Summerwork

An August 2026 Reading Is a Lifestyle Subscription Book Pick

Set in a single sweltering summer, the story of two traumatized teenagers picking up the pieces of their lives in the wreckage of a bizarre gothic mansion.

Seventeen-year-old Leo Arceneaux has been raised by his mother and uncle, having lost his father in a shockingly random murder when he was two. Connor Rigby is the teenage daughter of a wealthy lifestyle influencer. She has no idea who her father is. As summer begins, Leo and Connor both find themselves in a small town in rural Minnesota, living in the rundown grandiosity of Connor’s mother’s family’s estate. Rigby Mansion is a secluded gothic monstrosity that Connor’s mother is slowly renovating without ever actually being present. Leo is there as a summer landscaping laborer, working to pay off a debt to his mother and uncle, and Connor arrives shortly after, having left behind wreckage of her own and looking for a place to lie low away from her mother.

Connor and Leo soon find themselves in an unfamiliar but intense relationship—not simply a summer romance but something that feels important and somehow tied to the combination of this particular blazing-hot summer and this weird house in the middle of nowhere.

When an accident on the estate’s grounds reveals the bones of two long dead people, Leo and Connor become obsessed with the couple buried beneath the fountain. Neither of them can say exactly why, but they’re sure that somehow these two corpses are tied to the to whatever comes next in their lives.