Escape to warmer shores through the pages of these scintillating reads. But though it all seems light and warm – some of these summers have a dark side too. A lot can happen over a long, hot summer with the repercussions reverberating through lifetimes.

The View Was Exhausting by Mikaella Clements & Onjuli Datta

Win knows that Hollywood demands perfection - especially from a woman of colour. Leo just wants to enjoy life, and shift press attention away from his dysfunctional family. Together they control the narrative. Except this time, on the shores of Saint-Tropez, Leo is hiding a secret that is about to send Win’s world spinning. Now everyone’s dream couple must confront the messy reality of their relationship. Just as they’re starting to realise that they might actually be falling in love…

A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson

Erica is eighteen and ready for freedom. It’s the summer of 1960 when she lands on the sun-baked Greek island of Hydra where she is swept up in a circle of bohemian poets, painters, musicians, writers and artists, living tangled lives. Life on their island paradise is heady, dream-like, a string of seemingly endless summer days. But nothing can last forever.

Songs in Ursa Major by Emma Brodie

The summer of 1969. From the moment Jane Quinn steps barefoot onto the main stage at Island Folk festival, her golden hair glinting, her voice soaring into the summer dusk, a star is born - and so is a passionate love story. Jane’s band hits the road with none other than Jesse Reid, the musician whose bright blue eyes are setting hearts alight everywhere. And as the summer streaks by in a haze of crowds, wild nights and magenta sunsets, Jane is pulled into the orbit of Jesse’s star. But Jesse’s rise could mean Jane’s fall.

Voyeur by Francesca Reece

Leah, a young woman who has found herself ‘ambitioned’ out of London, is now aimlessly adrift in Paris. Michael, once the bright young star of the London literary scene, is now a washed-up author with writer’s block. When Michael offers Leah the opportunity to be his assistant and to join him and his family in their glorious property in the south of France for the summer, she finally feels her luck is turning. But as she begins to transcribe the diaries from his debauched life in 1960s Soho, something begins to nag at Leah’s sense of fulfilment; that there might be more to Michael than meets the eye.

Seven Days in June by Tia Williams

Eva Mercy is a single mother and bestselling erotica writer who is feeling pressed from all sides. Shane Hall is a reclusive, enigmatic, award-winning novelist, who, to everyone’s surprise, shows up unexpectedly in New York. When Shane and Eva meet at a literary event, sparks fly, raising not only their buried traumas, but also the eyebrows of the Black literati. What no one knows is that fifteen years earlier, teenage Eva and Shane spent one crazy, torrid week madly in love. While they may be pretending not to know each other, they can’t deny their chemistry - or the fact that they’ve been secretly writing to each other in their books through the years.