My 10 Most Anticipated Summer 2025 Book Releases

It’s that time of year again! The seasons are changing and new books are releasing. I love Summer book releases because I feel like I have so much more time to read during the Summer, whether it’s on a beach weekend or during a vacation. I’ve been researching all of the hot new releases for the next few months and have compiled a list to share here on the blog. So keep reading for my top ten Summer 2025 Book Releases that I’m excited for.

These new book releases are some of the most popular books of the  year. So if you’re looking for a good book to read this summer, make sure you check out my full blog post.

And if you’re looking for more great recs, you can find more of my book lists here.

What Kind of Books Do I Enjoy?

That’s always a tough questions to answer, isn’t it? So before I get on with my top ten Summer 2025 book releases, I’ll share a little bit about what kind of stories I love.

My favorite genres include thriller, cozy mystery, and women’s fiction. I also enjoy some literary fiction as well as some romance. But something I’ve learned about myself is that I don’t love spicy romances. I think that’s why I don’t trust booktok when it comes to romance books recommendations. Lol. The readers of tiktok seem to really love the spice!

Whether it’s a second chance romance or a cozy mystery set in a small town, I’ll probably give it a chance. I’m always willing to check out a debut novel or a new novel by one of my longtime favorite authors. Sometimes you find the best book when you least expect it.

My Top Ten Summer 2025 Book Releases

(In order of when they will be released)

Parents Weekend by Alex Finlay

May 6, 2025

In the glow of their children’s exciting first year of college at a small private school in Northern California, five families plan on a night of dinner and cocktails for the opening festivities of Parents Weekend. As the parents stay out way past their bedtimes, their kids—five residents of Campisi Hall—never show up at dinner.

At first, everyone thinks that they’re just being college students, irresponsibly forgetting about the gathering or skipping out to go to a party. But as the hours click by and another night falls with not so much as a text from the students, panic ensues. Soon, the campus police call in reinforcements. Search parties are formed. Reporters swarm the small enclave. Rumors swirl and questions arise.

Libby, Blane, Mark, Felix, and Stella—The Five, as the podcasters, bloggers, and TikTok sleuths call them—come from five very different families. What led them out on that fateful night? Could it be the sins of their mothers and fathers come to cause them peril or a threat to the friend group from within?

Told through multiple points of view in past and present—and marking the return of FBI Special Agent Sarah Keller from Every Last Fear and The Night Shift—Parents Weekend explores the weight of expectation, family dysfunction, and those exhilarating first days we all remember in the dorms when our friends become our family. (from Amazon.com)

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

June 3, 2025

Taylor Jenkins Reid is known for Daisy Jones, Evelyn Hugo, and more! And much like all of her books, her latest novel sounds like it will be completely one of a kind.

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.

Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easygoing even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warmhearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.

As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.

Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, it all changes in an instant.

Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, creating complex protagonists, and telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love—this time among the stars. (from Amazon.com)

Battle of the Bookstores by Ali Brady

June 3, 2025

This one seems like just the romantic comedy I need in my Summertime TBR. Who knew that you could find true love on the internet?

Despite managing bookstores on the same Boston street, Josie Klein and Ryan Lawson have never interacted much—Josie’s store focuses on serious literature, and Ryan’s sells romance only. But when the new owner of both stores decides to combine them, the two are thrust into direct competition. Only one manager will be left standing, decided by who turns the most profit over the summer. 

Efficient and detail-oriented Josie instantly clashes with easygoing and disorganized Ryan. Their competing events and contrasting styles lead to more than just frustration—the sparks between them might just set the whole store on fire. Their only solace during this chaos is the friendship they’ve each struck up with an anonymous friend in an online book forum. Little do they know they’re actually chatting with each other.  

As their rivalry heats up in real life, their online relationship grows, and when the walls between their stores come tumbling down, Josie and Ryan realize not all’s fair in love and war. And maybe, if they’re lucky, happily ever afters aren’t just for the books. (from Amazon.com)

The World’s Greatest Detective and Her Just Okay Assistant by Liza Tully

July 8, 2025

A brilliant Boomer detective and her ambitious Gen Z assistant try to get along in this delightful feel-good mystery.

