5 Of The Best Nostalgic Reads For Summer 2025

Memory might play tricks on us, but it never forgets the feel of a certain kind of coming-of-age summer. We've tried to recreate the feeling a thousand different ways: playlist algorithms, film grain filters, and the revival of surprisingly wearable low-rise jeans. But there's something fiction can do that no other nostalgia fix can. It returns you to the middle of it. Picture the long, languid afternoons, the private logic of adolescent infatuation, and the sense — however fleeting — that everything was just about to begin.

So, in an era of Y2K revival and rebooted everything, it's no wonder we're reaching for a literary throwback, too. Books, after all, were the primary distraction before the internet became ambient — when the "computer room" was a household fixture, and whatever you pulled from the library shelf had to last you a while.

Amid the stacks of dog-eared paperbacks and long-forgotten series, a certain kind of book still hits the sweet spot. Stories set at camp, or on the cusp of the millennium, or in the strange lull between childhood and whatever comes next. You'll start reading these and find yourself transported. If you're craving a summer you once had (or the one you wanted to have) you might just find it here.

If "The Parent Trap" was refreshed for the Instagram era and given a Reese's Book Club imprimatur, it would look a lot like "You Have a Match" by Emma Lord. A DNA test, taken half-seriously, returns a result that 16-year-old Abby isn't prepared for: she has a sister — one she's never met, and one she was never even told about.

Savannah, the match in question, appears to live an entirely different kind of life. She's a well-mannered, media-savvy neatnik — everything Abby is not. The two agree to meet at summer camp, where cabins, communal kitchens, and scheduled downtime offer just enough distance from real life for things to slip out sideways. Abby's best friend Leo is there, too, though calling him a friend might not feel quite as accurate anymore...

This one is for the readers who miss the unguarded emotional texture of being young, when the raw, unfinished feelings of adolescence were not yet hardened, not yet resolved. Lord keeps the tone light and unhurried, though there is a satisfying emotional weight beneath the surface of this plot. Reese Witherspoon called it "an utterly charming book," and beneath that charm, described it as a story about "sisterhood, friendship, and a very unique family dynamic." It belongs on any seasonal lineup that values mood as much as  momentum, making it a clear runner among the best beach reads for your summer reading list from her book club.

Taste used to be tactile. Before streaming made everything instant, before playlists auto-populated themselves, before the algorithm learned to mimic desire – you held it in your hands. It lived in vinyls and burned CDs, in taped tracklists, in borrowed wired headphones, in the stacks of cassette tapes alphabetized on bedroom floors.

"High Fidelity," Nick Hornby's 1995 novel, is a relic from this era in the finest sense. Set in a pre-millennium pocket of North London, it follows Rob — a thirty-something record store owner who files his many heartbreaks like LPs. His knowledge of music is encyclopaedic, his emotional maturity less so, and the novel traces the imbalance between these two forms of fluency. After yet another breakup with his long-term girlfriend, Rob turns to his record collection. He catalogues his series of doomed relationships through music, hoping to find meaning somewhere between the A and B sides.

In 2024, Discogs reported a 6.2% rise in vinyl sales — a telling figure suggesting a continued appetite for the physical. For readers looking to revisit the texture of the '90s — the decades' rhythms and reference points — "High Fidelity" is a romantic comedy with just the right amount of analogue longing.

The nostalgia Stephen Chbosky gives us in "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" is twofold. Set in the early 1990s, the novel captures a pre-digital interiority of passed notes and mixtapes. But for many readers, especially those who came of age in the 2010s, it's inseparable from its emotional afterlife as a Tumblr-era touchstone – a rite of passage for introverts, outsiders, and misfits everywhere.

The story is told through letters written by Charlie, a lonely teenager watching his first year of high school from the edges. In the wake of a friend's death, and carrying an anxiety disorder, he finds an unlikely belonging among a group of older students. They offer him a version of adolescence he might otherwise have missed with house parties on weeknights and mix CDs during midnight drives. The Smiths, Jack Kerouac, and "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" soundtrack were passed to him like contraband.

In the age of reblogs and curated angst, a book about not quite fitting in, ironically, somehow became the thing everyone read to feel understood. Chbosky captures the strangeness of uncertain youth with clarity. The novel's cult status only deepened with its film adaptation, starring Logan Lerman and Emma Watson, which brought the story to a new audience without losing its wistful melancholy.

They say college gives you the best years of your life. At the very least, it's the period you're most likely to mythologize later. Throw in late '90s gaming culture and you have a book perfectly suited to a summer of looking back.

Gabrielle Zevlin's "Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow" follows two childhood friends, Sam and Sadie, who reunite in college and begin building video games together — first in dorm rooms, then in studios. Their shared love of video games becomes the basis for a complicated, often combustible friendship that carries them through college, careers, heartbreaks, and artistic triumphs. But for all the tension and miscommunication, there is beauty in building an imagined world together where the emotional stakes are just as high.

This pleasing narrative floats fluidly between their perspectives, allowing space for misunderstandings. At times, the novel blurs the line between reality and digital space, folding in moments that take place within the games they've created and shared together. No need to be a gamer to enjoy it, either. Many readers on Goodreads have said the same, and still found themselves deeply moved. The proof is in the numbers: an impressive 4.13 average across a whopping 1.2 million ratings.

Set during the school year, yes, but the kind of nostalgia Curtis Sittenfeld conjures in "Prep" belongs firmly on a summer reading list. It's best read when the days are long and hot enough to make introspection feel like a natural state.

Lee Fiora is 14 when she leaves her modest midwestern home for Ault, an elite New England boarding school, as a scholarship student. She spends the next four years watching, attentive to the social mores she hasn't been taught, studying the rituals of the seemingly self-assured. She memorizes inflections and jargon, but rarely understands what any of it means until years later. It is this sense of retrospect that Sittenfeld (a seasoned chronicler of romantic reads and a Reese's Book Club alum in her own right) brings to this sharply addictive debut.

Though Fiora's experience is highly specific, the territory she circles is broadly familiar: class anxiety, self-consciousness, the adolescent ache of wanting to belong. "Prep" isn't an idealized or sentimental take on coming-of-age — it's nostalgia for readers who prefer it without rose-tinted glasses.

Summer slows things down just enough for our forgotten moments to surface. With the light sinking further into the evening, it's only natural that we become a little more porous to memory. These books are guaranteed to restore the soft blur of our earlier experiences.

Whilst summertime doesn't always bring clarity, it can sharpen sensation. The way time stretches and contracts can make us all the more sensitive to tone and mood. That's what we looked for here: books that build a world you can sink into.

Summer is also, of course, a mirror — held up to who we used to be, or thought we might become. The books on this list tap into that feeling of being just on the edge of something, uncertain of the shape you're taking, but blanketed in the sanctuary of the sun's embrace. They remind us how strange it is to be young, and how much stranger it can be to look back on it. This can often be a bittersweet experience, but there's certainly something satisfying in recognizing the distance between who you were during those summers, and who you are now during these.