Lying on a poolside lounger somewhere hot and divorced from real life, I’m not usually in the market for a brooding meditation on winter gloom. This is where summer novels – as opposed to summer reads – come in. The summer novel tends to be drenched in sunlight and steeped in pleasure, at least at first. It offers not just freedom and escape, but a glimpse of a blue-skied idyll. Nostalgia swims alongside the pursuit of serenity, and words seem to melt into the brain.But there may be a mosquito buzzing. The shining water on the horizon could be a mirage. As the summer novel lingers on gleaming seas and the joy of being someone else for a while, it also shows us a glint of something foreboding, even sinister, in the heat. Can anyone in the throes of summer hedonism really be trusted? The season can turn hellish, or just disappoint.Here are 10 summer novels to read before autumn comes.Tender is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald“On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-coloured hotel,” opens F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1934 classic. His powers of description do not wilt. The palms that cool the hotel’s flushed facade are “deferential”, while the beach that lies before it is a “bright tan prayer rug”.In a book that contains attitudes of the period, sun parasols, swimming costumes and notes from lovers are juxtaposed with a murky unpleasantness, as Dick Diver, possessing “the passions of many men inside him and nothing simple that he could see”, flails about violently. The action moves back in time to a psychiatric clinic in Zürichsee, Switzerland, where shore hotels, lakeside tennis courts and emerald hills soon become home to “savage filaments of lightning and world-splitting thunder”.Heat Wave by Penelope LivelyIn a cottage in World’s End, somewhere in rural England, copy editor Pauline suspects her son-in-law – self-involved historian Maurice – is having an affair, prompting her to look back upon the disintegration of her own marriage. Summer goes from being “a distinct possibility” and an “aesthetic diversion” to a sweltering eternity in Penelope Lively’s atmospheric novel from 1996, as the temperatures turn oppressive, and a “landscape of exuberance” becomes the site of “idiot weather”. Pauline is sure it will end in tears.When she teaches Luke, her grandson, to swim in a town pool with a clammy changing room, his toddler’s delight is uncontained, but the “sledgehammer heat” that leaves fields quivering in a haze proves the undoing of the adults. When the weather eventually breaks, so does the lid that Pauline has long kept on her anger.Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki“The day is hot, the mind empty, the leaves motionless, the body and soul, too,” is a typical scene-setting line in this dreamy novel about three sisters coming of age, published in Greece in 1946 as The Straw Hats and translated into English by Karen Van Dyck.In the first summer, Maria is 19, Infanta is 18 and Katerina, our narrator, is 16 and fantasy-prone. When a fire encroaches, oxygen is said to have “left the earth for another planet”, but the real threat to easy breathing comes from being in love. “It’s as if something is leaping up and down inside me, cutting off my air supply,” an infatuated Katerina declares. Against a backdrop of olive groves and pastry shops, Margarita Liberaki explores the tension between independence and domestic submission. There’s no nasty undercurrent, just the melancholy onset of three autumns.Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan LindsayTo St Valentine’s Day in the Australian summer of 1900 and this unsettling object lesson in the perils of colonial naivety under a “bright unclouded sky” – the title alone encapsulates a certain folly. Joan Lindsay’s dizzyingly visceral yet concise 1967 novel centres on her invention of the “College Mystery”, in which three schoolgirls and their mistress go missing during an excursion. It begins on a “shimmering summer morning” deemed “just right” for swapping the immaculate lawns of Mrs Appleyard’s College for Young Ladies for a “monolith” that rises up “slabbed and pinnacled like a fortress” as lizards bask on the hottest stones.Hanging Rock poses a “dark reality” amid the muslins, dahlias and Venetian blinds of these displaced characters – Mrs Appleyard dreams of Bournemouth pier – and as the summer flowers fade, the case remains eerily unresolved. A bushfire has the final word.Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead“There was summer, and then there was the rest of the time,” explains Benji, a teenager hanging out with his friends in the Hamptons town of Sag Harbor in 1985. They are “black boys with beach houses”, or “the definition of paradox”, Colson Whitehead writes in this joyous nostalgia-fest from 2009, in which Benji dissects everything from the political terrain of beaches to the outrage that is New Coke.Bad jobs with free ice-cream, the quest for beer and the ever-changing slang and fashions are all recalled, as is the essence of summer as a time of personal reinvention. “Five o’clock, June light, wrung out by the sun, sanded and damp – this day was one in a long series,” Benji says, suggesting it’s not the weather that’s glorious, but youth. Not everybody’s adult life will go quite so well.The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von ArnimSome cheating now: Elizabeth von Arnim’s 1922 story unfolds in spring – but it’s the Italian spring, and it’s a holiday novel about taking a break from one’s miserable self. What could be more summer than that?When four mismatched English women respond to an offer to rent a small medieval castle on the Italian Riviera, one of them, downtrodden Lotty Wilkins, is overcome with happiness. Away from her dull husband and in the “adorable condition” of lying in bed by herself, she puts off opening the shutters “as one puts off opening a precious letter”. When she finally throws them open to greet the Mediterranean, it’s a transcendental experience: “How beautiful, how beautiful ... not to have died before this ... to have been allowed to see, breathe, feel this.”Surely not even the unexpected arrival of Mr Wilkins can spoil the mood?The Summer Book by Tove JanssonDeath hovers over this wise and humorous novel, first published as Sommarboken in Sweden in 1972 and translated into English by Thomas Teal. Sophia, who has a bed to herself because her mother is dead, spends the summer with her grandmother on a tiny island in the gulf of Finland. She is a busy child, constantly testing her own limits and knowledge of her world. “I don’t have time,” she hilariously states to the older woman, who has much less of it.Storms come and go, and there are occasional intruders, including the “purring” yacht that leaves the ocean “holding its breath”. But a splendid tranquillity underpins their adventures. The island steams in the heat, the sea glistens and even a setting sun throws plenty of light through the window in Tove Jansson’s uplifting Scandinavian story of protective familial love.Holiday by Stanley MiddletonOne of the greatest menaces of summer – bumping into someone you know on holiday – drives the plot of Stanley Middleton’s unsentimental 1974 novel. Edwin Fisher is having an unsatisfactory time in the fictional English seaside resort of Bealthorpe, where he ruminates on the breakdown of his volatile marriage and the death of his young son, while also remembering his childhood visits to the same town. Then he runs into his parents-in-law, who want him to reconcile with their daughter.The resort and Edwin are in a morose state. “Who came to these places, now that the package deals to Ibiza or Tangiers were so cheap?” he wonders. Encountering a lifeless amusement park, gardens “with the stillness of a waxworks” and children digging trenches in the sand, he is, he realises, on the holiday his parents used to take.Swimming Home by Deborah LevyHeat permeates this 2011 novel set on the French Riviera in 1994, with Deborah Levy evoking a world of half-deflated linos, white plastic recliners and insects dying in the deep end. A poet, Joe, and his war correspondent wife, Isabel, are holidaying with their adolescent daughter, Nina, and another couple (who inevitably prove annoying) when they discover a depressed young woman, Kitty Finch, floating – alive – in the pond-like pool of their tourist villa. Isabel invites her to stay, and emotions duly simmer.“A swimming pool was just a hole in the ground. A grave filled with water,” thinks Joe, in one moment of foreshadowing. This is a place where motorboats make white frothy scars on the sea, residents dispatch hostile gazes from adjacent balconies and Nina will grow suspicious of Kitty’s motivation for collecting pebbles.A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor“The surface of the sea was dinted like beaten metal by the rain, or pitted, a few minutes later, by glancing sunlight,” writes Elizabeth Taylor (not that one) in this quaint 1947 novel. We are in Newby, a faded English coastal village, as lengthening spring days lead into a summer of changeable weather, flat beer and midlife disappointment.The genteel ensemble cast oscillates between a fish cafe, a pub called the Anchor and the seafront, sometimes enduring “tripe” at the pictures but mostly watching and becoming entangled with each other. If you walk down Newby’s cobbled streets, you will see the sea showing up “in a little cup at the bottom” – foam-flecked waves might flog the seawall, but in Taylor’s universe of the lonely you’re more likely to be sprayed by the water than swept away by it.