It is a truth universally acknowledged that Chicagoans do not leave Chicago in the summer.
Each year we await this why-we-live-here season and its unabashed joy. The explosion of sunlight and fragrant blooms. Ice-cold beverages perspiring on patios and dogs strutting in tiny baseball caps. Parks filled with melodious concerts and streets with fragrant culinary festivals. The beaches from Rogers Park to South Shore suddenly a patchwork of gleaming bodies, brightly patterned towels, paleta carts, and books with pages glowing white-hot in the sun.
Chicago beaches in the summer are full of readers. Their tastes are as unique as our neighborhoods, and far more complex than the ubiquitous descriptor “beach read” could possibly capture. Take a look at the book covers you pass the next time you’re walking your dog or dipping your toes in the surprisingly cold Lake Michigan surf. You’ll find philosophers and revolutionaries, fantasy tomes and essay collections, true crime and quirky little zines.
We love books because we have a rich literary community in Chicago. This includes dozens of independent bookstores, MFA programs, reading series and live lit events, the Midwest’s largest outdoor book fair, and the country’s first museum dedicated to American writers. We have too many exceptional resident storytellers to count, from celebrated poets and spoken-word auteurs like inaugural Chicago Poet Laureate avery r. young, to New York Times-bestselling authors like Daniel Kraus, whose 2025 summer novel “Angel Down” is making the rounds again after winning the Pulitzer Prize, along with his most recent release “The Sixth Nik.”
We also love nothing more in this city than to claim things as ours. Hot dogs and pizza, blues and house music, skyscrapers, the Pope, everything dope (h/t Shermann “Dilla” Thomas). Which led me to wonder: why aren’t we talking about Chicago beach reads?
I asked four local authors with novels releasing this summer to try to define the kind of books our city likes to read while lounging Lake-side.
A page-turner with heart
Rowan Beaird tells me she’s seen people reading Nietzsche and “War and Peace” on beaches in Chicago.
“Chicagoans are very smart, and we’ll take on those heavy books, regardless of the season,” she says, admitting that she once sobbed on a picturesque beach in Thailand while reading Ann Patchett’s “Bel Canto.” But who’s to say a terrorist hostage-situation novel isn’t a great vacation read? (I read Rebecca Makkai’s “The Great Believers” on a Greek island, another beautiful tearjerker of a story, set in part during the AIDS crisis in Chicago.)
Beaird describes her summer reading list as the type of books she’s interested in writing.
“Summer is when you want to be in Chicago. I want to be transported somewhere else in the books that I read, because I’m staying home,” Beaird says. “I just really love—and this is also what I’m always trying to write—a propulsive page-turner. But I also want it to be really beautifully written, and I want real flesh-and-blood characters. And I want that story to take me somewhere totally different.”
Beaird’s debut novel, “The Divorcées,” is set amidst the glamor and intrigue of a 1950s divorce ranch. Her new book, “Tenderness,” takes place during the 1970s at an island wedding. Out July 21, the novel is a braided story with three perspectives. including the bride, Shay, who has recent ties to the headline-making cult Synanon. Both are transportive, atmospheric books whose characters have deep inner lives and conflicting desires.
The idea for “Tenderness” began at an unusually tense wedding weekend. Beaird was in the phase of life in her late twenties that she describes as “an endless sequence of weddings” for friends and family, mostly incredibly joyful celebrations that center around reuniting with loved ones and dancing and cake. But not this one.
“I went to a particular wedding where I didn’t know the bride and groom very well, and immediately when I arrived, it became very clear to me that most of the attendees did not think this couple should be wed,” Beaird says. “I started to hear all of these side conversations and all of these whispered arguments about what he had done, and what she had done, how this was a horrible mistake. And all of a sudden, it wasn’t a celebration, it wasn’t a party anymore.”
From then on, she was certain she would write a novel set over the course of a wedding weekend, following the drama that unfolds during “that bizarre time when everyone who has ever known or loved you is all of a sudden under one roof.”
Unlike other wedding novels, “Tenderness” is not one love story but three—including an exquisitely rendered sister-brother relationship between Shay and her younger brother, William.
Beaird notes that there are many excellent novels, perhaps most notably “Little Women,” that delve into the nuances of relationships between sisters, but none that offer the same treatment for the sister-brother dynamic. She has a sister and a brother who informed that relationship at the heart of “Tenderness.”
“I thought of ‘The Divorcées’ as a romance about friendship, and I do think that there’s an element to ‘Tenderness’ that’s like a romance,” she says. “The deep love that can be shared between siblings, and how important that is to our lives.”
A very different relationship dynamic is also explored in “Tenderness,” through flashbacks that explore why Shay got involved with the Synanon cult. Beaird describes herself as someone who has “always been obsessed with cults,” but as she grew older she realized that behind the salacious aspects—bizarre beliefs, strange clothing and horrific acts of violence—these are groups that offer people something of value.
And she began to see someone like Shay as not so different from herself, had the circumstances of her life been different.
