Here are 100 books that 24 Hours in Italy fans have personally recommended if you like
24 Hours in Italy.
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There’s nothing better than sitting down at the pool to read a fun, engaging story that transports you into another world and keeps you entertained. I’ve always loved reading to escape, and when I started writing and posting my stories for free online at 17 years old, I discovered my true calling. My first story amassed 140 million reads with millions of comments, where people shared how much fun they had reading the story and how it helped them escape from their lives. Since then, I’ve continued writing stories I’m passionate about and sharing them with people who love a good, fun, romance.
When I think of the perfect, fun, poolside read, this book is the first to pop into my head.
The Unhoneymooners follows Olive, who ends up having to fake date a man she hates while on their fake honeymoon in Hawaii. I love those tropes (fake relationships, enemies to lovers, forced proximity) but on top of that, this book is laugh-out-loud hilarious.
I was giggling in the pool the entire time I read this, and the light, fast-paced, engaging vibe makes this book the perfect poolside read.
Named a “Must-Read” by TODAY, Us Weekly, Bustle, BuzzFeed, Goodreads, Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, Southern Living, Book Riot, Woman’s Day, The Toronto Star, and more!
For two sworn enemies, anything can happen during the Hawaiian trip of a lifetime—maybe even love—in this romantic comedy from the New York Times bestselling authors of Roomies.
Olive Torres is used to being the unlucky twin: from inexplicable mishaps to a recent layoff, her life seems to be almost comically jinxed. By contrast, her sister Ami is…
When Elliot finds herself dead for the third time, she can't remember her past, is getting the cold shoulder from her best friend, and has no idea why she keeps repeating the same mistakes across her previous lives. Elliot just wants to move on, but first, she'll be forced to…
There’s nothing better than sitting down at the pool to read a fun, engaging story that transports you into another world and keeps you entertained. I’ve always loved reading to escape, and when I started writing and posting my stories for free online at 17 years old, I discovered my true calling. My first story amassed 140 million reads with millions of comments, where people shared how much fun they had reading the story and how it helped them escape from their lives. Since then, I’ve continued writing stories I’m passionate about and sharing them with people who love a good, fun, romance.
Abbi Glines is the best at writing fun, steamy, New Adult summer romances.
You can’t help but be immediately immersed into the story, especially with all of the angst and drama and tension that leaves you needing to see how it’ll all work out. This book has got all those fun tropes that make a great poolside read: bad boy/good girl, enemies to lovers, step-siblings, forced proximity, and a coastal beach town.
The New York Times bestselling novel that launched the beloved world of Rosemary Beach and introduced the world to Rush and Blaire.
The wealthy son of a rocker. A tough farm girl from Alabama. Two step-siblings from different worlds. One summer in Rosemary Beach.
The last thing Blaire Wynn wants is to move in with her father’s new family in Rosemary Beach, Florida. She has no choice. Blaire’s mother has passed away after a long illness, leaving behind a mountain of medical debts and no way for Blaire to keep their small Alabama farmhouse.
There’s nothing better than sitting down at the pool to read a fun, engaging story that transports you into another world and keeps you entertained. I’ve always loved reading to escape, and when I started writing and posting my stories for free online at 17 years old, I discovered my true calling. My first story amassed 140 million reads with millions of comments, where people shared how much fun they had reading the story and how it helped them escape from their lives. Since then, I’ve continued writing stories I’m passionate about and sharing them with people who love a good, fun, romance.
This was the first book that got me into reading full-length novels, and it just happens to be a fun YA summer book. If you want a light, fast-paced, easy read to keep you entertained while lounging by the pool, this is the book for you.
It follows Robyn, a teen working at a water park with her best friend, Caitlin, and Caitlin’s very hot brother, who happens to be Robyn’s supervisor! Making a splash: Robyn, is an adorable, coming-of-age summer love story, and there are two more books from Robyn’s friend’s perspectives if you want more nostalgic summer romance.
