Summer reading is a serious business. Yes, technically it involves sun loungers, train journeys, park benches and the vague fantasy that we will all suddenly become the sort of people who own linen trousers. But choosing the right book matters.

A summer read should do at least one of the following: make you laugh in public, devastate you quietly, make you miss your stop, give you strong opinions about fictional people, or allow you to say, “I’m just going to read one more chapter,” while lying outrageously to everyone in the house.

Here are five new and upcoming reads we think deserve space in your bag, plus one extra because sometimes the correct number is whatever number lets us include Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen.

1. Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

For anyone who has ever seen a woman on the internet churn butter in a linen apron and thought: “Beautiful, but has she considered antibiotics?”

Yesteryear gives us Natalie, a lifestyle influencer whose whole brand is built around old-fashioned domestic perfection. She sells the dream: wholesome living, traditional womanhood, soft-focus kitchens, probably the kind of bread that requires emotional commitment.

Then she wakes up in the nineteenth century.

Which is where the fantasy rather abruptly meets mud, cold, labour, danger and the total absence of a phone charger.

This is satire with a very sharp little hatpin. It is funny, but not silly. It takes on nostalgia, influencer culture, femininity, performance, and the weird modern habit of pretending the past was gentler because everyone in the paintings looks calm.

They were not calm. They were probably hungry and had toothache.

Read it if: you like clever contemporary fiction, feminist bite, internet culture being gently pushed down a well, and books that make you laugh before asking you what exactly you are buying into.

2. A Plot to Die For by Ardal O’Hanlon

Never underestimate the murderous potential of a local committee.

In Ardal O’Hanlon’s A Plot to Die For, Finn O’Leary returns to his Irish hometown and finds himself drawn into village life, gardening politics and the kind of community business where everyone knows everyone and nobody is saying the important bit out loud.

There are tidy gardens. There are untidy secrets. There is civic pride. There is murder.

Frankly, it is amazing more Tidy Towns meetings do not end this way.

This is cosy crime with mud on its boots and a raised eyebrow. It has that delicious village mystery pleasure: the sense that every polite exchange is doing three things at once, and at least one person near the tea urn knows where the body is buried.

Read it if: you like your crime charming rather than grim, your gardens suspiciously immaculate, and your Irish villages full of people who say “grand” while concealing entire moral collapses.

3. Our Deadly Summer by Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen

A summer in New York. Two young Irish women. Youth, freedom, bad decisions, and the terrible confidence of being early-twenties and absolutely wrong about nearly everything.

What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Our Deadly Summer sees Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen moving into darker territory while keeping the wit, warmth and social precision that made readers fall so hard for their work in the first place. This is friendship with history. Friendship with secrets. Friendship that knows where the bodies are, perhaps literally.

There is something deeply compelling about stories that ask what happens when the person who knew you best also knows the worst thing you ever did.

Add New York, 2001, Irish women abroad, old loyalty, old panic and the kind of past that refuses to stay decorously in the past, and you have a summer read with claws.

Read it if: you loved Aisling but are ready for something darker; if you like stories about female friendship, buried secrets, noughties nostalgia and women making choices that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time and now require legal advice.

4. John of John by Douglas Stuart

Douglas Stuart does not write books so much as build weather systems and place families inside them.

John of John brings us to the Isle of Harris, where Cal returns home from art school to the world that made him and may not know what to do with him now. There is a father shaped by work, faith and expectation. There is a grandmother with Glaswegian force. There is a young man trying to understand who he is when everyone around him already seems to have decided.

Stuart’s great gift is tenderness without softness. He can write brutality, shame, love, longing and silence in a way that makes the page feel alive under your hands.

This is not a frothy beach read. This is a “stare out the window and think about fathers, sons, islands, bodies, art, God and the impossibility of going home unchanged” read.

Still summer. Just with more emotional topography.

Read it if: you loved Shuggie Bain or Young Mungo, if you like literary fiction with landscape and ache, or if you want a novel that will absolutely not let you off lightly.

5. Love Scene by Anna Carey

A fictional Irish soap. Two writers who cannot stand each other. One shared office. Sabotage behind the scenes.

