11 Page-Turners To Add To Your Summer Reads List

As summer approaches, it's time to add some page-turners to our reading lists. You know, books we can charge through in a matter of days or hours spent by the pool, on the beach, or waiting for a delayed flight.

So, here are a few worth checking out:

1. The Dead Zone by Stephen King

We follow Johnny Smith, a teacher with a life and a future, one that is put to an immediate halt when a dreadful accident leaves him in a coma for five years. Upon awakening, everything about Johnny's life and the people in it has changed; but even more importantly, he's developed a strange ability – one that allows him to see into people's futures at a touch. This new ability brings him closer to a powerful individual, and even closer to danger. 

2. Replay by Ken Grimwood

This fantasy/sci-fi novel follows the life of Jeff Winston, and then it follows the life of Jeff Winston again, and again. Saddened and unenthused by his life, Jeff suddenly drops dead, only to wake up as his 18-year-old self with all of his memories in tact. In repeating parts of his life, he explores different relationships, decisions, and various paths, making him, and the reader question where a meaningful life truly comes from.

3. The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

This vast yet intimate novel tells the harrowing unstable story of 20th century Vietnam; including the disruption caused by the land reform in the mid '50s, and devastation of the war throughout the '60s and '70s. Through the lives of grandmother Diệu Lan and her granddaughter Hương, this multigenerational saga tells a tale of sorrow, separation, and survival. 

4. Dawn by Octavia E. Butler

First in the Lilith's Brood series, previously known as he Xenogenesis Trilogy, Dawn follows Lilith lyapo, who, when waking up from a centuries-long sleep, finds herself aboard the vast spaceship of the Oankali. It is Lilith's role to reconstruct humanity after a nuclear war has all-but obliterated it.

5. Land by Maggie O’Farrell

The new novel from the best-selling author of Hamnet introduces us to Tomás and his 10-year-old son Liam, who are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland in 1865. Their task is arduous and troublesome in a country recovering from the Great Hunger, but Tomás is determined for this map to become a record of this great disaster. When an unexpected and unsettling encounter in a patch of woodland sends Tomás off course, his entire reality shifts, and Liam must figure out how they will finish the mapping and get them safely home. 

6. City of Thieves by David Benioff

This historical fiction is set four months into the siege of Leningrad, during a brutal, biting winter. With food scarce, a teenager named Lev is caught looting the body of a dead German paratrooper, and is arrested and put in a cell with Kolya, a charismatic young deserter. Instead of facing execution, the two are instead given an almost impossible task: finding a dozen eggs for a Soviet colonel’s daughter's wedding, or die. Their journey takes them through the perilous conditions of soviet Russia, and brings the two closer as they fight for their survival. 

7. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

In the mountains of southern Appalachia, we follow the fascinating life of hardship and survival; that of a young boy in poverty and on the fringes of a neglected society. Through the foster care system, being put to work, crumbling underfunded schools, and beyond, we hear the successes, failures, and survival of Damon Fields, otherwise known as Demon Copperhead. 

8. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

We follow Count Alexander Rostov, who in 1922 is found to be an unrepentant aristocrat by the Bolsheviks. He is then sentenced to house arrest in a grand, luxurious hotel, the Metropol, neighbouring the Kremlin. The charismatic and erudite Rostov must live out his life in the attic room of this fine institution, as some of the most turbulent years of Russian history roll by outside. His isolation provides a place to observe, but also to grow and reinvent. 

9. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

This far-reaching novel follows generations of a family, beginning in a small fishing village in Korea in the early 20th century, and travelling onwards through the busy street markets and ghettoised boroughs of Osaka, Japan, and beyond. It'a an emotive and thought-provoking read which focuses on familial loyalty, pride, and the complex history of the region during the early 1900s. 

10. Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

Washington "Wash" Black is 11-years-old. He knows only what life is like on the brutal Barbados sugar plantation where he was born. When he is ordered to be the personal servant of his master's brother, the eccentric inventor, naturalist and explorer Christopher Wilde, Wash's world completely changes. It is a story of growth, exploration, and escape; one that takes Wash around the entire globe as he must forge a life of his own. 

11. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

40 women are kept in an underground bunker, guarded by men who never speak. The youngest of the group has no memory of life before the bunker, of anything other than fake days, fake nights, and the inside of her cage. A sudden change leaves the girl on a journey of terrifying rediscovery as she navigates the complete unknown. 

What are your fave page-turners? Let us know in the comments below!

Additional thumbnail credits: AMC

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