1
author picked
Robyn
as one of their favorite books, and they share
why you should read it.
This book is for kids age
12.
What is this book about?
A funny, sweet trilogy about three girls and the friendship and romance they find working summer jobs at a water park!
Caitlin and Robyn, long time best friends, get summer jobs together working at The Splash, the local water park. While Caitlin gets to be a lifeguard, Robyn is stuck pushing little kids in inner tubes down a slide. And to complicate matters, Robyn's long-standing crush on Shane is turning into something more. There's just one problem....he's Caitlin's brother!
Kindle Book Award Finalist. Readers' Favorite Book Award Finalist. Gotham Writers' YA Novel Discovery Contest Finalist. B.R.A.G. Medallion Honoree
Brigit Quinn has always felt like an outsider. Growing up in a small town where her mom’s pagan practices are the stuff of local gossip, she’s spent her whole life trying…
There’s nothing better than sitting down at the pool to read a fun, engaging story that transports you into another world and keeps you entertained. I’ve always loved reading to escape, and when I started writing and posting my stories for free online at 17 years old, I discovered my true calling. My first story amassed 140 million reads with millions of comments, where people shared how much fun they had reading the story and how it helped them escape from their lives. Since then, I’ve continued writing stories I’m passionate about and sharing them with people who love a good, fun, romance.
Not a big romance/romcom reader? No worries, Never Coming Home is the perfect poolside book for you.
This
summer YA mystery/thriller follows a group of teen influencers who are
invited to a hot new exclusive island, but everyone’s hiding secrets,
and then people start dying. I enjoyed this book as a poolside summer
read because it’s so fast-paced and intriguing that I was sucked right
into the story.
It’s a summer slasher read full of twists and
perfectly unlikeable characters that kept me turning pages until it was
done in one sitting.
The escapist read you have been dying for! When ten of America’s hottest teenage influencers are invited to an exclusive island resort, things are sure to get wild. But murder isn't what anyone expected. Will anyone survive?
Everyone knows Unknown Island—it’s the world’s most exclusive destination. Think white sand beaches, turquoise seas, and luxury accommodations. Plus, it’s invite only, no one over twenty-one is allowed, and it’s absolutely free. Who wouldn’t want to go?
The mysterious resort launched with a viral marketing campaign, and now the whole world is watching as Unknown Island opens its doors to the First Ten,…
I’ve always been a lover of all things history, so it’s no surprise I gravitated to the world of historical fiction for my profession. What moves me the most is how, across time periods and culture, the bonds of family (more specifically sisters), remain one of the most enduring and poignant themes with which almost all can identify. Growing up, my relationship with my own sister was complex and difficult. However, now that we are grown, I can fully appreciate just how much my connection with her shaped—and continues to shape—the person I am. Exploring family ties in literature (both writing and reading) is one way in which I celebrate our common humanity.
This book has everything: love, drama, lush descriptions of a foreign country (essential now, when travel is so limited), and family curses. Having a sister myself, I loved how authentic the relationship between Emilia and Lucy felt; stronger than iron yet as fragile as glass. The unraveling mystery behind the so-called “curse” was just icing on the cake. Love truly is what life is all about---just not in the ways we always assume.
A trio of second-born daughters sets out on a whirlwind journey through the lush Italian countryside to break the family curse that says they’ll never find love, by New York Times bestseller Lori Nelson Spielman, author of The Life List.
Since the day Filomena Fontana cast a curse upon her sister more than two hundred years ago, not one second-born Fontana daughter has found lasting love. Some, like second-born Emilia, the happily-single baker at her grandfather’s Brooklyn deli, claim it’s an odd coincidence. Others, like her sexy, desperate-for-love cousin Lucy, insist…
As a second-generation Italian American, I’ve always had one foot in the past, fascinated by the way a family history can shape who we are and deepen our understanding of our place in the world. The characters I love are searching for that kind of connection. As a writer, I’ve always thought nothing deepens a story more than a glance into the past, and now, living and writing in a medieval hill town in Italy, surrounded by the remnants of history, I believe it more than ever. I step outside and the past roars in, reminding me how it shapes the present—and each one of us.
