Distract Yourself From the Heat With These 10 Gripping Reads

Set in the atmospheric fictional town of Wind Gap, Missouri, Camille Preaker, a journalist and Wind Gap native, journeys back there to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. There she must reckon with a challenging past she has fought to flee and uncovers dark family secrets in the process. This book is psychologically tense and unsettling and will stick with you long after you turn the last page.

If a woman’s slow descent into madness against the backdrop of a scorching hot summer is your cup of tea, this book will definitely suit your fancy. The narrator drops into a shocking spiral of insanity after her husband leaves her and her two children for a significantly younger woman. As she finds herself trapped in their high-rise apartment, she is forced to confront her past ghosts and accept her life will never return to the way it was before.

This read rests at the pinnacle of unreliable narrators, following Irina, who obsessively photographs average-looking men she scouts off the streets of Newcastle. These photographs offer the promise of her revival in the world of art, with the news of it inciting a tailspin surrounding her obsessive relationship with her best friend and a shy, attractive young man at her local supermarket. The book is shocking, comedic and twisted all in the same breath, leaving readers hungry to complete it in one sitting.

Looking to escape the summer heat and capitalist hellscape in one read? Then this is for you. Centered around Cassie, who finds herself trapped in her once dream job in cutthroat Silicon Valley, she realizes she is actually in a corporate nightmare. Though Cassie is not alone in this nightmare, a black hole that has been following her around for as long as she can remember accompanies her, feeding on her depression and anxiety.

Leading lady, Greta, lives with her friend Sabine in a funky, old Dutch farmhouse located in Hudson, New York. Spending her days transcribing therapy sessions for a therapist, Om, Greta finds herself fixated on his newest client, who she refers to as “Big Swiss.” On an afternoon out, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice in public and quickly finds herself enmeshed with her. Completely taken with her attraction to Big Swiss, Greta ignores any guilt she might have in order to sustain the relationship. This book is also getting adapted into a mini-series set to feature Jodie Comer as leading lady Greta.

"Asymmetry" tells two distinct stories: "Folly" and "Madness." Narrated across the Atlantic from each other, one follows a young literary editor and her torrid affair with an older, established writer. The other follows an Iraqi-American man held in a Heathrow detention room. Both stories are set against the backdrop of the Iraq War and explore issues of power, wealth, age and privilege. By interweaving the two stories together, Halliday successfully reaches an unexpected coda that will leave you pondering weeks after you set the book down.

Centering the story around an unnamed narrator, we follow her as she meets an enigmatic and charming man, Cirian. The two begin a deeply entangled romantic relationship before he abruptly rejects her, leading her down a spiral of longing and jealous obsession. This book engulfs readers into the unnamed narrator’s unsettled mental world that is torn between rebellion and degradation in the name of love. If you are interested in a psychologically gripping read, this book interrogates human nature, desire and power.

If you’re longing for a idyllic summer in the south of France, this novel will transport you there with the protagonist, 17-year-old Cécile. She joins her widower father and his latest mistress at a beautiful villa along the French Riviera. Here she attends superficial social gatherings hosted by her father while engaging in her own romantic pursuits with a young aspiring lawyer, Cyril. The summer is thrown into disharmony when Anne, a friend of Cécile’s late mother, unexpectedly arrives, creating an atmosphere of tension with her father’s mistress and herself as they all vie for his attention. If complex relationships against a scenic backdrop are up your alley, you’ll want to keep this read poolside.

Another psychologically intense read following a woman’s descent into madness. This book follows a French woman who has the ideal life and the ideal husband but allows herself to go down a spiral of constantly seeking reassurance that her husband still loves her. This behavior gets consistently and unsettlingly more extreme as the novel progresses until she reaches a point of no return.