The Everygirl Book Club’s Summer 2026 Reading Challenge

Jen Weinstein and Lauren Parker rule the town of Salcombe, Fire Island, every summer. Their husbands, Sam and Jason, have summered together on the island since childhood. Their one single friend, Rachel Woolf, is looking to meet her match, whether he’s the tennis pro—or someone else’s husband. This season starts out as quietly as any other… until a body is discovered, face down, off the side of the boardwalk.

Virdiana spends her days in Baja California under the harsh sun, dreaming of a life of romance, travel, and a future beyond this drab, dead-end town. When a wealthy American writer arrives with his wife and brother-in-law, she jumps at the offer of a job as his assistant, and soon becomes entangled in their glamorous lives. When one of them dies, Virdiana, eager to protect her new friends, lies, but it’s not long until someone starts asking questions—and Virdiana starts having questions of her own.

15-year-old Mina’s whole world is her two best friends, but after an unexpected kiss, the established dynamics of their trio quickly unravel. Loyalties shift and tensions simmer across the long days of this pivotal summer. Looking back, an adult Mina traces the undercurrents of longing that shaped her first experience of desire. Loving one person, Mina learns, can change the way we love everyone else—including ourselves.

Erica and Laure meet on the steps of the Sacré-Coeur in Paris, 1978. Erica is a student, relishing her first summer abroad before beginning university at home in England. Laure is studying for her PhD at the Sorbonne, drinking and smoking far too much, and sleeping with a married woman. The moment the two women meet, the spark is undeniable. Erica and Laure’s love story spans decades, but when life brings them within touching distance again, will they be brave enough to seize a future together?

Jo Ness spends her days hidden away at an underfunded aquarium with a draft of the jellyfish guide she and her friend Aldo had been working on together—until he died seven months ago. When she receives a call from Nadia, one of the few other humans she’s loved but hasn’t heard from in years, she jumps at the chance to help her. 

A giant jellyfish has been terrorizing a tiny island off the coast of Maine. With no evidence besides a grainy video of the creature, Jo drops everything to fly across the country. But when Jo arrives on Shattering Point, Nadia is nowhere to be found, and the islanders each have something different to say about the creature they’ve dubbed Clementine… a jellyfish who changes all who see it.

When Caroline Lash arrives in Greenhead, Massachusetts, she falls head-over-heels for Van Whittaker. Born and raised in this picturesque coastal village, Van runs with the same crowd he did as a kid: Bailey, Augusta, and Fran. Together, the group runs wild through the marshes, beaches, and bars of Greenhead. But when Bailey discovers that she is pregnant with Van’s baby, the delicate balance of the group’s friendship is thrown off. Soon, Caroline is cast out of the circle, and what she does next exposes long-held secrets and works the entire town of Greenhead into a lather.

An aspiring archivist determined to begin a “serious” life becomes the all-purpose assistant to the Baronessa, known to her friends as Coco, a defiantly youthful and naturally flamboyant woman of 92. Amid a chaotic and colorful milieu of characters, our young man does his best to catalog the villa’s extensive collection of art and antiques—although things keep going missing from right under his nose.

Along the way, he tumbles into an affair with a married man and the Baronessa loses someone close to her. Then, he becomes an unwitting accomplice in Coco’s great and final plan: to locate the love of her life and be reunited before it’s too late.

1990. In the myth-riddled woods of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, sixteen-year-old Annabelle Riley’s twin sister, Sabrina, has been having an affair with a mysterious older man, and Annabelle is determined to uncover what’s going on. Then, inexplicably, both sisters disappear.

In this same town years later, newly instated police chief Callie Hauser makes an arrest that unexpectedly resurrects details from a heartbreaking cold case. As she digs deeper, the past and the present collide, challenging everything Callie believes about right and wrong, who she is, and the town she’s always called home.

When Sophie Drear plans her escape to coastal Maine for the summer—for a temporary job revitalizing the storied grounds at Lilymoor House—she doesn’t expect to fall in love with the beguiling land, the quirky staff, and the enigmatic woman who owns the place. And then, the door appears. Never in the same place twice, it leads her to a secret, and unfinished, garden with a frustrated thundercloud of a man trapped inside. Despite herself, Sophie has come to care for the residents of Lilymoor just as much as she cares for its grounds. With the help of one man on the outside of the secret garden, and one man on the inside, she might be the only person who can figure out exactly what Lilymoor needs to bloom once more.

As a booked-and-busy casting agent, Sasha Cruz is all about finding the perfect person to slot into the perfect role. What she doesn’t do, however, is relationships. But on a flight to Paris for work, Sasha’s seated next to a broodingly attractive mystery man, and sparks fly—but they never exchange contact information. Convinced she’s lost out on her soulmate, Sasha emails her work friend for help, but accidentally writes to the entire company worldwide. The international manhunt to find Seat F begins. Meanwhile, Sasha takes matters into her own hands. She hires a smoldering detective she knew in another lifetime—who complicates matters in unforeseen (and irresistible) ways.

