Twelve books worth clearing your calendar for — new favorites, old friends, and everything in between
Every June I make myself a small promise: this summer I will read slowly. I will savor. I will not stay up until midnight turning pages under the covers the way I did as a child during summer break.
I break this promise every time.
The summer books for women over 50 on this list are the reason why. Some are new releases I read in the past year and could not stop talking about. Some are the kind of old favorites you reach for the way you reach for a favorite dress in July, because you know exactly how they feel and that is precisely the point. All of them have women at the center who are fully themselves, which at this point in my reading life is non-negotiable.
There is a juicy novel on this list, a love story, a best sellers list regular, a story of a woman starting completely over, and at least two books that will make you cry. I am telling you this upfront so you can plan accordingly. Sunglasses. Pool deck. Cool drink. You know the drill.
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Beach Read by Emily Henry
January Andrews writes romance novels and has stopped believing in them. Augustus Everett writes literary fiction and has never believed in happy endings. They end up neighbors for the summer in houses on the same lake, each with a deadline and a serious case of writer’s block, and they make a bet: he will write a romance, she will write something dark and honest, and they will trade approaches for the season.
Emily Henry is the writer I press on anyone who says they do not read romance novels. The banter is sharp. The love story lands. The chemistry is there from the first night they actually talk to each other across the fence. And underneath the lake house sunshine there is a real story about grief and what it takes to start believing in something again.
What I love most about Emily Henry is that she writes true love as something two people build, not something that falls on them. That is harder to write than it sounds, and she makes it look easy. People We Meet on Vacation and Book Lovers are waiting for you when you finish this one. I have not read an Emily Henry novel I did not finish in one sitting.
Sandwich by Catherine Newman
Rocky is a woman in her fifties on Cape Cod for the family’s annual summer week. Her adult children, her aging parents, her husband of many years, all of them under one roof for seven days. The novel is told in the present tense and it is one of the funniest and most quietly devastating books I have read in recent years.
Catherine Newman writes the experience of being in the middle of everything at this age, the generation that is still needed in two directions at once. Rocky is taking stock of her body, her marriage, her parents, herself. She is doing this while making sandwiches and keeping everyone happy and being the person the household runs on. You will know her the moment you meet her.
This is the main character women over 50 have been waiting for someone to write. I am glad it was Catherine Newman.
The Women by Kristin Hannah
Frankie McGrath is twenty years old when she follows her brother to Vietnam as an Army nurse. What happens to her there, and what happens when she tries to come home, is the kind of story that makes you want to call someone you love when you finish it.
Hannah does not soften what happened to female veterans after Vietnam. The way they were ignored, blamed, made invisible. By the time I put this book down I sat with it for a long time before I could pick up anything else. If you have a best friend who reads, give her this one. It is exactly the kind of book two women need to read at the same time so they can talk about it.
Kin by Tayari Jones
Vernice and Annie have been best friends since childhood in Honeysuckle, Louisiana. Their lives go in completely different directions: Vernice leaves for Spelman College and a world of ambition and accomplishment; Annie stays and spends decades searching for the mother who left her. When a tragedy pulls them back together, the friendship that was always between them has to find its shape again.
This is the best novel I have read this year. The story of a woman who leaves and the story of a woman who stays, and what it costs both of them. I keep thinking about Annie. That is always the sign.
Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano
If this one has been sitting on your TBR pile, this is the summer to get to it. Ann Napolitano’s Pulitzer Prize winner follows four generations of one Chicago family from 1920 forward through the century. The women at the center are fierce and entirely real. It is a big novel in the way that good family sagas are big: you are not just reading about these people, you are living inside their world, and when it ends you feel the grief of leaving a place you have been for a long time.
Napolitano writes the way women actually move through time, carrying their mothers and grandmothers with them whether they mean to or not. That part is true.
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
Lara is a woman in her fifties on a cherry farm in Michigan during the early weeks of the pandemic, her three grown daughters home and underfoot, telling them the story of the summer she was twenty-four and almost famous. The story she tells is not quite the one she has always told herself.
The question at the center, what do we owe our children of our own past, is one most of us are living in real time. There is an old flame, handled quietly and precisely. And it is the truest portrait of a long marriage I have read in years. Not a dramatic one. A real one. Three days to read, weeks to think about.
Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
Tova Sullivan is a sixty-something widow working the night shift at a small-town aquarium in the Pacific Northwest, still quietly untangling what happened to her son thirty years ago. One of her coworkers is a giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus, who narrates alternating chapters and has figured out considerably more than anyone around him realizes.