“I started to realize that, really, the one thing that people who join cults typically share is that they’re at a point of transition and vulnerability,” Beaird says, citing leaving a church or a marriage as such pivotal and painful events. “I thought about the moments in my life when I’ve been at my most vulnerable, and if someone had reached out a hand to me and said, ‘Here, come join us, we have a lot of answers to all the questions that you’re asking right now,’ I feel like I would have joined a cult in a heartbeat.”
Funny and philosophical
Like Beaird, bestselling author and poet Kathleen Rooney agrees that a Chicago beach read is transportive. A way for people posting their #SummertimeChi selfies to travel elsewhere while reading, whether that’s on an actual beach, lounging in a park or standing on a crowded El car.
“Typically people think of a beach read as being escapist,” she says, referencing the tone of thrillers and romance novels. “A Chicago beach read might be less escapist—not that there’s anything wrong with wanting to escape!—and more transportive, it just really takes you somewhere else. Like, ‘I’m fine being here, but this is gonna take me away.’ I think also, Chicago leans a little more political and less fashionable.”
Whereas Beaird’s book takes place in the pressure-cooker of a small, remote island off the coast of Virginia, Kathleen Rooney’s fifth novel, “Man Overboard!” (out July 7), is set within the enormity of the ocean.
“The ocean itself is a killing machine,” she says matter-of-factly. “I fear it, I respect it, I’m in awe of it, it’s sublime. But it’s sublime in the true, you know, [Edmund] Burkean philosophical sense, where it’s a terrible beauty.”
Rooney is more afraid of the ocean than most people, and has the story to prove it.
“I didn’t see the ocean until I was, like, nineteen years old, which is late,” she says. “I was with my best friend from college on this trip that his dad very generously took us on to Costa Rica. And the first time I saw the ocean, I had the only panic attack I’ve ever had in my life: I fully just lost it. I later read that, I think it’s Charlotte, one of the Bronte sisters—and I put this in the book, too—she passed out the first time she saw the ocean. She got there and just fainted. I get it, girl!”
Thankfully the protagonist of Rooney’s book, a former college swimmer nicknamed “Kick,” emerges with his consciousness and wits intact after drunkenly plunging from the deck of an all-inclusive cruise with his family. Things get both harrowing and weird from there, with some speculative elements surfacing on occasion. And it’s much funnier than a reader might expect, going into an ocean survival story.
Rooney’s sense of humor shines in her previous historical novels, perhaps most acutely in her World War I tale “Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey” (narrated in part by a taxidermied pigeon at a Smithsonian museum), but “Man, Overboard!” dials the jokes up along with the stakes. Each chapter represents another hour that Kick fights to stay alive, hoping someone will rescue him.
“Stories that are sad are always strangely sadder when you sprinkle in comedy,” Rooney says. “I think humor can often be like a deflecting mechanism and a coping mechanism, which I think is a lot of how Kick uses it, but it can also be the subversive thing that turns a situation around and lets you really get at the heart of it.”
She references another philosopher, as she often does in conversation, noting that the longer Kick is in the water, the more the humor in the novel becomes almost Freudian in tone, where every joke has a kernel of truth to it. (See Sigmund Freud’s “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious” for more on this topic.) But she also set out to write an entertaining book, in a way only she can.
“Sometimes comedy doesn’t get the gravitas that it deserves, or that sometimes tragedy does,” Rooney says. “I think in a way, I’ve written a Chicago beach read, because it is funny and transportive, but when you peel back the layers and get to that Freudian kernel of the joke, it’s actually [about] a dynamic character who needs to change, and you’re with him on this journey.”
As to whether or not Kick makes it out of the terribly beautiful ocean alive, she’s not giving anything away, but adds that she hopes the novel is “fun for people in a beachy, yet philosophically satisfying manner.”
Makes you miss your El stop
Bram Stoker Award-winning author and poet Cynthia Pelayo tells me Chicagoans need the kind of book “that’s gonna grab us by our collars.”
She is planning to reread Kraus’ “Angel Down” this summer, a gruesome World War I novel written in a single audacious, bloody and relentless sentence. The two horror writers are friends who talked extensively about World War I, the mechanization of war and trench warfare, and the kinds of things that were said to manipulate people into participating in the generation-defining destruction it caused.
Pelayo’s recently released seventh novel, “It Came From Neverland,” reimagines the childhood fairytale of “Peter Pan” in the same time period, with Wendy Darling as a slightly older school teacher working with orphaned children and reading to soldiers just back from the Western Front, wounded and traumatized.
“When I started researching World War I, one thing that stood out to me is that a lot of younger men—much younger men, boys—from farmlands and rural communities were signing up for the war,” Pelayo says. “No one was really questioning it, and [the boys] were just lying. And so there was something about that juxtaposition of these really young men going off to war, and then the Lost Boys. I wanted to explore that: the horror of war, the horror of the world that she’s living in changing fast, and then the memories of her past.”
