The 15 Best Beach Reads (Even if You’re Not at the Beach)

Summer is nearly upon us, and with it warmth, sun and that sandy old haunt, the beach. Whether you’re traveling to a picturesque resort or strolling to your local beachfront, it’s nice to have some mesmerizing reading material. Yes, sometimes beach reads get a bad rap: They’re too juicy, too plot-focused, too pedestrian, too predictable.

Let’s reclaim the idea of beach reads, shall we? If you read it on a beach, it’s a beach read. Et voilà. Whether you want a frothy romance, pulpy thriller, weighty biography, no-holds-barred memoir or a collection of literary short stories, we’re not here to pass judgment.

“You must be the first person in history to take Henry James to the beach,” author Marlon James said to his editor, Jake Morrissey, on a literary podcast. To which he replied: “I’m a guy who read ‘War and Peace’ by the pool.” I can relate to Morrissey; last time my toes were in the sand, I had an experimental novel by a 19th-century Brazilian writer in hand, “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas.” It was grand.

Surreal spousal tale

Londoner Lauren Strickland is decidedly single when she goes to her friend’s bachelorette party on a Saturday night, but when she comes home, happy and drunk, she finds a man in her flat. A husband. Her husband. Wait, huh? After quelling her surprise and fear, Lauren begins to explore her curious new situation. And the situation is thus: She has an enchanted attic. Each time a “husband” enters the attic, to change a lightbulb, say, or investigate a sound, a new man emerges. Within days, she is going through husbands of every imaginable personality like toilet paper. With each spouse, the particulars of her life shift, butterfly effect-style. Everyone she tries to tell is obviously skeptical—or seriously concerned. So, Lauren decides to milk the magical attic. She adopts a low-stakes goal: Find a suitable husband to take to her friend’s wedding, where she’ll be seated at the same table as her ex-boyfriend. She’ll worry about the rest later.

Light and fizzy, this novel would be perfect to tear through poolside. Readers who enjoyed Matt Haig’s “The Midnight Library” would likely savor the choose-your-own-reality aspect of “The Husbands,” though this book doesn’t pack the same emotional wallop. Still, the steady flow of fresh spouses, paired with Lauren’s wry observations, buoy the reader along.

Perspective-shifting period piece

This novel at first reads like a sweeping, smartly written biography of an early 20th-century financial titan and the upper-crust society he occupies—a bit like “Downton Abbey,” but rather than an upstairs-downstairs depiction of affairs, this story is solely about the upstairs set. On page one of “Trust,” we meet Benjamin Rask, a reserved, laconic scion of a tobacco trading dynasty, who becomes a wildly successful New York financier more interested in how money moves than the luxuries it affords. He marries a brilliant woman named Helen, and the first quarter of “Trust” tracks their respective upbringings and the life they build together.

Then, about 125 pages in, “Trust” becomes an altogether different tale: A memoir allegedly written by a different financier. Read more, and the perspective shifts again, and again. “Trust” is composed of four narratives, and the later sections prompt us to distrust the preceding parts. Just when you think you’ve got this puzzle of a novel figured out, it rearranges itself, which only adds to its mysterious, canny charm.

Coastal story collection

Bestselling novelist Amor Towles—author of “A Gentleman in Moscow,” among other hits—wades into the waters of short fiction with “Table for Two.” The collection includes six short stories set wholly or partly in New York and a novella set in Hollywood that follows a character from Towles’s 2011 debut novel, “Rules of Civility,” to 1930s Los Angeles.

The people populating Towles’s tales hail from various backgrounds, inclinations and eras. In one story, a naïve Russian peasant satisfied with a quiet life relocates to Moscow in the 1920s at the urging of his fervently Communist wife, where he stumbles into wildly successful entrepreneurship and sees his fortunes rise and fall. In another, a young Bostonite-turned-New Yorker dead set on becoming a “celebrated novelist” finds himself in a predatory arrangement with a rare-books dealer in the ’90s. Money is a throughline in “Table for Two,” along with its close cousins, power and greed. These stories reel you in with elegant prose and a surfeit of wit, and often conclude in unexpected ways. Readers who relished Towles’s novels would likely savor his foray into shorter fiction.

Captivating Caribbean-set novella

Languorous and lulling as a toasty summer afternoon, “Until August” follows Ana Magdalena Bach, a 46-year-old woman who visits the Caribbean island where her mother is buried for one day and night every summer. Each time, she drapes a fresh bouquet of gladioli on her mother’s grave—and takes a new lover. Ana’s first one-night stand, which happens early in this slender novella, startles her. She’s been married for 27 years; her husband had been the only man she’d slept with, the only adult she’d seen naked, until that August when, spurred by brandy, gin and the charms of a silver fox in her hotel bar, “she felt bold enough to take a step that had never occurred to her in her entire life, not even in dreams.”

Published posthumously a decade after García Márquez’s death and translated from the original Spanish by Anne McLean, “Until August” was written in his final years, when he was suffering from memory loss. He never wished it to see the light of day, ordering his loved ones to destroy the manuscript. “In an act of betrayal,” his sons write in the preface, “we decided to put his readers’ pleasure ahead of all other considerations.” The book is far from perfect, at times lacking the depth readers expect from the beloved author, but it is pleasing—and fleeting. At less than 150 pages, this story offers one last taste of a great talent.

