Top 6 books for summer reading 2023

Whether you’re relaxing next to the sea or in a lounge chair on your back porch, your summer vacation will be more enjoyable with something good to read in your hands. To help you decide what to read this year, here's a selection of 6 books for summer reading 2023. We hope that they that will keep you entertained all summer long.

Elif Shafak: Island of the Missing Trees

This time, the popular and award-winning writer Elif Shafak presents a rich, magical new novel on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal. We follow the story of a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, who, just before the outbreak of the civil war (1974) become involved in a forbidden love.

Isabel Allende: A Long Petal of the Sea

In Isabel Allende's new novel, we follow the story of a young doctor, Victoro, and his friend Roser, who are forced to leave Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War and cross the Pyrenees on the road to exile in France. The two refugees board the ship Winnipeg, where a beautiful story of hope, love and belonging unfolds.

Annabel Monaghan: Same Time Next Summer

This is a perfect summer romance. Sam has the perfect doctor fiancé, a great job in Manhattan, and is about to tour a wedding venue near her family’s Long Island beach house. Everything should go to plan, yet the minute she arrives, Sam senses something is off. Wyatt is here. But there’s no reason for a thirty-year-old engaged woman to feel panicked around the guy who broke her heart when she was seventeen.

Haruki Murakami: First Person Singular

In these eight short stories, the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author discusses love, loss, childhood, ageing, transience, and death through the eyes of the first-person narrators, who are always elderly men. Occasionally, a narrator may or may not be Murakami himself. So, we are not sure if it is a memoir or fiction.

Rachel Howzell Hall: What Never Happened

Colette Weber job is writing obituaries for the local newspaper on Catalina Island. Considering the number of elderly folks who are dying on the island, she has a lot to do. But as Coco learns more about these deaths, she quickly realizes that the circumstances surrounding them are remarkably similar… and not natural. This is a thriller that pulls you in and won't let go.

Jack Fairweather: The Volunteer

This is the incredible true story of Witold Pilecki, almost unknown hero who was completely erased from history by the Polish post-war communist government. Pilecki was a Polish soldier who volunteered for an audacious mission: assume a fake identity, intentionally get captured and sent to the camp, and then report back to the underground on what had happened to his compatriots there. He ended in Auschwitz, where he stayed for almost three years, before managing to escape.

There are also interesting stories in the books we recommended for you last summer. Perhaps one of them will keep you company on the GoOpti ride to the airport.