Three reads for the summer 2025

Summer is just beginning, and with it come the holidays, a perfect time to dive into a good book. Whether you're at the beach, by the pool, in the park, or enjoying the comfort of your sofa at home, any place can become the ideal setting to enjoy the pleasures of reading. Below, we recommend a few books that might just become your best companions this season.

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is considered one of the most widely read and admired classics of all time, continuing to inspire readers and writers alike. In 2025, we celebrate the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth. This milestone offers a unique opportunity to rediscover her work from fresh perspectives, reaffirm its relevance, and introduce it to new generations around the world. Throughout the year, publishers, libraries, and universities will join in the commemoration with special editions, reading groups, literary events, and reflections on Austen’s legacy and her role in the history of literature.

To mark the occasion, Arpa Publishers presents a new translation by Ángeles Caso, novelist, translator, and expert in English literature. This edition includes the original illustrations by Hugh Thomson. In this novel, Austen delivers a precise and ironic analysis of love in the early 19th century.

2. Cleopatra: The Woman Behind the Myth of Egypt’s Last Queen by Alejandra Izquierdo

Historian Alejandra Izquierdo presents the many faces of Cleopatra—scholarly ruler and strategic thinker. Two thousand years after her death, Cleopatra is more legend than historical figure. Was Cleopatra a good ruler? What was life like under her reign? How did she become pharaoh? How were her alliances with Caesar and Mark Antony forged? Will her tomb ever be found?

In this book, the author explores the queen and her world: Egypt’s connections with Rome, the cultural atmosphere, religion, economy, and politics of the final period of the Ptolemaic dynasty, and all that Cleopatra represented as its last ruler.

Izquierdo holds a degree in History and a PhD in the Science of Religions from the Complutense University of Madrid. She currently teaches Classical Egyptian and Egyptian Text Reading at the San Dámaso University (UESD), and since 2021 she has combined historical outreach on social media with academic research and publications.

3. Complete Poetry by Julio Cortázar

Poetry is always good company. Alfaguara publishes for the first time the most overlooked work of one of the great legends of contemporary Spanish-language literature: The Complete Poetry of Julio Cortázar. This monumental volume, edited by Andreu Jaume, includes all of Cortázar’s poetry published to date, along with a section of previously unpublished poems discovered posthumously in the Daniel Devoto and María Beatriz Valle-Inclán Archive, held at the Fundación Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid.

Written with absolute freedom and deep awareness of the power of language, the poetry explores the invisible zones of reality. Free from clichés, it weaves together seemingly contradictory elements: history and utopia, a desire to communicate and formal experimentation, contemplation and commitment, sensitivity and rebellion.

As Jaume notes in the introduction, “the reader holds in their hands the most comprehensive compilation to date of the poetry of a writer who already considered himself ‘an old poet’ in 1969 (Cortázar published his first poetry collection in 1971) even though he had kept this side of his imagination secret until then, a hidden fire that now illuminates the richness of his well-known fiction.”