Sunny Hostin Books in Order

If you want her personal story first: I Am These Truths.
If you want the full Summer Beach trilogy: Summer on the Bluffs → Summer on Sag Harbor → Summer on Highland Beach.
If you prefer to sample a single beach read: Start with Summer on the Bluffs.
If you like community driven drama with mystery threads: Summer on Sag Harbor → Summer on Highland Beach.

Sunny Hostin grew up in a South Bronx housing project, the daughter of teenage parents, and has built a life that bridges courtrooms, television studios, and bestselling books.

Born Asunción Cummings in 1968 to a Puerto Rican mother and an African American father, she identifies as Afro Latina and has spoken often about feeling like she lived between cultures and expectations.

As a kid, she was surrounded by both hardship and love. Her parents, Rosa Beza and William Cummings, juggled low wage work and activism while insisting that books, museums, and school mattered. A violent attack on a beloved uncle when she was seven left her determined to understand why systems fail families like hers.

Hostin raced through school, graduating from the all girls Dominican Academy at sixteen, then earning a degree in English and rhetoric from Binghamton University followed by a law degree from Notre Dame. Scholarships, late night study sessions, and part time jobs were her ladder out of poverty, but she never forgot the neighborhood she came from.

After law school she clerked for a state chief judge, then joined the Justice Department's Antitrust Division before becoming a federal prosecutor handling child sex crime cases. The work was grueling, but it sharpened her belief that the law should protect the vulnerable, not just the powerful, and it taught her how to explain complex cases in plain language.

That skill made television a natural next step.

Hostin began appearing on Court TV, then on cable news programs that asked her to unpack headline making trials and civil rights cases. Over time she became a familiar legal analyst, eventually joining ABC News as senior legal correspondent and, in 2016, taking a permanent seat as a co host of the daytime talk show The View.

Even as her TV profile grew, writing stayed at the center of how she processed the world. Her memoir I Am These Truths traces her path from the projects to the federal courtroom and national news desk, laying bare family secrets, professional hurdles, and the mix of racism, colorism, and sexism she faced along the way. The book is candid about fertility struggles, marriage, and the emotional toll of covering stories like the killing of Trayvon Martin.

She then turned to fiction with the Summer Beach novels Summer on the Bluffs, Summer on Sag Harbor, and Summer on Highland Beach. Set in historically Black coastal communities, the books follow women like Esperanza 'Perry' Soto and Olivia Jones as they navigate inheritance, friendship, romance, and class in spaces that have rarely centered Black and Afro Latina characters in popular beach reads. The series has landed on bestseller lists and is being developed for television, giving her characters another way to reach readers.

Across both nonfiction and fiction, Hostin returns to a few core themes: the costs and rewards of ambition, the weight of family history, the search for belonging when you straddle cultures, and the quiet power of women's friendships. She writes with the same directness viewers recognize from the Hot Topics table, but with room for vulnerability and reflection that does not always fit into a television segment.

Away from the camera, she is married to orthopedic surgeon Emmanuel Hostin, and they have two children, Gabriel and Paloma. The family makes its home in New York, with a much loved escape on Martha's Vineyard, and her off air life includes everything from tending beehives to supporting causes tied to domestic violence, housing, and opportunities for kids in the Bronx.