Olivia Blunt is thrilled to be hired as assistant to the nationally renowned investigator Aubrey Merritt. She longs to become a valued contributor to the great detective’s work, but Merritt is a difficult, exacting boss, and the learning curve is steeper than she expected.

After weeks of boring computer work, Olivia is finally invited to join Merritt on an important case. On the night of her sixty-fifth birthday party, Victoria Summersworth somehow fell over her balcony railing to her death on the rocky shore of Vermont’s Lake Champlain. She was a happy woman—rich, beloved, in love, and matriarch of the preeminent Summersworth family. The police ruled her death a suicide, but Victoria’s daughter Haley thinks it was murder.

Merritt and Olivia soon discover that the Summersworth family is complicated web of lies, ambitions, and resentments. As the list of suspects grows, Olivia makes one apparent mistake after another. When she blunders into a truly dangerous situation, she realizes Merritt might be right: she might be in over her head with this whole detective thing…or she might be unravelling a mystery even bigger than the one they started with. (from Amazon.com)

Sounds Like Love by Ashley Poston

July 15, 2025

Sometimes you might just stumble upon the perfect guy when coming back home…

Joni Lark has a secret. She’s one of the most coveted songwriters in LA, and yet she can’t write. There’s an emptiness inside her, and nothing seems to fill it.

When she returns to her hometown of Vienna Shores, North Carolina, she hopes that the sand, the surf, and the concerts at The Revelry, her family’s music venue, will spark inspiration. But when Joni gets there, nothing is how she left it. Her best friend is hiding something, her mother’s memories are fading fast, and The Revelry is closing.

How can Joni write when her world is leaving her behind?

Until she hears it. A melody in her head, lyric-less and half-formed, and an alluring and addictive voice to go with it—belonging, apparently, to a wry musician with an emptiness of his own.

Surely, he’s a figment of Joni’s overworked imagination.

Then a very real man shows up in Vienna Shores. He’s arrogant and guarded—nothing like the sweet, funny voice in Joni’s head—and he has a plan for breaking their inconvenient telepathic connection: finish the song haunting them both and hope they don’t risk their hearts—or their secrets—in the process.

Because that melody, the one drawing them together . . . what if it’s there for a reason? (from Amazon.com)

A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping by Sangu Mandanna

July 15, 2025

I’m not sure if they are a series or not, but I read my first book by Sangu Mandanna last year. It was called The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches and I really enjoyed it. I think this might be the second book set in the same magical world.

Sera Swan used to be one of the most powerful witches in Britain. Then she resurrected her great-aunt Jasmine from the (very recently) dead, lost most of her magic, befriended a semi-villainous talking fox, and was exiled from her Guild. Now she (slightly reluctantly and just a bit grumpily) helps Jasmine run an enchanted inn in Lancashire, where she deals with her quirky guests’ shenanigans, tries to keep said talking fox in check, and longs for the future that seems lost to her. But then she finds out about an old spell that could hold the key to restoring her power…

Enter Luke Larsen, handsome and icy magical historian, who arrives on a dark winter evening and just might know how to unlock the spell’s secrets. Luke has absolutely no interest in getting involved in the madcap goings-on of the inn and is definitely not about to let a certain bewitching innkeeper past his walls, so no one is more surprised than he is when he agrees to help Sera with her spell. Worse, he might actually be thawing.

Running an inn, reclaiming lost magic, and staying one step ahead of the watchful Guild is a lot for anyone, but Sera Swan is about to discover that she doesn’t have to do it alone…and that the weird, wonderful family she’s made might be the best magic of all. (from Amazon.com)

The Lake Escape by Jamie Day

July 15, 2025

It’s always a good idea to try to get together as adults and try to one up your closest friends. Right? That’s what this book sounds like to me at least.

JULIA, DAVID, AND ERIKA grew up together spending summers at their idyllic Vermont lake homes for as long as they can remember. Now adults— with their own sullen teens, endless mortgages, and low-voltage sex lives— the three friends have amassed secrets over the years.

