I don’t know about you, but my summers are filled with travel. This year alone I’ve gone to Asheville for a mountain weekend, spent a week at a resort in Mexico with my husband, Houston for a conference, Las Vegas for a girl’s getaway, and tomorrow I fly out to Seattle for a backpacking trip. Between flights, laying out by the pool/beach, and relaxing mornings with a cup of tea, that’s a lot of reading time! I tend to fly through books in the summer.

But it’s a special kind of book you want during the summer. In the winter, when it’s dark and cold and you can curl up in your favorite socks with a cup of hot chocolate and burrow into the blankets for hours at a time, you can tackle those thousand page epics or the really thought-provoking biographies. In the summer, when everything is vying for your attention all at once, you want a book that will capture you completely and take you away to someplace new and exciting, a book that will spit you out inspired and happy with your life all at once.

Jenny Colgan’s 2016 novel The Bookshop on the Corner is one of those books. Nina Redmond is a fantastic librarian but when her local lobrary branch closes she has to decide what to do – follow her co-workers to the new media center in the city, or step out of her comort zone and ask herself what she truly wants out of life for the first time. Not to give too much away, but she chooses the latter, and it includes a mobile bookshop, the Scottish countryside, deliciously described local delicacies, and a dog named Parsley. Oh, a couple of Austen-worthy romantic interests!

I listened to this audiobook as I was training for my backpacking trip. It’s read by Lucy-Price Lewis and I she’s quickly become one of my favorite audiobook readers! Training for a backpacking trip (you know, the kind where you go so far into the mountains you lose all cell service and carry all your food, clothing, and shelter on your back for a few days, just for the fun of it) looks like a lot of running up and down hills. And I gotta tell ya, that is hard! It’s hard to have the discipline to get to the bottom and turn around and run right back up (pro tip: park at the top of the hill so you have to run up it at least once). Jenny’s writing and Lucy’s narrating made training a rather enjoyable experience. I was able to forget how hard it was to breathe listening to Nina embark on an adventure so far out of her (and my!) comfort zone and listening to the descriptions of the local Scottish cheese and pastries is enough to convince anyone they can run one more mile, if only so they can go home and stuff their face!

If you don’t finish this book dreaming of Scottish farm life and secretly wishing you’d married a Scot (sorry Will!) then I don’t even know what kind of book to recommend to you!