a few summer books recommendations for our dear bookworms🌼
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Seacrow Island by Astrid Lindgren
A city family rents a cottage on a remote Swedish island for the summer and slowly learns the rhythms of island life, its fishermen, its silences, and its surprises. Told through the eyes of several children and adults at once, the novel captures both the joy and the ache of a summer that cannot last forever.
Waffle Hearts by Maria Parr
Nine-year-old Trille and his neighbour Lena share a summer full of adventures, waffle-eating, and big feelings on a small Norwegian island. A warm and funny story about growing up, loyalty, and what it means to have a true best friend.
The Moomin by Tove Jansson
The Moomin family — round, gentle creatures who live in a cosy valley — set off on curious adventures full of strange characters, wild weather, and quiet magic. Beneath the playful surface, Jansson hides surprisingly deep ideas about freedom, belonging, and the beauty of small things.
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The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Esperanza, a young Latina girl, narrates her life in a Chicago neighbourhood through a series of short, poetic vignettes — about her family, neighbours, dreams, and desire to one day leave Mango Street behind. The language is simple and lyrical, each chapter no longer than a page or two, yet the cumulative effect is quietly powerful.
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
After a painful divorce, Elizabeth Gilbert spends a year travelling through Italy, India, and Indonesia in search of pleasure, spiritual peace, and a new sense of self. Each country becomes a lens through which she examines identity, faith, and desire with wit, honesty, and considerable literary flair.
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
An elderly grandmother and her six-year-old granddaughter spend a summer together on a tiny island off the Finnish coast, exploring the rocks, the sea, and each other. The book has no conventional plot — it is a series of quiet episodes, each one a small meditation on life, death, nature, and the strange tenderness between old age and childhood.
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Emma by Jane Austin
Emma Woodhouse is clever, rich, and convinced she has a gift for matchmaking — a conviction that leads her to meddle cheerfully in the lives of everyone around her. The novel is Jane Austen's sharpest and most ironic comedy of manners, built around a heroine who is blind to her own feelings while seeing everyone else's with false clarity.
In the Likely Event by Rebecca Yarros
Izzy and Nate survive a plane crash together as strangers and are pulled in and out of each other's lives over the next ten years — she into politics, he into the military. Their story reaches a breaking point when they are reunited in Afghanistan, where Nate is assigned to protect her.
Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes
Frances Mayes, a poet and professor, buys a ruined villa in the Tuscan countryside and spends her summers restoring it alongside her partner, learning the rhythms of Italian life through its food, markets, and people. Written with a poet's eye for sensory detail, the memoir is less a travel book than a love letter to beauty, reinvention, and the quiet courage of starting over.