The search for meaning, world-weariness, loneliness and love, whether in Lagos or Odessa, whether girls, guys, gays, or young widows: all the summer books that I recommend for reading on a holiday or a subway have some things in common. Like: Don’t read blurbs if you like surprises! These are also very different new and old books. They all promise entertainment with class, beyond shallow summer romances and holiday crime novels!
Deadly Tide in the Bestseller Lists
Popular bestsellers are often romantic stories, crime, thrillers, and light entertainment about summer, holiday, and travelling. Summer crime novels and romcoms with a regional flavor and culinary scenes might be suited for people learning to read (a new language), but even then I’d rather recommend “all ages” books for adolescents as those are usually less boring. It’s not for no reason that book sharing shelves in hostels and camp sites brim over with titles like “Deadly Tide” or “Scones and Longing”.
The Tiny Things are Heavier (Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo)
The Tiny Things are Heavier features colorful, funny, and affectionate passages, while it’s no easy reading. With a melancholic tone, we accompany young Sommy on her journey from Lagos, Nigeria, to the University of Iowa, USA, and follow her life and love story, her pain, her joy and her friendship. There is the old African neighborhood, her mum’s sayings, fashion details like isi owu hairstyle, Ankara (Accra-tie-dye) and aso oke fabrics. There are musical and foodie details, reading recommendations from Tolstoi (War and Peace) to Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart) to Octavia Butler. The Tiny Things are Heavier is much more than “the new Normal People” (by Salley Rooney), that booktoks praised it to be.
Who should read it? It’s a book for everyone who appreciates realistic details and has an open mind to discover something new or see their familiar surrounds with with fresh eyes!
Love on Bad Days (Ewald Arenz)
“Love on Bad Days” (Die Liebe an miesen Tagen) would also fit as a title for Okonkwo’s book, however there’s already another book by that name.
Perhaps not as obvious a choice for summer reading, but more contemporary and multi-layered than the nostalgic look back at youth in One Great Summer (Der große Sommer) by the same author, Ewald Arenz. Love on Bad Days is full of details and observations, beautiful and funny moments, and profound strokes of fate, set between Hamburg and a fictional university town in southern Germany.
Who is this book for? Anyone who has had to cope with misfortune and experienced bittersweet summers and winters between love and disappointment, laughter and despair, for everyone who won’t let chance and adversity spoil their spirit. As the title suggests, this is not an easy read, shining light on a different kind of “coming of age” and struggles of family, illness, and ageing.
Summer in Odessa (Irina Kilimnik)
The next summer book in my list is Irina Kilimnik’s sad, defient, and beautiful (young) coming-of-age-story “Summer in Odessa”. The Berlin-based autor used to live in Odessa before leaving for Germany at the age of fifteen. Loving details of the beach and heat, summer storms and heartbreak immediately drew me into the spell of her story.
“On a lukewarm evening, the yellow butter light of the old street lanterns, decorated with hanging flower baskets, was shining upon the curb stones, letting them shimmer like the scales of a freshly caught fish.” (As translated by me in the absence of an official translation.)
Olga lives in Odessa, where she reluctantly tries to complete her unloved studies and ponders her family, love, friendship and betrayal. A visitor from America is not the only reason why the familiar world is showing cracks in the summer of 2014: ‘The city passes us by, with its problems and hardships, with its beautiful house facades behind which fear and uncertainty lurk, and with its people who love and betray their neighbours at the same time.’
The reason for reading? This novel is historical and timeless, youthful and universal at the same time. Although humour and love suffer some setbacks here, too, Summer in Odessa is perhaps the lightest read of all books on this list.
Up at the Villa (William Somerset Maugham)
At the top of the list, and by far the oldest book on it, is Up at the Villa, a work that reads more old-fashioned than it actually is, because Somerset Maugham’s books have certainly not been reprinted so often without good reason. What can you expect? Entertaining reading with grotesque surprises, humour and serious undertones, which even more than 80 years after its publication only seems old-fashioned at first glance, and this novel can also be understood as both historical and timeless.
It was my mother who recommended that I read Somerset Maugham, years ago, and while I didn’t really warm to The Razor’s Edge, I came across this summery alternative.
Who should read it? Everyone who saw Sisi and me, Call me by your Name, or La Chimera and still see these films’ retrofictional aesthetic in front of their eyes.
Call me by your Name (André Aciman)
Books like Call me by your Name are no insider tips. Call me by your Name isn’t “the book based on the film”, as the advertising sticker suggests, as it was clearly the book that came first. The film featuring the (back then) young and upcoming actor Timothy Chalamet was appropriately praised for its beautiful images and atmosphere. The film finds too few, and the book way too many words to describe Elio’s lonely days in the hot summer sun some time in the 1980s between family, friends, and the only slightly older visiting student. Together, the book and the film complement each other perfectly in my eyes. But let’s focus on books here: Call me by your Name is still a coming-of-age novel worth reading.
Who is this book for? I’ll recommend it to everyone who doesn’t yawn at the sight of an introverted intellectual’s diary, and not just to those who have experienced queer love or the summer heat of the 1980s themselves. The book is so much more than that, because there is also Elio’s girlfriend Marzia, the scene where he plays the piano, the diverse visitors dining with his educated parents, and the delicious ravioli made by Mafalda, the family’s cook and housekeeper.
Summary
These are five books that promise sophisticated entertainment:
- Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo: The Tiny Things are Heavier (2025)
- Irina Kilimnik: Summer in Odessa (2024)
- Ewald Arenz: Love on Bad Days (Die Liebe an miesen Tagen, 2023)
- André Aciman: Call me by your Name (2007)
- W. Somerset Maugham: Up at the Villa (1941)
Conclusion: Summertime without “Deadly Tide” on the Bookshelf
There are good bestsellers and bad ones. “Deadly Tide” and “Scones and Longing” have both been imagined by ChatGPT, like my initial working draft title “Seven Beautiful Summer Books” that I dropped after reading all those tragic chapters while still wanting to finish the books. Prefering to present new books instead of old ones, seven would be too much to ask, so I settled with five.
Apart from spontaneous purchases when I run out of stimulating reading material while travelling, I mainly use my lightweight e-book reader for non-fiction books and I always enjoy exciting and relaxing moments with large printed books and new sketchbooks away from my computer screen. The photographs are mine and you might have already seen them on social media: shivering at a lake in early summer, seeking midsummer shadow in front of a book store, and finally putting all books together at a glance on the sofa.
I hope you found something useful in my recommendations, otherwise feel inspired to discover something else, because once again, in 2025, many different exciting and important new books have been published!