This is a love story and a mystery and a book about grief and what it looks like when a woman has outlived the life she planned for herself. The octopus chapters are not gimmicky. They are genuinely moving, which I would not have believed if someone had told me before I started.
Our Perfect Storm by Carley Fortune
Our Perfect Storm is set around a lake in the kind of summer that only exists in novels and in memory. Carley Fortune writes the kind of romance where you are rooting against it at first and then, somewhere around chapter eight, you realize you have completely changed sides. She earns the ending. Not every romance writer does. If you are new to Fortune, start with Every Summer After. You will read both in a weekend.
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
Sybil van Antwerp has been writing letters her whole life, to friends, family, authors, politicians, anyone who seemed worth the postage. We meet her in her seventies, working through complicated relationships with her ex-husband and grown children entirely through correspondence. The novel is told exclusively in letters.
Sybil is formal at first and then, as the letters accumulate, entirely herself: funny, sharp, surprisingly open. She reminded me of every woman I know who has been underestimated her whole life and simply kept going anyway. She lives in New York City, moves through that world with a particular kind of dignity, and the city itself is present in the letters the way a city is when someone loves it and is also tired of it. This is the most talked-about book in my reading circles this summer, and one of the best portraits of a woman living completely on her own terms that I have read in years.
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
This is the book everyone is talking about right now, and for once the conversation is warranted. A woman reckoning with the choices that made her life, and the ones that unmade it. Yesteryear just hit the New York Times bestseller list. If you want one new release this summer, this is the one.
The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett
Kathryn Stockett wrote The Help in 2009 and then, apparently, took her time. Sixteen years. The Calamity Club is worth every one of them. A group of women, underestimated and increasingly unwilling to stay that way, fight for what belongs to them in a time and place where hypocrisy is the local weather. It is funny and big-hearted and occasionally devastating.
This is the book club book of the summer. Bring it to your next gathering. The real reason this one works as well as it does is that Stockett is writing about women who have run out of patience, which is a very satisfying thing to read about.
A Few Old Friends Worth Revisiting
Every summer reading list should have at least one book you already love, or one that somehow slipped past you and is still waiting. These are the ones I come back to or give to people who have not found them yet.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman is one of the most extraordinary novels of the past decade. Eleanor is a young woman living a life of rigid routine and deep isolation, and the story of how she begins to let the world in is told with wit and tenderness. This is the type of book that sneaks up on you. If it is on your TBR pile, move it to the top. It is also a thought-provoking novel in the best sense: I was still thinking about Eleanor weeks after I finished, which is the whole point.
For mystery readers, Agatha Christie is still the gold standard of edge-of-your-seat plotting, and summer is the best way to work through anything you have missed. And Then There Were None and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd are the two I return to most. The real reason the mystery genre exists is Agatha Christie, and if you have read her you know exactly what I mean.
If you want to go somewhere else entirely, Anne of Green Gables is set on Prince Edward Island and is one of the great love stories ever written, not a romance exactly, but a love story between a young woman and a place and a life she makes entirely for herself. Most people read it as young adults and then forget that it reads differently at fifty. I am telling you: go back. It reads differently at fifty.
And for historical fiction: Life After Life by Kate Atkinson is one of the best Second World War novels written in the past twenty years. It will give you something to think about long after the summer is over.
How to Build Your Own Summer Reading List
I mix books deliberately. A big novel for the long afternoons when the heat outside makes sitting still the most sensible thing you could do. A lighter book for mornings, before the day starts. Something funny at least once a week, because summer is long and even the best reading gets heavy. And yes, a romance novel. Always at least one. Good summer reading needs one.
The Women, Hello Beautiful, and Kin are the long-afternoon books. Sandwich and Remarkably Bright Creatures are the morning books. Beach Read and The Calamity Club are the ones for laughing. The Correspondent and Yesteryear are the ones that will stay with you into September. Good beach days call for a different type of book than rainy afternoons, and this list has both covered.
The best way to use a list like this is not to read it in order but to read it in mood. What do you need today? Personal growth, a fresh start, an old friend, a love story, something with sunny days and a happy ending? Start there. Every one of these will be worth your reading time.
What is on your reading list this summer? I would love to know. The best recommendations I have ever gotten came from the comments right here. If you read something you could not put down, tell me about it.
Come find me on Instagram. I share what I am reading in my stories. Or check out my book lists on Pinterest, and my Bookshop on Amazon
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