Read With Jenna’s August 2026 Pick Title

Jenna Bush Hager says her August 2026 Read With Jenna pick, “Sunlight Finds You” by Laura Moriarty, is “the perfect summer read.”

“It is propulsive and drenched in light, just like the title,” she says.

The novel opens in 1949 in St. Petersburg, Florida. There, 17-year-old Nora meets and falls in love with Leonard, a New York transplant.

“His parents, and a secret, separate them which leads Nora through a twisty path towards adulthood, heartbreak and eventually, healing,” Jenna said, calling this a book about “forgiveness, both of ourselves and others, and love.”

Moriarty is the author of multiple novels including “The Chaperone,” which became a movie directed by “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes in 2018.

With her latest, she always knew she wanted to write a love story — “a big love story.”

“Not exactly a romance, but a story about the way love can change a person and alter the course of the life,” she tells TODAY.com.

Moriarty says she also “knew pretty early” that she wanted to set the novel in St. Petersburg in the 1950s. During WWII, soldiers passed through St. Petersburg on their way to Europe. Some returned permanently upon their return, turning St. Pete into a “boom town,” Moriarty explains.

“It really became this place of explosive growth and typically seeking the sun in good times after the war,” Moriarty says.

But the journey to “Sunlight Finds You” was a long road, she says, because of her own health. Moriarty was diagnosed with cancer while writing the book and had to have her jaw almost completely reconstructed during treatment.

“It slowed me down. I’m so, so happy to be on the other side of it,” she says.

Moriarty says her procedure helped her connect more deeply to Nora and her troubles.

“I started thinking about you know how going through something isolating and hard can make you more vulnerable for a while before it makes wiser,” she says.

She spoke to her mom, who lived in Florida in the 1950s, for context about Laura’s life and the choices women in that era had to face.

“It was really hard to navigate this narrow path for women and girls. They have the same dreams and desires for autonomy that we all do. I don’t want to go back,” she says.

While reading, Moriarty hopes people look back at the crossroads in their lives, including moments they might consider to be mistakes.

“What I really love about her is she’s able to look at her mistakes with her younger self of compassion. She doesn’t go into just beating herself up, or she learns to stop doing that,” she says.

“I hope it prompts people to think about their own big choices that they they made and how it shaped their life. And I hope they can think about doing it with that same sort of compassion. In her case, it made her more compassionate to other people.”