Image: Kotryna Zukauskaite
Your Feral Girl Summer Reading List: No Shame, Just Heat
The nights are steamier, the outfits clingier, and your people-pleasing tendencies are packed away with the fleece. Welcome to Feral Girl Summer. This is your permission to read for you—loud, messy, sexy, wild, and unhinged. These books tingle in all the right places: the brain, the body, and the memory. Who cares who’s watching? It’s your summer. So throw one in your tote and let the games begin.
New. Naughty. Necessary.
Brand new books hitting shelves with the perfect combination of intellect and heat. These aren’t your typical beach reads—they’re the literary equivalent of that perfect summer fling: unexpected, intoxicating, and impossible to forget.
by Sarah MacLean
These Summer Storms represents enormously successful historical romance writer and romance genre advocate Sarah MacLean’s first time throwing her pen into the contemporary fiction ring. The novel, which will be released on July 8, centers around protagonist Alice Storm who returns to her dysfunctional family’s private New England island following the death of her father. Once there, she discovers that he has created a sort of inheritance game dictating that Alice must stay longer and contend with far more than she had planned.
By Mia Sosa
A brand new rom-com with rules, regret, and repressed desire. It’s hot. It’s mischievous. It’s funny. And it’s about time Javi got it together. This friends-to-lovers page-turner has taken up real estate on a slew of most-anticipated 2025 summer reads—and should take up real estate on your beach chair this summer as well.
By Amy Shearn
Pandemic. Divorce. Midlife horniness. Sexual exploration. Intimacy. Welcome to Amy Shearn’s wildly smart, honest, and totally unfiltered tale of a woman who creates an AI lover to avoid bad dates. And maybe also to avoid herself.
by Emily Adrian
Just in time for the stickiest days of summer, Seduction Theory comes out on August 12. The novel boasts a tantalizing premise: A creative writing graduate student’s thesis project “fictionally” outs the web of infidelity in the department. Smart and steamy, this one will keep you delightfully hot and bothered into the back-to-school season.
Flings from Summers Past
A chance to dip back into hot reads that you may have missed the first time around, or will love slipping into for a second time. And an opportunity to see what does—and perhaps doesn’t—age as well as you have.
How Stella Got Her Groove Back
By Terry McMillan
This 1996 tale of self-realization follows 40-something, overworked divorced mom Stella Payne from the boardroom to an ocean view room on a last-minute vacation to Jamaica with her bestie. There, Stella finds steamy romance with a younger man, connection, and ultimately—as the title of this fun bestseller suggests—herself.
by Jennifer Weiner
Big Summer is a gift-that-keeps-on-giving beach and everywhere else read by author extraordinaire Jennifer Weiner. A love story, mystery, and exploration of female friendship and social media’s tentacles rolled into one, the novel is set against the backdrop of an extravagant Cape Cod wedding. Weiner’s 2020 novel—and really, any and all of her books—focus on women characters who embrace their whole, wonderful, and sometimes spectacularly feral selves as the heroes of their own stories.
Nonfiction That Hits Like a Summer Tryst
True stories of storm and self to keep you flipping pages all summer long.
The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex
By Melissa Febos
The Dry Season is provocative and wise in all the best expected—and unexpected—ways. National bestselling author Melissa Febos takes to the page in this memoir to write about her year of abstinence, discovering that it turns out to be the most sensuous and fulfilling year of her life. If you can’t get enough of Febos (first of all, you’re not alone), then pick up Whip Smart: The True Story of a Secret Life about transformation from a college student to a professional dominatrix, or any of her other titles.
A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck
By Sophie Elmhirst
Maurice and Maralyn did what most only dream about. The real-life couple quit their jobs, sold their house, bought a sailboat, and took to the seas together in the summer of 1972. It was smooth sailing until the day when a whale sank their boat, and the couple began what would become a year together on a small raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean—a test to their marriage they could’ve never imagined. This non-fiction release will be available on July 8.
Feral Girl Poetry
Before summer’s end, dip into prose poetry, the OG feral woman of the poetry world, and luxuriate in the freedom of word.
Useful Information for the Soon-to-be-Beheaded: Prose Poems
By Shivani Mehta
If that title didn’t have you at hello then consider reading it again. Attorney-now-poet Mehta brings to life a glowing constellation of emotions while showing why surrealist prose poetry is the feral girl summer of poetry. At 73 pages, it’s as light as a pair of flip flops and a true literary wonder for anywhere the summer takes you. Craving more? Mehta’s newest collection, The Required Assembly: Prose Poems, is equally as dazzling.
Turning Up the Heat
So many of us have been told beach book fantasies are frivolous. But why? Have we too easily bought into the narrative that women’s stories, all of our stories, are somehow less than? What if we didn’t relegate our summer steam and desires to the shortest season of the year? Now’s the time to reach for what—and who—you want, one glorious sun-drenched page at time.
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