Six For Sunday: Summer Reads – Books With Sunshine On The Cover

Welcome to the first Six For Sunday of July! We’ve finished with our Bookish Wishes theme and we’ve moved onto Summer Reads! I’m really looking forward to this month of prompts!

Six for Sunday is a weekly meme hosted by the lovely Steph at ALITTLEBUTALOT. You can find a list of prompts from July to December 2019 here

Books With Sunshine On The Cover

I’ve looked through my books and turns out they’re not particularly sunny so I struggled with this one slightly! Some of these I’ve read, some are sitting on my shelves waiting to be read and some I’m looking forward to adding to my collection!

If Birds Fly Back by Carlie Sorosiak

Linny has been living life in black and white since her sister Grace ran away, and she’s scared that Grace might never come back. When Linny witnesses the return to Miami of a cult movie star long presumed dead, she is certain it’s a sign. Surely Álvaro Herrera, of all people, can tell her why people come back – and how to bring her sister home?

Sebastian has come to Miami seeking his father, a man whose name he’s only just learned. An aspiring astrophysicist, he can tell Linny how many galaxies there are, how much plutonium weighs and how likely she is to be struck by a meteorite. But none of the theories he knows are enough to answer his own questions about why his father abandoned him, and why it left him in pieces.

As Sebastian and Linny converge around the mystery of Álvaro’s disappearance – and return – their planets start to collide. Linny’s life is about to become technicolor, but finding the answers to her questions might mean losing everything that matters.

This was an easy one to find, the sun is handily popping out from behind a cloud. I read this one back in 2017 and absolutely loved it!

The Freedom Broker by K. J. Howe

At eight years old, Thea Paris watched her brother being snatched from his bed.

Her inability to save him has haunted both their lives ever since.

Twenty years later, the unthinkable happens when her billionaire father is abducted.

But this time, she is prepared.

Now, Thea is at the top of her game as a freedom broker, negotiating for the release of kidnap victims around the world.

And she has only one objective:

Find him or die trying…

This one has been sitting on my Kindle for a little while now, to be honest I’d kind of forgotten about it, but now I’ve re-read the blurb I think it might actually move slightly up my TBR

Lampie and the Children of the Sea by Annet Schaap

Lampie and the Children of the Sea is a prizewinning and enchanting fairytale adventure, set in a world of mermaids, pirates and stormy seas

Every evening Lampie the lighthouse keeper’s daughter must light a lantern to warn ships away from the rocks. But one stormy night disaster strikes. The lantern goes out, a ship is wrecked and an adventure begins.

In disgrace, Lampie is sent to work as a maid at the Admiral’s Black House, where rumour has it that a monster lurks in the tower. But what she finds there is stranger and more beautiful than any monster. Soon Lampie is drawn into a fairytale adventure in a world of mermaids and pirates, where she must fight with all her might for friendship, freedom and the right to be different.

This one landed on my doormat recently for the sake of this I’m arguing that that is a sun in the background – honestly I think it might be the lighthouse light… This was originally written in Dutch so I’m intrigued as to how it translates into English!

Last Light by Helen Phifer

Lucy watches the pathologist leave, then turns to the nameless victim on the table. ‘I promise I will catch whoever did this to you,’ she whispers.

In charge of a new team, Detective Lucy Harwin is called out to attend the discovery of a woman’s body in an abandoned, crumbling church, and is quickly plunged into a case that will test her leadership skills to the limit.

With no leads except the crudely-fashioned crucifix the victim was displayed on, Lucy is at a complete loss. That is, until another body turns up: an elderly woman who devoted her life to the church. 

Faced with a killer stalking the streets of her small coastal town, while also throwing herself into work to forget the love of her life, Lucy’s first case is turning into a nightmare. 

Linking the killer to the church where her own teenage daughter volunteers, it seems the threat is quickly drawing closer to Lucy and those she loves. Can she catch this monster and prevent a tragedy that will tear her world apart?

I recently read and reviewed Last Light – that is a sunrise? sunset?… One of them that you’re seeing on the cover of this one. It was a great read too, although a little darker than the sun would suggest, that said the sky does look a little stormy…

The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman

It is twenty years since the events of La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust Volume One unfolded and saw the baby Lyra Belacqua begin her life-changing journey.

It is seven years since readers left Lyra and the love of her young life, Will Parry, on a park bench in Oxford’s Botanic Gardens at the end of the ground-breaking, bestselling His Dark Materials sequence.

Now, in The Secret Commonwealth, we meet Lyra Silvertongue. And she is no longer a child . . .

The second volume of Sir Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust sees Lyra, now twenty years old, and her daemon Pantalaimon, forced to navigate their relationship in a way they could never have imagined, and drawn into the complex and dangerous factions of a world that they had no idea existed.

Pulled along on his own journey too is Malcolm; once a boy with a boat and a mission to save a baby from the flood, now a man with a strong sense of duty and a desire to do what is right.

Theirs is a world at once familiar and extraordinary, and they must travel far beyond the edges of Oxford, across Europe and into Asia, in search for what is lost – a city haunted by daemons, a secret at the heart of a desert, and the mystery of the elusive Dust.

I’ve pre-ordered the special edition of this book from Waterstones and the cover for that hasn’t been revealed yet but the standard version has a sun on it so this totally counts! I can’t wait to get my hands on it!

The Girl In The Grave by Helen Phifer

When the body of a teenage runaway is found hidden inside someone else’s grave in a small-town cemetery in The Lake District, an urgent call is made to Forensic Pathologist Beth Adams. Still traumatised by a recent attempt on her own life, one look at the beautiful girl’s broken body is enough to bring Beth out of hiding for the first time since her attack. She’s the only one who can help her trusted friend, Detective Josh Walker, crack the most shocking case of his career.

Beth struggles to believe it’s a coincidence that the gravesite was scheduled to be exhumed, exposing the evidence. Does this twisted killer want to be caught?

Throwing herself into her work Beth discovers traces of material beneath the victim’s fingernails that sets the team on the killer’s trail. But this critical lead comes at a dangerous price, exposing Beth’s whereabouts and dragging her back into her attacker’s line of fire once again.

With Beth’s own life on the line, the investigation is already cracking under the pressure. Then another local girl goes missing… Can Beth stay alive long enough to catch the killer before he claims his next victim?

It’s another Helen Phifer book – she clearly likes the cloudy sky aesthetic! I’m slightly cheating with this one, there’s no actual sun on the cover but the beautiful colours in the sky clearly show the effects of some sun! I’m looking forward to getting my hands on this one later this month!

They were my #SixforSunday! If you’ve taken part leave a link to your post below and I’ll be sure to check it out!