This book made me fall in love with Puglia, the hot, dusty “heel of the boot” with its lemons, olives, and cactus, its boxy farmhouses. Not that the story, bouncing from Paris to New York to a long-gone Rome, doesn’t deliver—the narrator, Alina, talks about a family secret passed from woman to woman, disintegrating memories, a past she must understand before the movers arrive and the house with its mural of a naked woman painted on a patio wall is no longer theirs. Present and past, the known and the unknown combine, and all of it is tied to alluring, sensual Puglia. As a storyteller, Marciano demands your attention, painting the life story of a family whose Italy is unlike the one you think you know.
This second novel by the author of the acclaimed Rules of the Wild is very much in the tradition of The Leopard or The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a compelling story of three generations in twentieth-century Italy. Casa Rossa, the home of the Strada family, is a magnificent farmhouse standing amidst the olive groves of Puglia. The story opens as the house is being sold. Alina, the daughter entrusted with packing it up, is piecing together the fragments of her family's past. Her grandmother, Renee, a beautiful Tunisian pied noir, muse and model to Alina's painter grandfather, left him for…
An Heir of Realms tells the tale of two young heroines—a dragon rider and a portal jumper—who fight dragon-like parasites to save their realms from extinction.
Rhoswen is training as a Realm Rider to work with dragons and burn away the Narxon swarming into her realm. Rhoswen’s dream is to…
Jason Webster is the international best-selling author of fifteen books on Spain, including Duende, Sacred Sierra, The Spy with 29 Names, Violencia: A New History of Spain, and the Max Cámara series of crime novels. He is a publisher, broadcaster, award-winning photographer, a board member of The Scheherazade Foundation, and is married to the Flamenco dancer Salud.
Hemingway (who might have fully ‘got’ Spain if he had been less obsessed with ‘being Hemingway’) once described Madrid as ‘the centre of the world’. Jules Stewart is a former reporter who knows the city like the back of his hand. In this book he provides a perfect guide for travellers (even of the armchair variety) around what is one of the most vibrant European capitals. From Dalí’s favourite café to the place where Cervantes drew his last breath, it brings the history of the place alive like nothing else.
Hemingway called Madrid 'the most Spanish of all cities' and the 'centre of the world'; it was a place that drew him back again and again. But he wasn't the only writer to have been inspired by this proud city which fizzes with energy and is so infused with art and literature. From the Cafe Gijon, a popular hang-out of Lorca, Dali and Bunuel, and the Bar Chicote, Hemingway's preferred watering hole and a popular haunt for bohemian Madrid during the Civil War, to the Hotel Florida where John Dos Passos and Antoine de Saint Exupery used to stay, to…
I have written two short story collections and am working on a third. I have been passionate about short stories for as long as I have been a reader, and continue to find the form extraordinary. Alice Munro famously defined a short story as a house you can step inside rather than a journey you undertake. I feel that a short story is a respectful invitation to the reader to visit briefly and enjoy a small interlude on the way to wherever they are going.
She’s best known for her novel The Namesake, which was made into a film, and her first collection, The Interpreter of Maladies. They’re good. Read this one. As a side note, she also moved from the US to Italy, learned Italian, and began publishing in Italian. Her work has now been translated from Italian and back to English. This is, itself, astonishing. As is this book.
