From submerged worlds to small villages, from grief to mourning to impossible dimensions, four novels that tell much more than a story. Because literature, when it's great literature, is also an extraordinary laboratory for understanding society.
Every summer has its books. The ones we throw in our backpacks before we leave, the ones we've been waiting on our bedside table for months, the ones we keep company on a trip or on an evening too hot to sleep.
For this summer of 2026, we've decided to offer you four very different readings. They're not sociology essays, nor academic textbooks. Yet, each of these novels manages to convey something fundamental about the way we live together, build relationships, navigate change, and give meaning to the world.
J.G. Ballard, The underwater world
What would the planet be like if climate change had already prevailed? What if major cities had been swallowed by water, tropical forests had reclaimed the metropolises, and heat had transformed the Earth into an almost prehistoric environment?
When J. G. Ballard published The Drowned World in 1962, the debate on global warming was still far from making headlines . Yet the British novelist crafted one of the most fascinating literary anticipations of the contemporary environmental crisis.
The protagonist, Robert Kerans, is a biologist on a scientific expedition to future London. The city is now almost completely submerged: skyscrapers barely emerge from lagoons, buildings are covered in lush vegetation, and prehistoric animals seem to be re-inhabiting the spaces vacated by humans.
But the reader soon realizes that the novel's focus isn't on the catastrophe. Ballard is primarily interested in what happens inside people. Kerans, in fact, doesn't feel nostalgia for the lost world. On the contrary, he feels a strange attraction toward that new ecosystem, as if the planet's transformation were awakening something ancient in the human mind as well.
The arrival of the enigmatic Strangman, determined to drain part of the city to recover treasures and riches from the past, introduces a conflict that runs throughout the book: attempt to restore a world now finished or accept that history has taken an irreversible direction?
Ballard creates hypnotic pages, packed with memorable images, in which the landscape becomes a mirror of the psyche. It's a slow read in the best sense of the word: it invites you to observe, immerse yourself, and let yourself be transported.
Sociological suggestions
Society doesn't change only through laws or institutions. It also changes when the environment that hosts it changes. The Underwater World shows how an ecological crisis can redefine behaviors, desires, values, and even the perception of time . Today, in the era of the Anthropocene and climate emergencies, the novel seems surprisingly timely and invites reflection on the relationship between nature, culture, and social adaptation.
Banana Yoshimoto, The sweet tomorrow
Banana Yoshimoto possesses a rare ability: to speak of pain without making it burdensome, to recount loss without depriving it of hope. In The Sweet Hereafter, we meet Sayoko, a young woman whose life changes radically after a car accident. She survives. Her partner, Yōichi, dies.
From this point on, the novel follows the slow journey of someone who must learn to live with an absence that seems to occupy every space of everyday life. Along the way, Sayoko comes into contact with the ancient Okinawan idea of mabui , the deepest part of the soul that can be lost after a trauma and that must be rediscovered to truly return to life.
It's a simple yet powerful image that runs throughout the book. The search for the mabui becomes the search for oneself after pain. With his delicate, essential, and almost suspended style, Yoshimoto constructs a novel that speaks of relationships, memory, spirituality, and rebirth without ever falling into rhetoric.
It's no coincidence that the work was conceived after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami: the protagonist's individual journey also becomes a reflection on the ability of communities to recover after a collective tragedy.
Why read it with a sociological eye?
Every loss is also a social phenomenon. People cope with grief through support networks, rituals, symbols, and shared beliefs. Yoshimoto shows how rebuilding one's identity never happens entirely alone, but within relationships that continue to give meaning to life even when everything seems to have stopped.
Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland
It's hard to find a book that manages to be simultaneously a fantasy tale, a mathematical reflection, a political satire, and a classic of social philosophy. Flatland manages to do just that . The protagonist lives in a two-dimensional universe populated exclusively by geometric figures. Here, form determines everything: social prestige, role, power, even the value attributed to individuals.
Women are represented by mere segments, considered dangerous and strictly controlled. Men, on the other hand, occupy a position that is increasingly elevated the more sides they possess. Society appears perfectly ordered, but it is an order built on exclusion, inequality, and the impossibility of imagining alternatives.
Everything changes when the protagonist encounters a Sphere from a three-dimensional world. The existence of an additional dimension challenges every established certainty. But anyone who attempts to recount this discovery is ridiculed, isolated, and ultimately punished. Published in 1884, the novel retains a surprising modernity even today. Behind the geometric allegory lies a lucid critique of societies that transform cultural conventions into absolute truths.
What is sociological about this novel?
Flatland is about conformism, the social construction of reality, hierarchies, gender, power, and knowledge. It reminds us that every society has invisible boundaries that seem natural only because no one taught us to question them. It's a short, ironic, and extraordinarily timely book.
Antonello Mori, The secrets of Torre Orsaia
There are places where the past seems to never truly pass. Communities where stories live on in tales, silences, and half-truths passed down from generation to generation. It is precisely from this atmosphere that The Secrets of Torre Orsaia , Antonello Mori's debut historical novel, comes to life.
It's 1794. Don Giuseppe Paolino, an elderly priest nearing death, decides to entrust his confession to a writer from Naples. He wants to tell his truth before it's too late. From that moment, the novel unfolds like a long journey down memory lane. Youthful passions, rivalries, trials, accusations, betrayals, power relations, and events emerge that involve not only the protagonist, but the entire community.
The reader is continually prompted to question what he is reading. Is Don Paolino telling the truth? Is he seeking redemption, or is he constructing a final tale to absolve himself? Each new episode challenges the previous one, transforming the novel into a refined investigation of memory and the ambiguity of recollection . The Cilento setting contributes to making the story particularly engaging. The territory is not merely a backdrop: it becomes a silent protagonist that influences relationships, mentalities, and individual destinies.
A historical-social novel for this summer 2026?
The novel beautifully captures the workings of small communities. Reputation, social control, the weight of religion, local hierarchies, and the construction of collective memory emerge naturally through the narrative. It's a reading that reminds us how truth, in social relations, often depends on those with the power to tell it.
Not always non-fiction
A novel doesn't need to explicitly address sociology to help us understand society. Sometimes, simply following a character, entering a community, experiencing a crisis, or observing an imaginary world is enough to find ourselves reflecting on profound social issues.
The readings we've discovered and selected this year are very diverse, but they all have this same ability: they tell engaging stories without sacrificing complexity. If you're looking to alternate nonfiction with a few novels this summer, these four titles are an excellent starting point. Happy reading.
Lecturer in Communications and HR Management. Journalist with a degree in Sociology (cum laude). Editor-in-Chief of Sociologicamente.it.
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