SEARCH THE
Recommended Reads for the Adult Summer Reading Challenge
This summer, let your next great adventure begin between the pages of a book!
The theme for this year’s Adult Summer Reading Challenge is travel and adventure! We’re inviting readers to journey around the world and beyond without leaving their favourite reading spot. By train, by plane, by ferry, on foot, two wheels or four, it’s time to feed your dreams of wanderlust by reading 8 books in 88 days. Topics may include adventure, travel, vacations, road trips, stories set in different countries or by international authors.
There are plenty of books to choose from that fit the theme. Still, if you’re having trouble getting started, Cindy Buhne, Adult and Information Services Librarian, has compiled a list of recommendations:
Travel:
6:40 to Montreal
Eva Jurczyk
Agatha’s husband bought her a first-class ticket on the famous six-hour train from Toronto to Montreal as a present – a one-day writing retreat so she could get some serious writing done on her book.
The first-class car is the perfect place to be productive, with only a handful of other passengers, plenty of snacks and drinks, and beautiful views flying by outside the window. But when the train breaks down in the middle of the Canadian woods, and one of Agatha’s fellow passengers dies quietly in his seat, what started out as a pleasant day in transit with no distractions turns into a fight for survival against an unknown and unseen enemy.
Will Agatha – or any of them – make it out alive?
The Business Trip
Jessie Garcia
Stephanie and Jasmine have nothing and everything in common. The two women don’t know each other but are on the same plane. Stephanie is on a business trip, and Jasmine is fleeing an abusive relationship. After a few days, they text their friends the same exact messages about the same man, the messages becoming stranger and more erratic.
And then the two women vanish.
The texts go silent, the red flags go up, and the panic sets in. When Stephanie and Jasmine are each declared missing and in danger, it begs the questions: Who is Trent McCarthy? What did he do to these women, or what did they do to him?
Twist upon twist, layer upon layer, where nothing is as it seems, The Business Trip takes you on a descent into the depths of a mastermind manipulator. But who is playing who?
The Continental Affair
Christine Mangan
With gorgeous prose, European glamour, and an expansive wanderlust, Christine Mangan’s The Continental Affair is a daring cat-and-mouse game that is as surprising as it is satisfying.
Meet Louise and Henri. Two strangers, travelling alone, on the train from Belgrade to Istanbul. Except this isn’t the first time they have met. Louise is running from her past, from the shady people she has stolen money from, and from Henri, the person sent to collect it.
Her journey takes her from her native London to Spain, France, and the seductive Baltics. Henri, disillusioned after a stint in the gendarmerie, leaves his native Algeria for Spain, where he hoped to find a brighter life. Instead, he gets wrapped up in his aunt’s criminal organization, running errands and doing odd jobs, no questions asked.
He soon realizes that Louise is no ordinary mark.
Adventure:
The Blue
Lucy Clarke
Lana and her best friend, Kitty, leave home looking for freedom, and that’s exactly what they find when they are invited onto The Blue, a fifty-foot yacht making its way from the Philippines to New Zealand.
The Blue is exactly the escape they are looking for – until one of their new friends disappears overboard.
News of the World
Paulette Jiles
In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction.
The Guilt Trip
Sandie Jones
Rachel and Noah have been friends since they met at university. While they once thought that they might be something more, now, twenty years later, they are each happily married to other people, Jack and Paige, respectively. Jack’s brother Will is getting married to the dazzling, impulsive Ali, and the group of six travels to Portugal for their destination weekend.
As they arrive at a gorgeous villa perched on a cliff-edge, overlooking towering waves that crash on the famous surfing beaches below at Nazaré, they try to settle into a weekend of fun. While Rachel is looking forward to getting to know her future sister-in-law, Ali, better, Ali can’t help but rub many of the group up the wrong way: Rachel’s best friend Paige thinks Ali is attention-seeking and childish, and while Jack is trying to support his brother Will’s choice of wife, he is also finding plenty to disagree with Noah about. But when Rachel discovers something about Ali that she can hardly believe, everything changes.
