The AIR MAIL Summer Reading List

From escapist to essential, we have something for everyone.

From Ann Patchett’s tender tale of reconciliation to Jenny Jackson’s juicy seaside romp, here are the 10 books our editors are taking with them on their travels this summer

Waist Deep, by Linea Maja Ernst

An instant best-seller in Denmark after its release in 2024, Linea Maja Ernst’s slim novel is perhaps best described as a cross between Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection(winner of the inaugural AIR MAIL Tom Wolfe Literary Prizes) and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Seven friends in their early 30s spend the week at a Danish lake house, discussing monogamy, sexuality, and the intellectual radicalism of their university days over tastefully appointed tablescapes and craft cocktails. In between languid lake swims and sensual forest escapades, old crushes surface and new anxieties rear their heads in this deft portrait of millennial disenchantment. — READ ON