This is not a workplace. This is a pressure cooker with scripts.

Anna Carey’s Love Scene has the kind of set-up that rom-com readers understand in their bones: two people being professionally irritated at each other while the rest of us sit there thinking, “Yes, yes, very annoying, now kiss.”

Annie and Art are enemies, colleagues and, very inconveniently, exactly the sort of people who might understand each other if they could stop sparring for five minutes. Around them, the soap opera they work on is going off the rails, which is bold, considering the emotional chaos in the writers’ room is already doing a lot of heavy lifting.

This is sharp, Irish, funny and properly readable. The sort of book you buy for “something light” and then find yourself ignoring people for.

A noble outcome.

Read it if: you like enemies-to-lovers, clever dialogue, Dublin energy, behind-the-scenes chaos, rom-coms with bite, and fictional people who are obviously in love but insist on making it everyone’s problem first.

Bonus Pick: Land by Maggie O’Farrell

We said five. We lied. Not maliciously. Bookishly.

Maggie O’Farrell has a new novel, and that is simply not something one leaves sitting outside the list like an unwanted sandwich.

Land takes us to nineteenth-century Ireland and into the world of mapping, memory, hunger, history and inheritance. A father and son are connected to the work of recording the country through the Ordnance Survey, but in O’Farrell’s hands, land is never just land. It holds grief. It holds power. It holds the stories people try to name, measure, erase or survive.

O’Farrell is one of those writers who can make the past feel close enough to touch and dangerous enough to flinch from. Her historical fiction does not arrive wearing a costume and asking politely to be admired. It breathes. It watches. It remembers.

This is the heavyweight of the summer stack. The one you save for when you want to be properly absorbed. Possibly ruined, but in a tasteful literary way.

Read it if: you love Maggie O’Farrell, Irish history, historical fiction with emotional force, beautiful prose, and novels that leave you slightly changed and very quiet for a while.

Also worth keeping on your radar… because the book gods are not done with us yet.

John Boyne has The Weight of Angels coming, with Oscar Wilde at the centre of an imagined alternative path in September and Donal Ryan returns with Where Are the Kings in August -  any new Ryan or Boyne is automatically an event for readers who enjoy sentences that look simple until they quietly take your head off.

Vicki Notaro’s Anywhere But Here arrives in July and brings three Irish women to Donegal at messy turning points in their lives, which sounds extremely promising because Donegal is scenic, dramatic and very good for forcing people to confront themselves.

And Sheila O’Flanagan’s Secrets Between Friends is already out and perfect for readers who want old secrets, complicated relationships, emotional decisions and the deep satisfaction of falling into a story that knows exactly what it is doing.

Whatever kind of summer reader you are, we support you.

The organised holiday stacker.
The chaotic “just browsing” buyer.
The person who comes in for one book and leaves with a tote bag making structural complaints.
The reader who wants something clever.
The reader who wants something comforting.
The reader who says “nothing too sad” and then buys Douglas Stuart.

We see you. We admire you. We may gently enable you.

Call into Chapters, browse online, ask a bookseller, or wander dramatically until a book chooses you.

It is not a shopping problem.

It is seasonal literary preparation.

FAQs

1. What should I read this summer?

It depends on your mood. For something funny and sharp, try Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke or Love Scene by Anna Carey for literary fiction with emotional weight, John of John by Douglas Stuart or Land by Maggie O'Farrell for cosy crime, A Plot to Die For by Ardal O'Hanlon for friendship and secrets, Our Deadly Summer by Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen.

2. Is there a sequel to the Aisling series?

Not a sequel, but Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen have a new standalone novel. Our Deadly Summer out in May 2026. It's a darker, suspense-tinged story about two Irish women in New York in 2001, with the same wit Aisling fans loved.

3. How many books should I bring on holiday?

A rough rule: one book for every three days, plus one extra in case you finish early or hate one of them. An e-reader solves the weight problem, but most readers still pack at least one physical book for the ritual of it.

4. How do I pick a book I'll actually finish?

Read the first page in the shop. If the voice grabs you, that's your answer. Reviews and recommendations help, but the first-page test is the most reliable signal you'll keep going.