What we're reading this summer

Book recs from a culture editor.

Naomi May

Jun 19, 2026

Hello!

Hope everyone had a good week 🫶

Welcome again to our new subscribers from The Know — so happy to have you all here.

On the menu today:

News: Including how Phoebe Bridgers’ tour photos were made, and a potential Taylor Swift wedding decoy
Open Tabs: A summer reading list for us all, curated by the wonderful Naomi May
Hot + Not: With musician Charlotte MacInnes
Add to Queue: Great stuff to read, watch, and listen to this weekend

Enjoy the sun!!!

Holly x

P.S. if you have a journey or a long run and need a rec, I was on HIP REPLACEMENT this week! 🎧

Updates from the Capsule universe you may have missed this week:

Olivia Rodrigo’s new album is very good. You can almost hear her frontal lobe developing in real time
The next Red Lips x Bumble dating event (hosted by previous Capsule guest writer Olivia Petter) is next Wednesday! Tickets here 💋
Maggie Rogers spilled the tea on a New York Times journalist at Rosalía’s show
The photo for the Phoebe Bridgers tour is a piece of art. Here’s how it was made
Tom Holland once again being the sweetest man on earth
Charli xcx talking sense
Is this Taylor Swift MSG wedding gossip just a really good decoy?
Five (!) great looks worth seeing: Suki Waterhouse looking like 2000s Keira Knightley, Bella Hadid in 90s Prada, Ayo Edebiri in a Björk t-shirt, Rosalía in an amazing Yasmina Studio tutu, and of course Rama Duwaji in custom Miss Claire Sullivan to the Knicks parade
And this week we started making videos for Capsule…why are the bloopers the best bit?!
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If you have more thoughts, please hit reply <3

By Naomi May

In his 2009 novel The Long Fall, Walter Mosley shared a sentiment I have long maintained: “A man’s bookcase will tell you everything you’ll ever need to know about him.”

I can tell you exactly where I was when I first encountered that quote — my first student halls, tucked just behind Farringdon station, on an evening when I should, no doubt, have been writing essays — because it lodged itself somewhere deep inside. When I began building my life in London, the first things I’d consider in people’s homes were their bookshelves. I fell in love with some people whose bookshelves were full of Austen, and I showed myself the door whenever anybody had bookshelves in their home that were gathering dust, devoid of their very purpose.

I have read prolifically since I was a little girl, and throughout my life books have provided comfort, support and escapism in equal measure. I can point to the books I read during my first love, my first heartbreak, my first hot, languorous summer in London.

I make time for reading the way other people make time for scrolling or watching TV: instinctively, less out of obligation than necessity. I bookmark my days with it — the first thirty minutes of every morning are dedicated to reading, I listen to audiobooks while I exercise, and I finish every evening with another thirty. Books allow me to slip in and out of worlds that differ from my own, some far more beautiful, some considerably less so, but as I have always maintained: there is almost nothing a good, intellectually nourishing book cannot fix.

If you’re looking to build a summer reading curriculum, consider these. Some are tried-and-true favourites — good-for-the-soul comfort food, essentially — and others are newer discoveries I’m just as evangelical about. They are stories that will furnish you with knowledge, engender empathy and leave you aching with love.

The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst

Hollinghurst is a writer I return to time and time again, and The Line of Beauty — which I first encountered during one long, airless London summer — remains the work of his that I return to most often. Set against the gilded excess of 1980s Thatcherite Britain, it follows Nick Guest, a young gay man embedded in a world of wealth, beauty and increasing precariousness. Sensuous, morally complex and written with a lapidary elegance, it is the kind of book that makes you slightly bereft when it ends. A masterpiece I would like to mandate everybody read at least once in their lives.

The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende

I am, by disposition, resistant to magical realism — but when my best friend, who is coincidentally one of the most widely-read people I know, thrust a copy of The House of the Spirits into my hands, I had my first introduction to Allende’s linguistic magic. Sumptuous, hypnotic and vast in its emotional range, The House of the Spirits traces four generations of the Trueba family across a turbulent, transforming Chile. Allende writes with such warmth and authority that if this novel doesn’t convert you to magical realism, nothing will.

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

Emily Sundberg is something of a high priestess of culture, and when she recently curated a summer reading list sourced from her readers, one title emerged as the overwhelming consensus. McMurtry’s Pulitzer-winning epic follows two aging Texas Rangers driving a cattle herd from the Rio Grande to Montana, and has been called the great American novel so frequently the description has essentially calcified into fact. I haven’t read it yet, but a tattered copy I acquired via AbeBooks sits at the very top of my to-be-read pile.

Hot Milk, Deborah Levy

Sun-drenched and hallucinatory in equal measure, Hot Milk is a book you feel as much as read — the chorus of crickets, the relentless beat of the sun, the specific disorientation of being somewhere foreign and unmoored from everything familiar to you. One of my all-time favourite writers, Levy describes female desire and psychological drift with an almost unnerving precision. Hot Milk tells the story of Sofia, who has brought her ailing mother to a Spanish coastal town in search of a cure; what she finds instead is something altogether more destabilising. Best consumed horizontally, somewhere warm, Aperol Spritz in hand, with no particular obligations for the foreseeable.

Girl’s Girl, Sonia Feldman

Sharp, propulsive and forensically attuned to the anxieties of contemporary womanhood, Girl’s Girl is one of my best discoveries of the summer so far. Fifteen-year-old Mina’s whole world is her two best friends — until an unexpected kiss causes the established dynamics of their trio to unravel entirely. Everything that was once shared openly, from clothes to secrets, now feels impossibly fragile; loyalties shift and tensions simmer across the long days of a pivotal summer, as an adult Mina looks back and traces the undercurrents of longing that shaped her first experience of desire. Feldman writes girlhood — its invisible jealousies, its unspoken negotiations, and its particular brand of excruciating self-consciousness — with an Austenian precision. A truly delicious summer read.

Lázár, Nelio Biedermann

Lázár is one of the best books I’ve read this year; a sweeping, dynastic odyssey told over generations, it is a remarkable story that is loosely based on Biedermann’s own family’s experience. His own noble ancestors were prominent Central European aristocrats whose lineage dates back to the early 1800s, and many moments throughout the novel are inspired by stories told to him by his grandmother — such as her escape from Hungary on foot and her run across a frozen river in 1956 to reach Switzerland. He also included historical accounts, such as his great-uncle being held at gunpoint by a Soviet soldier. Even more impressively, Biedermann started writing it when he was 16 and had it published when he was just 22 (it came out in March 2026.) I cannot recommend it enough.

I Want You To Be Happy, Jem Calder

Boy meets girl. Around each other they orbit — tentatively, hopefully, inevitably — until they simply stop. The merry-go-round will be immediately recognisable to anyone who has navigated the modern dating scene with any degree of self-awareness. Wryly funny, acutely observed and superbly ironic, Calder writes contemporary romantic failure with a precision that is almost forensic. Given that Calder has been championed by Sally Rooney from the beginning of his writing career, it’s unsurprising that I Want You To Be Happy has drawn comparisons to Rooney’s tour de force Normal People. If you haven’t read it, read it immediately, and then pass it on to every friend you have (as I have done.)

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