As the wedding weekend unfolds, the secrets each of them holds begin to spill, and friendships and marriages threaten to unravel. Soon, jumping to conclusions becomes the difference between life and death.
Road Trips:
Lost in the Summer of ’69
Eliza Knight
Three generations of women, an unforgettable summer of music, and the epic cross-country road trip they’ll never forget. Summer, 1969.
Eleanor Bell doesn’t have anything to lose. According to her doctors, she might not remember how to sing or play guitar soon, so why not head west now? Why not join the music festivals sweeping the country and lose herself in the music again in a swan song of her own?
Except Eleanor forgets, maybe on purpose, to tell anyone where she’s going. When her daughter, Leanne, discovers her mother missing, she enlists the help of her own daughter, Nora, to help her find Eleanor.
The last thing Nora wants to do before starting as one of Yale’s first female undergrads is hit the road. But then Nora hears her grandmother on the radio – singing. Nora and Leanne hop in their Lincoln Continental for a cross-country road trip, always one step behind Eleanor, who has been dubbed the Dame of Rock and Roll by none other than Johnny Carson.
Maureen
Rachel Joyce
The final piece of the Harold Fry trilogy, revisiting the characters ten years on to tell a story about loss, love and forgiveness.
Ten years after her husband, Harold Fry, made his extraordinary walk across England to try and save a dying friend, Maureen Fry makes her own pilgrimage, and although she packs a proper bag and takes the car, her trip will be equally transformative.
Unlike her husband, Maureen does not make friends easily, and she is not entirely sure what she hopes to find at the end of the road, but this is a journey she knows she must make, whatever obstacles present themselves on the way.
Mrs. Endicott’s Splendid Adventure
Rhys Brown
Surrey, England, 1938. After thirty devoted years of marriage, Ellie Endicott is blindsided by her husband’s appeal for divorce. It’s Ellie’s opportunity for change, too.
The unfaithful cad can have the house. She’s taking the Bentley. Ellie, her housekeeper Mavis, and her elderly friend Dora – each needing escape – impulsively head for parts unknown in the South of France.
With the Rhône surging beside them, they have nowhere to be and everywhere to go. Until the Bentley breaks down in the inviting fishing hamlet of Saint Benet. Here, Ellie rents an abandoned villa in the hills, makes wonderful friends among the villagers, and finds herself drawn to Nico, a handsome and enigmatic fisherman.
As for unexpected destinations, the simple paradise of Saint Benet is perfect. But fates soon change when the threat of war encroaches. Ellie’s second act in life is just beginning – and becoming an adventure she never expected
Vacations:
The Guest Cottage
Lori Foster
Marlow Heddings is starting over. She’s carried the outrage of her husband Dylan’s affair with a younger woman – and the expectations of his family’s powerful Chicago holdings company -long enough.
Now, after another devastating twist of fate, she’s unapologetically moving on.
Arriving in tiny Bramble, Kentucky, Marlow revels in her freedom, swapping her executive suits for sundresses… and scouting places to open her dream boutique. Best of all is her new residence, an adorable cottage with gorgeous lake views – and a breathtaking landlord, former Marine Cort Easton. Soon they’re sharing dockside morning coffee and nighttime firefly gazing. Marlow’s new life feels like a dream. Then Pixie Nolan arrives on her doorstep.
With a shocking secret.
To Marlow’s astonishment, Dylan’s “other woman” is a desperate girl of nineteen, destitute, exhausted, and disowned by her family. Defying her manipulative in-laws’ demands and surprising even herself, Marlow vows to lay down roots in Bramble and help Pixie get on her feet. Then they’ll part ways. But empathy has a way of forging bonds.
Meet me at the Lake
Carly Fortune
In desperate need of a lifeline while running her mother’s lakeside resort, thirty-two-year-old Fern Brookbanks finds it in the form of Will Baxter, who rescued her nine years ago, and, believing he is hiding something, but knowing he’s the only one who understands what she’s going through, wonders if she can do the same for him.