When Landon receives a letter from Rose—the woman he once planned forever with—he learns their love story is over. She’s undergone a radical memory-erasing treatment, leaving behind her grief, her past… and him. But Landon can’t bear to lose the love of his life. If she fell for him once, couldn’t she fall for him again?

Now, Rose’s world is a blank canvas, and she’s dating someone new. Landon reenters her life as a stranger, entwining their lives once more. But what Rose doesn’t know is that her new friend carries the weight of everything they once shared. And when she starts exhibiting strange symptoms, it becomes clear their history isn’t gone—it’s just buried.

The night Clay Lockhart’s wife dies, a violent storm tears their home—and the eight hectares of land beneath it—away from the Scottish coast, sending it adrift into the Atlantic. Thirty years later, twelve-year-old Ellie Mills discovers the fabled floating island off the coast of Nova Scotia and finds Clay still living in the weatherworn farmhouse perched on its highest hill.

When the island vanishes overnight, Ellie is left questioning whether it ever existed at all. But decades later, the island resurfaces—and Ellie, now in her thirties, returns, determined to uncover the truth. What she finds is even stranger: Clay hasn’t aged a single day.

Elizabeth Zhang has it all figured out: a 3.9 GPA at Columbia, the perfect letters of recommendation, and a clear path to Harvard Law and a high-powered corporate law career. So when Harvard rejects her, she’s stunned, and even more so when she learns a fellow Columbia classmate, Laura Kim, got in instead. Convinced Laura took the one “interesting Asian woman” spot that should have been hers, Elizabeth’s curiosity curdles into a full-blown obsession as she begins to follow Laura’s every move to figure out what makes her so special. Layered, subversive, and genuinely propulsive, this debut is a sharp, suspenseful look at stereotypes, ambition, and how far someone will go to prove they matter.

Lillian has a plan to lock her situationship, Henry, down. She’ll be the best, most accommodating version of herself until he falls in love with her. But when Henry blindsides Lillian with a breakup, she’s left with no choice but to exact revenge with a hex. 

Lillian expects Henry to come crawling back to her, but instead, she becomes a prime suspect in his murder case when he’s found dead. Desperate to control the narrative, clear her name, and assume her rightful place as Henry’s mourning girlfriend, Lillian’s pursuit of the truth will throw her into a dangerous tailspin, which may just upend her life for good.

Frankie is the funny one, the sister who got sober, opened a bookstore, and slipped into domestic life without ever confronting the past. Mere is the caretaker, a mother quietly unraveling under the demands of her neurodivergent daughter and her lonely marriage. 

Over the years, the Gilmore sisters’ bond fractured, creating a divide of resentment neither could cross. When a woman in Frankie’s social circle disappears, the sisters are pulled into a shared reckoning and can no longer deny the past that has shaped so much of their present.

All Fours isn’t a traditional road trip story, but it definitely takes you on a wild ride, and i’s just the entertainment you need if you have hours on the road ahead of you. A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to NY. Thirty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, checks into a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in an entirely different journey to reinvent her sexual, romantic, and domestic life and find a new kind of freedom.

After a brutal breakup, Theo and Kit exited each other’s lives once and for all. All that remains is the unused voucher for the European tour they never went on. Four years later, it seems like a great idea to finally take the trip, separately. Of course, they both had the exact same idea, and now they’re trapped with each other for three weeks in the most romantic cities of France, Spain, and Italy. When Theo suggests a full-on European hookup competition, Kit is totally game. But sometimes a taste of everything only makes you crave what you can’t have. If you loved Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue (the movie or the book), you’ll love this steamy read.

Recently divorced from her “perfect husband,” Jess moves into her parents’ basement to hide and heal—and serve as the family’s handmaiden. But she’s also a talented draftswoman in the marble business run by her uncle, who believes she can do anything. 

After an unexpected loss unearths long-buried secrets that force Jess to question her loyalty to those she trusted, she escapes to her ancestral home, Carrara, Italy. From Tuscany to Milan to Lake Como, Jess carves a place in this new world. But as Jess uncovers the truth about her family history, it changes the course of her life forever.

Hendrix Barry lives a fabulous life. She has phenomenal friends, a loving family, and a thriving business in the entertainment industry. And in the midst of everything, she’s facing her toughest challenge yet: Caring for an aging parent. Who has time for romance? She hasn’t met the man who can keep up with her, anyway. Until…him. Tech mogul, Maverick Bell, may be the first to make her feel this seen, but he’s the last one she can have. This man is off limits if she plans to stay the course she’s set for herself. But they do say forbidden fruit is the juiciest…