Again, this is technically a novel but reads, daringly, as short fiction. A woman, middle-aged, single, and childless, goes about her days in a large Italian city. She shops for groceries, chats with friends, thinks about her childhood, and thinks about aging. Each section is short, unadorned, perfect. You won’t believe how perfect. I love this book also because it’s so obviously “domestic fiction,” concerned with private life, with tiny moments of transition, but puts a solitary woman at the center. It is…
Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. The woman at the center wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home, an engaging backdrop to her days, acts as a confidant: the sidewalks around her house, parks, bridges, piazzas, streets, stores, coffee bars. We follow her to the pool she frequents and to the train station that sometimes leads her to her mother, mired in a desperate solitude after her father's untimely death. In addition to colleagues…
I’ve just spent the last few years writing Return to Valetto, about a nearly abandoned village in Umbria and the last ten people who live there. In 2018, I received an NEA grant to conduct research in Italy and I visited about a dozen abandoned and nearly abandoned towns all across Italy. While I was traveling, I immersed myself in books about Italy—from history and biography to memoir and fiction. The books on my list were stepping stones in my education about all things Italian and I hope you find them as transporting as I did!
In many ways, this sort of book has gone out of style since it was published in the 1960s.
It’s an opinionated and ambitious portrayal of the Italian psyche and culture. Barzini looks at his fellow Italians with a dispassionate eye and a healthy sense of irreverence, uncovering their foibles, hidden beliefs, superstitions, and great strengths as a culture.
For me, Italy is an eternal paradox. Just when you think you’ve worked it out, something happens that makes you do a double-take. This book helps you understand that paradox has been part of Italy’s identity since the very beginning.
In this consummate portrait of the Italian people, bestselling author, publisher, journalist, and politician Luigi Barzini delves deeply into the Italian national character, discovering both its great qualities and its imperfections.
Barzini is startlingly frank as he examines “the two Italies”: the one that created and nurtured such luminaries as Dante Alighieri, St. Thomas of Aquino, and Leonardo da Vinci; the other, feeble and prone to catastrophe, backward in political action if not in thought, “invaded, ravaged, sacked, and humiliated in every century.” Deeply ambivalent, Barzini approaches his task with a combination of love, hate, disillusion, and affectionate paternalism, resulting…
"A haunting YA mystery. Touching on everything from police ineptitude and community solidarity to the endless frustration of being patronized as a young person, this paranormal thriller confidently combines timely and relatable themes within a page-turning storyline." - Self-Publishing Review
"Biel's writing is fast-paced and sharp!" - author Christy Wopat…
I am an historian and archaeologist of the Roman world, who has lectured on the subject around the world. This summer I am moving from a position in London to one in Los Angeles. One of the attractions of Roman history is that it is a vast subject spanning three continents and more than a thousand years. There is always something new to discover and a great international community of researchers working together to do just that. It is a huge privilege to be part of that community and to try and communicate some its work to the widest audience possible.
Migration is the great theme of the twenty-first century. Our experience has set historians on a quest to see how new the mass movement of peoples really is. Isayev’s book is one of the first full-length studies of migration in Roman times.
It is enormously wide-ranging, bringing together the evidence of archaeology and of Roman comedy and history with the insights of geographers and sociologists. We see populations transplanted against their will, enslaved prisoners, hostages, and refugees, but also settlers and traders trying to make their fortune, and explorers and travelling scholars. Best of all we explore the ways that Romans thought about this, sometimes encountering chillingly familiar hostility but more often positive views of new arrivals. Romans often thought of themselves as a city of immigrants, and saw their willingness to accept newcomers as one reason for their success. Isayev does a wonderful job of opening up this new…
Migration, Mobility and Place in Ancient Italy challenges prevailing conceptions of a natural tie to the land and a demographically settled world. It argues that much human mobility in the last millennium BC was ongoing and cyclical. In particular, outside the military context 'the foreigner in our midst' was not regarded as a problem. Boundaries of status rather than of geopolitics were those difficult to cross. The book discusses the stories of individuals and migrant groups, traders, refugees, expulsions, the founding and demolition of sites, and the political processes that could both encourage and discourage the transfer of people from…
