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The 5 Best Summer Holiday Novels to Cure Your Travel Bug

For many of us, our holiday plans were canceled this summer – or at least changed drastically. If you’ve rerouted to the English coast or postponed your jet setting to a later, safer date here are the best summer vacation novels to live vicariously through.

Same Beach Next Year by Dorothea Benton Frank
‘Same Beach, Next Year’ by Dorothea Benton Frank

This holiday romance unravels between a complicated love square made up of former sweethearts, Adam Stanley and Eve Landers, and their respective spouses, Eliza and Carl. 

A chance meeting on the Isle of Palms brings these couples together and year after year they reunite as friendships and relationships grow. 

The Lowcountry of South Carolina is the backdrop for this complex story whilst sun, sea and sand all enrich the lives of these characters as they experience love, family, and heartbreak.

Summer Kitchens The perfect summer cookbook by Olia Hercules 1 1
Summer Kitchens: The perfect summer cookbook by Olia Hercules

If you aren’t a fiction reader and looking to enrich your summer staycations in other ways this is perfect. 

Olia offers fresh and vibrant recipes for the summer, inspired by the outdoor cooking styles of Ukraine that made up her childhood. 

Her third book is Olia’s return to the people, landscape and recipes that continue to entice her home.

The Safe Place by Anna Downes 1 1
The Safe Place by Anna Downes

For crime and thriller loves this book is a must-read. Emily Proudman is struggling, personally, and professionally. Secretly, she wishes for rescue. Then when her ex-boss Scott Denny offers Emily a summer job as a housekeeper on his remote, beautiful French estate it all feels too good to be true.

Emily immediately settles into an oasis of ever-lasting days stretched out by the pool. However, soon enough Emily realizes that Scott and Nina are hiding dangerous secrets, and if she doesn’t play along, the consequences could be deadly.

A Theatre for Dreamers Polly Samson 1
A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson

A 1960s bohemian community in The Greek island of Hydra is made up of of poets, painters and musicians. 

Their lives are disrupted by teenage Erica, armed with handful of blank notebooks and dealing with the grief for her mother. Settling on the edge of this circle, she watches, as a paradise unravels.

JoJo Moyes encourages everyone to read “If you wish you could disappear to a Greek island right now, I highly recommend’

The Forever Summer by Jamie Brenner 1 1
‘The Forever Summer’ by Jamie Brenner

With one careless mistake Marin Bishop loses everything she’s worked for. Her career, relationship and family ties are all put at risk.

But when one young woman from LA arrives in New York claiming to be Marin’s half-sister Marin is easily convinced to accompany her on a road trip across New England in search for her paternal grandmother. 

As the summer unfolds at her grandmother’s tiny beachside inn, it becomes clear that the truth of her half-sister is just the beginning of a string of truths that will change Marin’s life forever.

Emily Liebert, author of Some Women and You Knew Me When recounts that The Forever Summer paints a poignant portrait of a family in turmoil, striving to make peace with the past and forge forward into the future.”

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