As a child, Pelayo loved Disney’s animated “Peter Pan” and “Hook” with Robin Williams. When she grew up and became a parent herself, she began to see the story in a more sinister way: a supposed “boy” who never grows up, taking children away from their homes at night. Making elaborate promises he may or may not be able to keep.
In Pelayo’s propulsive and surreal telling, Neverland is as dangerous a place as a battlefield, and we eventually learn the sinister identity Peter has been hiding. But she tells me she didn’t want to portray her version of Peter as a strictly Pennywise-type creature, despite the quippy marketing materials that frame her novel as “‘Peter Pan’ meets Stephen King’s ‘It’.”
“I thought it would be more monstrous to show him as a manipulative person, and how he could create and cause massive harm just with language,” she says.
In the summer when her kids are home, she has more time for reading. Pelayo loves “getting lost in something that’s beautiful, and that slowly pulls [her] under.” Her recommended beach reads include complex speculative novels in translation like “Our Share of Night” by Argentine author Mariana Enriquez and “Hurricane Season” by Mexican author Fernanda Melchor.
Chicagoans need more than just an escape in the summer, she insists. “We need something that’s gonna grab us by our collars, because we already live in the best place in the world,” she says. “You know, if it makes you miss your stop on the El, that’s phenomenal.”
A book with more heft to it
Rooney tells me about a financial thriller she enjoyed last August, Chicago writer Amran Gowani’s “Leverage,” that sounds gripping enough to warrant a missed train stop while providing social commentary in the form of a Wall Street satire. It’s about a hedge fund analyst who loses a $300 million investment and finds himself working against the clock to avoid existential consequences.
“Alongside the thrill, you’re really learning about that [hedge fund] environment and the way people who work in that environment are treated, especially if they’re women or minorities,” Rooney says.
Race and class issues in a fictional Chicago suburb are the simmering undercurrent of “Majestic Hills,” the third novel from award-winning journalist and author Dawn Turner. A former Chicago Tribune reporter and columnist, she wrote extensively about race, politics and people whose stories too often remain untold.
Out August 4, “Majestic Hills” follows the story of Black power couple Josephine and Langdon Blaque—he’s an emergency-room doctor, she’s a lawyer—living in a condo downtown until Langdon convinces her to give the peace and quiet of the title suburb a try. The premise is based on Turner’s life, when her ex-husband suggested a similar move.
“Just out of the blue, right before we were married, he’s like, ‘Well, why don’t we live in the country?’ And I said, ‘Why don’t we not? How about we don’t do that?’” she says with a laugh. “But I did give him a year, and we wound up being there for two decades because I absolutely loved the community. We had amazing neighbors.”
The Blaques’ neighbors in Majestic Hills, mostly white, are welcoming and kind at first, inviting the new couple to social events and making them feel like part of a community. But an unexpected crime pulls deeply ingrained prejudices to the surface, fracturing the neighborhood and the Blaques’ once-solid foundation.
Turner says that she wanted to explore a closer relationship among the residents, the sort of “love thy neighbor” place where people don’t have fences between their yards and can pick herbs and vegetables out of each other’s gardens.
“By the end of the book, people who are allies are still allies,” she says. “And I’m hoping that by the end, the people who… They’re on this fence, so to speak. Maybe with a trauma, when something big happens [to the community] people can start to think about, or maybe rethink some of their prejudices or notions. Those things that just kind of keep us apart.”
In one particularly memorable scene, Langdon shares at a Fourth of July gathering that his family would read Frederick Douglass’ famous speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” each year on the holiday. The ensuing conversation reveals historic injustices and feels especially timely, given this summer’s nationwide celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
“I am drawn to the books that have a little bit more heft,” Turner says of her beach reads, which is an apt description of her novel as well.
One recent book she’s looking forward to reading this summer is “Black Summers: Growing Up in the Urban Outdoors” edited by Desiree Cooper, a nonfiction collection of essays, poetry and graphic stories. Turner was in Cleveland this spring with one of the contributing essayists and enjoyed her reading of the piece that appears in the book.
She’s also planning to read Jeff Hobbs’ new nonfiction book “Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America.” Not a light read, but an important one. One with more heft to it.
The kind of thing a Chicagoan would read on the beach.
Because we are, in the words of Chicago bard Carl Sandburg, a “city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.”
We’ll read what we damn well please.
“It Came From Neverland” by Cynthia Pelayo is available from Crooked Lane Books.
“Man Overboard!” by Kathleen Rooney is available July 7 from Gallery Books. Rooney will appear in conversation with Deborah Shapiro on Saturday, July 11 at 3pm at Seminary Co-op Bookstore, 5751 South Woodlawn.
“Tenderness” by Rowan Beaird is available July 21 from Flatiron Books. A launch event with Beaird will be held on Tuesday, July 21 at 7pm at Exile in Bookville, 410 South Michigan (second floor).
“Majestic Hills” by Dawn Turner is available August 4 from Scribner. A launch event with Turner will be held on Wednesday, August 5 at 7 p.m. at Call & Response Books, 1390 E. Hyde Park, Chicago.