This summer, David is eager to show off his newly renovated home—which now blocks his friends’ cherished lake views—and his much-younger girlfriend. He also, unwittingly, brings a nanny with a hidden agenda. What could possibly go wrong?

When David’s girlfriend mysteriously vanishes after a shouting match, Julia and Erika wonder just how well they know their lifelong friend. The lake harbors a harrowing past: two young women, with no known connection, vanished without a trace thirty years ago. Did the lake take another?

As a search is mounted, an intricate web of lies, deceits, and betrayals spanning generations starts to surface, and everyone finds themselves in danger of becoming the next victim. Of the lake, or something darker. (from Amazon.com)

She Didn’t See It Coming by Shari Lapena 

July 29, 2025

Bryden and Sam have it all: thriving careers, a smart apartment in a luxury condominium, supportive friends and a cherished daughter. The perfect life for the perfect couple.

Then Sam receives a call at his office. Bryden – working from home that day – has failed to collect their daughter from daycare. Arriving home with their young girl, he finds his wife’s car in the underground garage. Upstairs in their apartment her laptop is open on the table, her cell phone nearby, her keys in their usual place in the hall.

Except Bryden is nowhere to be seen. It’s as if she just walked out.

How can she have disappeared from her own home? And did she even leave the building at all?

With every minute that passes – and as questions swirl around their community – Bryden and Sam’s past seems a little less perfect, their condominium less safe, their friends, neighbors and relatives no longer quite so reliable . . . (from Amazon.com)

High Season by Katie Bishop

August 12, 2025

On a beautiful summer’s night twenty years ago, troubled seventeen-year-old Tamara Drayton was found floating face-down in the pool of her family’s idyllic mansion in the south of France, leaving her twin brother, golden-boy Blake, to pick up the pieces of their shattered family.

Also left behind was their sister Nina who, at six years old, became the youngest person ever to testify in a French murder trial. Because she’s the only one who saw what happened—who watched as her babysitter, Josie Jackson, pushed Tamara under the water, and held her there until she stopped breathing.

Didn’t she? Twenty years later, Nina’s memories have faded, leaving her with no idea of what really transpired that night. When a new true crime documentary about her sister’s murder is announced, Nina thinks this might be her chance to finally find out.

But the truth always comes at a cost. Who will pay the price? (from Amazon.com)

Love’s A Witch by Tricia O’Malley

August 26, 2025

I love a love story with magic and whimsy, so this book seems right up my alley.

She’s hexed. He’s vexed. And for Scotland’s most magical small-town, their feud might just spell disaster.

Sloane MacGregor swore she’d never return to Briarhaven, but with her twenty-fifth birthday looming—the day witches come into their magic—her grandmother summons her and her sisters back for one tiny task: break the centuries-old curse haunting their bloodline.

Knox Douglas, Briarhaven’s grumpy mayor, has worked tirelessly to make his town a haven for magical folk. The last thing he needs is a cursed MacGregor wreaking havoc. It doesn’t matter he once crushed on her. For the sake of Briarhaven, Sloane has to go.

But magic has other plans—and in Briarhaven, love really is a witch. (from Amazon.com)

Which Release is my Most Anticipated Book of the Summer?

I would say that honor goes to Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid. I have been consistently impressed with her books over the past couple of years (I think I’ve read 5 of her works so far) and they have all been books I would re-read. And I don’t just say that about every book.

Some Honorable Mentions:

Just because I didn’t mention them in my top 10, doesn’t mean I’m not excited for these books as well! Here are some honorable mentions.

• Great Big Beautiful Life (The latest release by bestselling author Emily Henry, which actually came out in April)
• Don’t Let Him In by Lisa Jewell
• Caught Up by Navessa Allen (Book 2 in the Lights Out series)
• Don’t Open Your Eyes by Liv Constantine (I really liked the Senator’s wife which I read last year)
• Park Avenue by Renee Ahdieh

In Conclusion

I hope that you had a good time reading today’s blog post about my most anticipated Summer 2025 Book Releases. I love that there’s just so much to read at any given time. This list of books might have given you some reading inspiration, but if you have any recommendations make sure to let me know in the comments.

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