Murder Takes a Vacation
Laura Lippman
Highly acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Laura Lippman returns with an irresistible mystery featuring Muriel Blossom, a former private investigator and middle-aged widow whose vacation on a Parisian river cruise turns into a deadly international mystery… that only she can solve.
Far Away Places:
The Little French Bistro
Nina George
Marianne is stuck in a loveless, unhappy marriage. After forty-one years, she has reached her limit, and one evening in Paris, she decides to take action. Following a dramatic moment on the banks of the Seine, Marianne leaves her life behind and sets out for the coast of Brittany, also known as “the end of the world.”
Here she meets a cast of colourful and unforgettable locals who surprise her with their warm welcome, and the natural ease they all seem to have, taking pleasure in life’s small moments. And, as the parts of herself she had long forgotten return to her in this new world, Marianne learns it’s never too late to begin the search for what life should have been all along.
The Layover
Lacie Waldon
An unexpected tropical layover with her nemesis turns a flight attendant’s life upside down in this witty, breezy debut romantic comedy about life – and love -30,000 feet above the ground.
Our Italian Summer
Jennifer Probst
Workaholic, career-obsessed Francesca is fiercely independent and successful in all areas of life except one: family. She struggles to make time for her relationship with her teenage daughter, Allegra, and the two have become practically strangers to each other. When Allegra hangs out with a new crowd and is arrested for drug possession, Francesca gives in to her mother’s wish that they take one epic summer vacation to trace their family roots in Italy.
What she never expected was to be faced with the choice of a lifetime.
Allegra wants to make her grandmother happy, but she hates the idea of forced time with her mother and vows to fight every step of the ridiculous tour until a young man on the verge of priesthood begins to show her the power of acceptance, healing, and the heartbreaking complications of love.
Non-Fiction:
The Great Canadian Bucket List
Robin Esrock
Spanning nature, adventure, culture, history, food, and the bizarre, The Great Canadian Bucket List unpacks the remarkable and unforgettable. With his trademark storytelling, humour, and curiosity, Robin celebrates Canadian experiences that are absolutely unique, instantly memorable, wholly inspirational, and waiting to be discovered.
The Happy Nomad
Charlotte Bradman
Vivid, self-confessional and darkly humorous, The Happy Nomad is the story of how Charlotte Bradman breaks free from her turbulent past, mounting debts and the nine-to-five treadmill, and finds a simpler way of life, living full-time in her beloved campervan.
Freed from the burden of a thirty-year-old boiler on the edge, temperamental ceilings that don’t like heights, and letterboxes that mercilessly allow bills and arrest warrants through, Charlotte finds joy in a life lived closer to nature.
Stripped back to the very basics, no longer weighed down by material possessions, she discovers the precious gift of time, enabling her to connect with both herself and the people she meets, and to re-evaluate what it truly means to thrive.
Hell of a Ride
Martin Bauman
Martin Bauman was twenty-three and restless when he embarked on a solo bicycle trek across Canada. It was a ride that came in the wake of his father’s sudden depression, his cousin’s suicide, and the stirring up of his own childhood of buried memories.
He had billed the 7,000-kilometre journey as a mission to encourage people – men, especially – to talk about depression. It was ironic that he was so reluctant to talk about his own.
In Hell of a Ride, Bauman – named one of Canada’s “emergent” authors by the RBC Taylor Prize in 2020 – brings his sharp reporting instincts and lyrical prose to explore a timely question: how much of the past do we carry with us? And how much of our fate is ours to choose?
The Adult Summer Reading Challenge runs from Monday, June 15 – Friday, September 11.
You can register in person at the Coulson Family Bracebridge Library, 34 Salmon Avenue. Online registration is also available, but you must visit the library to pick up your logbook.
Once filled out, it can be submitted for your chance to win a prize basket.