78 books like The Summer Book

The first of Moberg’s 4-volume saga of Swedish immigrants, this book is so thoroughly researched that he invented a term, calling them “documentary novels.” The family in the story are farmers from a poor, remote parish in Sweden whose lives are constricted by both the church and the state. This reflects the painful realities of Europe in 1850, where almost everyone was poor, rural, oppressed, and completely unprepared for the journey ahead of them. Whether you read Moberg’s Emigrant Novels for the intense personal drama or for more understanding of why people leave their homelands, you will find these stories deeply emotional and insightful.

This is an unusual crime story set in Copenhagen, Denmark. It caused a sensation when it was published in 1992. The main character Smilla Jaspersen is a half Inuit scientist from Greenland, lonely and homesick in the big city. The death of an Inuit boy pulls her into a complex web of crime exposing Denmark’s complicated relationship with its protectorate Greenland. The title refers to the Inuit people’s understanding of their wintry habitat, and is a reminder of the threat to traditional lifestyles of many indigenous people. A thriller, but so much more. 

This book is happiness. 

Okay, but here’s the thing: It takes about 30 pages for Niall Williams to hit his stride. There’s a lot about weather at first, the whole Irish rain situation. Stick with it. Once Christy comes on the scene in this small Irish town, Faha, and is hoping to have a meeting with a woman he left at the alter 30 years before, and once our young narrator gets involved in his plan—BAM. 

The reader is fully in the world of Faha as electricity is introduced into the village, as Noel begins to figure out love and the insanity that is normal around him—well, I did not want it ever to end, even as at the beginning I was waiting for it to begin. Another book to clutch to the heart.    

I met Patrik Svensson at a book event in 2019, just as his novel was released and came away with a signed copy when I left. I brought it home and put it aside for a later read. When I finally picked it up, I was fascinated. This is another autobiographical story, this one about a little boy growing up in the southern part of Sweden. The father and son only really come together when they go eel fishing. The father teaches the son the elaborate technique of setting the eel traps and through this they establish a silent bond. Interspersed throughout the narrative are chapters with facts about the mysterious life cycle of eels. It is an extraordinary novel, unlike any other I have read. 

Based on a true story, this is an important, thought-provoking book in these times of mass migrations around the globe. The story follows the thirteen-year-old boy Otto Ullman’s journey from Vienna to Trelleborg in southern Sweden. He is sent by his adoring Jewish parents as the persecution of Jews escalates in Austria during the lead-up to the second world war. The letters between Otto and his family, other relatives, and friends left behind are difficult to read. The efforts they all make to keep a brave face in spite of intolerable circumstances are utterly moving. Amongst the letters are official Swedish documents revealing the extent of racism and prejudice in Sweden. There are many similar stories. But I find this one particularly heartbreaking. 

Evie Wyld writes atmospheric and eerie stories that always have an edge, a threat of danger about them, and this wonderful book is almost gothic in its atmosphere of place. The rock itself actually exists, I’m not sure if the house in question does, but the rock and the house and the remote Scottish location bind us into a feeling of constant danger like no single character ever could. The story unfolds in a series of tales told across time periods, back and forth (a tricky format to pull off, but Wyld does it brilliantly). The central character is the great old house, in some disrepair,  and how it has been occupied over time by women who have been, to one degree or another imprisoned by their circumstances. I don’t want to spoil the story, but I guarantee that from the first few pages you will be drawn into the… show more.

Daniel Mason’s The Winter Soldier is superb. I love its wonderfully drawn characters and visual details, its sense of medical authenticity, its depiction of the convolutions of history—in this case, the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s side of things in WWI. It’s all held within a heart-wrenching narrative about a Viennese medical student assigned to a distant field hospital in the Carpathian Mountains. What he finds is a village church turned into a makeshift hospital with a single nurse in charge. The author, a physician, creates so well the terror of a medical student facing, for the first time, what his textbooks couldn’t convey—the awful effects of war upon the human body and mind. Nor could those textbooks show what love and atonement feel like. The Winter Soldier does.  

Set in the 19th century New England social landscape of transcendentalist educational trends, this is an important book about women, misogyny, education, and ‘western’ medicine. The landscape here is a farmhouse outside a New England village where the patriarch social philosopher and teacher has started a school for girls following the death of his wife. His grown daughter is his helper, and you see where I’m going with this…also his prisoner. She is vulnerable by her sensitive nature and by her lack of worldly education. When other girls come to board at the new school and other teachers, men, arrive to practice the educational theories they have developed in a fervor of advancing just how women’s education should evolve, the young women respond variously to these new influences. The remote landscape, again, keeps them from freedoms that might improve their awareness. There are also magical trees, birds, and a… show more.

The Saturday Night Ghost Club wraps a poignant story about grief and loss inside a nostalgic 1980s package that brings to mind the best of Steven Spielberg and Stephen King.

I’m always a sucker for a group of misfits who band together and learn some important life lessons, and Davidson takes that outline and fills it in with Uncle Calvin, Jake, Billy, and Dove. Uncle Calvin will break your heart, the boys’ friendship will warm it, but the real MVP for me is fierce, wild Dove.

The vibe of this book is sleepovers in wood-paneled game rooms, staying out past bedtime under a full moon, and being on the cusp of leaving childhood fears behind, while learning that the adult world sometimes holds more darkness than you knew. 

I love wordplay, and Douglas Florian is a master. His poems are short, fun, and well-crafted. He also illustrates his books, in a style that is sketchy, childlike, and textural. When I need a bit of lighthearted inspiration for my own poetry, Florian always delivers. He has written dozens of books, but his book about summer called Summersaults captures the essence of his style. Here’s a delicious sample:

"A Summery"

June: We seeded.
July: We weeded.
August: We eated.