightmare come true. But Dan may just surprise her. While covering up her lie, can they find something true? From the bestselling author of Nora Goes Off Script, Annabel Monaghan’s It’s a Love Story is a forced proximity romance read and one of the best new books for a summer getaway.
Release date: 27 May 2025
Lucky Day – Chuck Tingle
Vera is a survivor of a global catastrophe known as the Low Probability Event, but she definitely is not thriving. Once a passionate professor of statistics, she no longer finds meaning in anything at all. But when problematic government agent Layne knocks on her door, she’s the only one who can help him uncover the connection between deadly spates of absurdity and an improbably lucky casino.
What’s happening in Vegas isn’t staying there, and the world soon finds itself at risk of another disaster. From serial bestselling horror novelist Chuck Tingle, Lucky Day is a new 2025 horror book following the story of one woman going up against the most horrifying concept of all: nothing.
Release date: 12 August 2025
What Kind Of Paradise – Janelle Brown
Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane only knows the woodstove that heats her father’s home, the vegetable garden they depend upon to eat, and the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives to her instead of schooling. Her father is evasive about the past, giving Jane very little outside the facts that they used to live in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, sparking his decision to move Jane off the grid and raise her in this Thoreau-like utopia.
As Jane grows into a teenager, she begins to push against the boundaries of this restricted world. She starts accompanying her father on his trips away from their cabin. But when Jane discovers that her devotion to him has made her an accomplice to a horrific crime, she flees to her mother’s San Francisco. It is a city of seismic change and, in the perils of her quest to understand herself, she will come to question everything she values in Janelle Brown’s new 2025 book, What Kind of Paradise.
Release date: 3 June 2025
The Ghostwriter – Julie Clark
Ghostwriter Olivia Dumont has spent her whole professional life hiding the fact that she is the only child of infamous horror author Vincent Taylor, renowned not just for his novel but for being the prime suspect in the brutal slaying of his siblings.
On the cusp of financial ruin, Olivia begrudgingly agrees to ghostwrite her father’s last book, not realising that she will be forced to wrestle with the ghosts that reside at the heart of her family. A deliciously dark, twisty mystery, Julie Clark’s The Ghostwriter is one of the most propulsive summer 2025 books that promises to keep you hooked from the first page to the very final, shocking reveal.
Release date: 3 June 2025
The Love Haters – Katherine Center
Katie Vaughan has been burned by love in the past – now she might be lighting her career on fire. She has two options: wait to get laid off from her job as a video producer, or, at her coworker Cole’s request, take a career-making gig profiling Tom “Hutch” Hutcheson, a Coast Guard rescue swimmer in Key West. The only catch? Kaie’s not entirely qualified. She can’t swim – but fakes it that she can.
But paradise soon proves to be messier than it seems. As Katie becomes entangled with the handsome Hutch, his colourful aunt Aue and his Great Dane, she finds herself trapped in a lie. Or two. Swim lessons, helicopter flights, conga lines, drinking contests, hurricanes, and stolen kisses all ensue in Katherine Center’s latest novel, The Love Haters, undoubtedly one of the best 2025 beach reads and books to take on vacation this summer.
Release date: 20 May 2025
Check Out The Best Katherine Center Books
With A Vengeance – Riley Sager
In 1942, six people destroyed Anna Matheson’s family. Twelve years on, she’s ready for retribution. Under false pretences, Anna has lured those responsible for her family’s demise 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 for them at the end of the line. Finally, justice will be delivered.
But Anna’s plan is quickly derailed by the murder of one of the passengers. As the train hurtles through the night, it becomes clear that someone else on board is enacting their own form of revenge – and they won’t stop until everyone else is dead. With time running out until the final destination, Anna is forced to hunt the killer in the midst of protecting the people she hates the most. One of the most pulsating new books from 2025, With a Vengeance is the latest gripping thriller novel by Riley Sager, bestselling author of The Only One Left.
Release date: 10 June 2025
Katabasis – R.F. Kuang
Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that dream turn into reality – her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world – that is, until he dies in a magical accident that may have been her fault.
Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands, and even death itself isn’t going to stop the pursuit of her dreams. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the same conclusion. From R.F. Kuang, Katabasis is a new 2025 summer book following two students as they set aside their rivalry and journey into Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the expense of their own.
Release date: 26 August 2025
Don’t Let Him In – Lisa Jewell
Nick Radcliffe is a man of substance and of good taste. He has a smile that could melt the coldest heart and a knack for putting others at ease. He’s exactly what Nina Swann needed following her husband’s unexpected death. But to Nina’s daughter, Ash, Nick seems too slick, too polished, too good to be true. Without telling her mother, Ash begins digging into his past. What she discovers is more than unsettling.
Martha is a florist living in a neighbouring town with her infant daughter and her devoted husband, Alistair. But lately, Alistair has been travelling more and more often for work, disappearing for whole days at a time. When Martha questions him and his absences, he always has an answer. Yet, Martha is unable to shake the feeling that something isn’t quite right. In her latest thriller for summer 2025, Lisa Jewell sets Nick, Nina and Martha on a collision course where a shocking truth proves to be far darker than anyone could have ever imagined. All three are about to wish they had heeded the same warning: Don’t Let Him In.
Release date: 24 June 2025
Check Out The Best Lisa Jewell Books
Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
