We previously sent this newsletter with a link to last year’s Summer Reading Guide. See below for the correct link to this year’s edition.

This past week, I tested out some burgers on our new outdoor grill in preparation for cookouts to come. My wife pulled Anna Karenina—the 2000 translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky—off our bookshelves in preparation for a bucket-list reading experience. Meanwhile, at the office, the Atlantic books team put the finishing touches on the 2025 edition of our annual Summer Reading Guide.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s books section:

• A different way to think about medicine’s most stubborn enigma
• An eerily familiar 20th-century hoax
• The not-at-all-funny life of Mark Twain
• We’re all living in a Carl Hiaasen novel.

One of summer’s distinguishing features is its generous expanse of daylight and leisure time, which allows for pleasures both solitary and communal: You can crack open the book you’ll read all summer, or immerse yourself in a cult classic, and still have time to host a barbecue, where you’ll swap ideas on what page-turner to pack for an upcoming vacation. On rainy or scorching days, you can transport yourself to another place or learn something completely new without leaving your home, stocking up on insights to share with friends when fair weather returns.

Summer can feel like an interregnum during which to recharge, but unlike its seasonal opposite, these months discourage the notion of keeping your thoughts to yourself. That’s why, this year, we’ve added a category to our list: “Pick Up the Novel Everyone Will Be Talking About.” Last year, debates over Miranda July’s All Fours seemed to spark up everywhere. In 2025, we’re wagering that coming releases from R. F. Kuang and Elaine Castillo will jockey for attention with anticipated hits from S. A. Cosby and Taylor Jenkins Reid. But no one can predict the discourse; the only thing we can say for certain is that there will be plenty of time for talking, reading, and talking about reading. Consider the conversation started.

The Hero of This Book, by Elizabeth McCracken

McCracken once promised never to make her deeply private mother, Natalie, a character in one of her books—especially not in a memoir, a genre the elder McCracken despised. But when Natalie died, in 2018, the writer reconsidered that vow. The Hero of This Book, a novel that playfully skirts the boundary between fact and fiction, sees the bereaved McCracken wrestling with the ethics of writing about the ones she loves. In the process, she tries to parse Natalie’s many contradictions. McCracken, or her avatar, spends the novel wandering around London, a favorite city of Natalie’s, shortly after her mother’s death, recalling as much as she can about her: her small stature and larger-than-life personality, her bookish brilliance and financial incompetence, her stubbornness and self-mythologizing. (Natalie claimed to have invented both the mojito and children’s Tylenol.) From this swirl of memories emerges a moving portrait of an imperfect person who, McCracken writes, “loved being alive and in the world.” Her vivid rendering proves to be not a betrayal but the ultimate tribute. — Sophia Stewart

From our list: What to read to understand your mom