After an excruciating wait, it’s finally summer, which means long days, plenty of outdoor time and, if you’re me, the joy of choosing the books to read during our vacation in late July-early August when I’m not writing or on the hunt for the best blueberry pie  in Hancock County.

This is Part One of a two-part post. Another on anticipatory book pleasure will follow in July.

Here’s the first half of my summer 2026 list:

♦   JOHN OF JOHN by Douglas Stuart. A gay man adrift after finishing art school returns home to the Isle of Harris in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides and faces age-old conflicts with his father, a strict Presbyterian lay preacher, welcomes the embrace of the salty Glasgow-born grandmother who helped raise him and navigates loneliness and longing in a place where it’s not easy to be his authentic self. I’m assured it’s more uplifting than it sounds. Stuart won the 2020 Booker Prize for SHUGGIE BAIN, another Scotland-set book you might want to consider if the sight of kilt-wearing, bagpipe-playing Scots marching through Boston in support of their World Cup football team moves you like it does me.

♦   While we’re over the sea, I look forward to Maggie O’Farrell’s LAND: A NOVEL, a historical leavened with magical realism from the author of HAMNET. Set in the 1850s after Ireland was devastated by the famine known as the Great Hunger, LAND focuses on an Irish land surveyor and his realizations about the enduring power land has for those who lived and loved on it. The British can claim land and tax it, but its ownership remains with those who made their lives on Ireland’s remote west coast before and after the many depredations forced upon them by their colonial overlords. Again, my description falls short of conveying why I can’t wait to read it. As readers of this blog know, the west of Ireland holds a special and deep place in my heart, so I’m all in.

♦Paul Doiron’s newest novel STORM TIDE will be out on June 30 and as always, I cannot wait. In the 16th Mike Bowditch novel, the determined (some would say dangerously stubborn) Maine Game Warden is investigating two murders. As is often the case, he’s in the doghouse with his bosses at the Maine Warden Service due to his deep-seated tendency to bend rules, not in a way that’s corrupt, because Mike is a deeply honorable man, but as a means to get to the truth. And after Mike’s long personal journey to maturity, his wife Stacey is about to give birth to their first child. STORM TIDE appears to have all of the elements that make this series a success, and I can’t wait to read it in a comfy outdoor chair some lazy afternoon.

♦   Eleanor Morse’s beautiful prose and powerful insights about the human heart draw me to her work. I’m delighted to know my Peaks Island friend will be launching her new novel THIS FOREIGN LAND on July 9 at Print Bookstore in Portland. The story is set in 2018, when the country was shocked by implementation of a governmental policy to separate children from their immigrant parents. A Maine man travels to the southern border to do what he can to support the families in crisis. Early reviewer Neela Vaswani, author of You Have Given Me a Country, said of Morse’s book: “I didn’t know it before I started reading, but I needed THIS FOREIGN LAND’s reminder: love, courage, and endurance are the only things that remain when everything else is stripped away.” That’s one powerful endorsement, especially if, like me, you’re looking for a book that, at its core, is about hope and courage.

♦   Sometimes I just want to escape this time period, a well-timed impulse because Larry McMurtry’s classic LONESOME DOVE is being revived to mark the 40^th anniversary of its publication. The story of a pair of retired Texas Rangers leading a cattle drive from Texas to Montana in the late 1870s won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985.  I have a secret about this book, which is that somehow, despite its fame and the allure of its story line, I’ve never read it (!) The time has come, and this summer, when I want to disappear into an absorbing read that has nothing to do with the current state of our world, I’ll be reaching for LONESOME DOVE.

NEXT MONTH, I’ll be writing about five other highly anticipated summer/early fall reads:  Lisa Gardner’s YOU’LL BE SORRY, Robyn Gigl’s ALL WE HIDE, Elizabeth Strout’s THE THINGS WE NEVER SAY, and books due out in September by two of my friends and blogmates, Dick Cass’s HARD AS A HEADSTONE and Jule Selbo’s 6 DAYS.  Until then, enjoy your own reading, and if you’re inclined to share what’s on your summer list, that’s why we have a comments section.

Brenda Buchanan sets her novels and short stories in Maine. Her three-book Joe Gale series features a contemporary newspaper reporter with old-school style who covers the courts and crime beat at the fictional Portland Daily Chronicle. Brenda’s short story, “Means, Motive, and Opportunity,” was included in the anthology Bloodroot: Best New England Crime Stories 2021 and received an honorable mention in Best American Mystery and Suspense 2022.  Her story “Cape Jewell,” appeared in Snakeberry: Best New England Crime Stories 2025. “Crime of Devotion” was included in Murder Most Senior, an anthology released this spring at the Malice Domestic conference and her story “Links in the Chain” will be published in the anthology The Lines We Cross, which will be published in conjunction with Bouchercon this coming October.