Fantastical historical fiction

“Ours” enthralls from its earliest pages, beginning with a too-familiar, present-day tragedy (Black youth with his back to police, shots fired, life extinguished) and winding backward to a magic-inflected past. In the 1830s, a mysterious Black woman named Saint traverses Arkansas, freeing enslaved people using fearsome conjuring abilities, leaving a trail of “plantations that she single-handedly ruined without any bloodshed but plenty of death.” Near St. Louis, she establishes a town called “Ours” where the liberated can safely thrive, using her powers to cast protective spells to expel outsiders. But seclusion comes with costs, and even magic can be conquered.

Written in distilled, distinct prose (author Phillip B. Williams is an award-winning poet), “Ours” reads like mythology or folklore paired with ethnography. The inhabitants of the town, their relationships and routines, feel specific, lived-in and complex. Questions about how to form a utopian community—if such an ideal is even attainable—reverberate throughout. Unlike many stories that grapple with slavery, “Ours” is refreshingly focused on freedom.

Glittering guilty pleasure

Those who want to eat the rich may salivate while reading “Pineapple Street,” which has characters who earnestly say things like, “Oh, no! I left my Cartier bracelet in Lena’s BMW and she’s leaving soon for her grandmother’s house in Southampton!” These characters also have names like Georgiana and Chip and Cord, play tennis like it’s a profession and occupy palatial Brooklyn limestones and luxury condominiums. It’s easy to abhor them. It’s fun to observe them. It’s also possible, in occasional moments, to understand them.

The audience proxy is Sasha, a middle-class woman in her 30s who married into this old-money family. We meet Sasha early in her marriage and watch her navigate her new one-percenter in-laws. The novel also dips into the perspectives of other characters.

This breezy read is the bookish equivalent of an effervescent Netflix dramedy. It reminds you of something created by Darren Star—think “Younger,” think “Emily in Paris,” think “Sex and the City”—and that’s not shade, it’s a sales pitch. Expect to be entertained.

Deep dive into discontent

Everything is fraught nowadays, and everybody knows it. Author and New York Times columnist Frank Bruni takes a magnifying glass to the mess of political and social divisions plaguing America (and beyond) and aptly attributes rising discord and violence to an overarching culture of grievance in his newest book.

Bruni argues that grievance, at its best, rights injustices and spurs necessary change; at its worst, it sows chaos and diminishes goodwill. He uses a 2022 Fox News report falsely claiming that the Biden administration rerouted pallets of baby formula to migrants during a nationwide formula shortage—and the outrage that followed—to illustrate a growing trend among a “perilous share of Americans.”

Bruni zooms in on grievance overload on both sides of the political aisle, in pop culture and on college campuses, in virtually every digital and physical space we occupy. He also zooms out, exploring the origins of this grievance sickness and prescribing potential antidotes.

Bruni writes with humor, insight and precision, but be warned. Taken together, the instances of violence, hate, misinformation and demagoguery he enumerates are staggering. It’s probably best to read this brilliant book in bits—a chapter at a time, possibly with a stiff drink, followed by a siesta.

Worthwhile romantic read

Romance is a tricky genre. It can easily veer into saccharine territory, or lurch toward tawdriness. “The Neighbor Favor” is that rare romantic novel that is genuinely sweet, surprisingly moving and compellingly written. Lily Greene, a shy Brooklynite who dreams of editing children’s books, emails N.R. Strickland, the author of an obscure fantasy novel she adores, never expecting a reply. He answers, and their ongoing correspondence evolves from formal, to friendly, to flirtatious. The epistolary section of the book, which spans about 40 pages, is exceedingly delightful—until Strickland suddenly ghosts Lily. Fast forward five months, and Lily is crashing at her sister’s ritzy Manhattan apartment and crushing on her handsome new neighbor, who is trying to hide his complicated past and suppress how desperately he wants her. Tension ensues. You know how this ride ends, but it’s a pleasant journey nonetheless.

Modern morality tale

“Confidence” is about cons, love and moral corruption. Main character Ezra Green is a queer teen who got the short end of the stick. He’s short, snaggletoothed, almost legally blind, of low-income means and forced to attend Last Chance Camp after a hustle gone awry, revealed when a classmate snorted too much of the pulverized Sudafed and sea salt Ezra marketed as a mix of coke and Molly. At Last Chance, Ezra meets and is taken with the charismatic Orson.

Together, they birth several schemes, culminating in a giant con called NuLife, which promises freedom from pain and enduring bliss through a process called “Synthesis.” Ezra falls deeper in love with Orson, as more folks fall prey to their scams. As this jaunty caper proceeds, one questions if Ezra is a flawed-yet-lovable underdog or a manifestation of moral decay. And of Ezra and Orson’s relationship, a reader might ask, what’s real, and what’s smoke and mirrors? Those queries prompt you to keep turning the page.

Enthralling thriller

Given time, provisions and a comfortable place to sit, a person just might be compelled to begin “Age of Vice” and not rest until reaching the final sentence. This 500-plus-page saga is propulsive, cinematic, unputdownable. The thriller opens in New Delhi with a fatal accident. A drunken servant named Ajay driving a Mercedes that belongs to someone else mows over five poor people, including a pregnant woman, killing them all. He is arrested, beaten, jailed, attacked, and just when it seems he’ll languish or perish in prison, we—and the warden—learn he’s connected to a powerful family. Apologies are made, privileges offered.

Traversing time, perspectives and several parts of India, “Age of Vice” follows Ajay and the other players involved in a fearsome crime syndicate and the tangled web they weave. It’s the first novel in a planned trilogy. Get lost in its sumptuous literary sweep now before it heads to a TV screen near you.

Compelling coming-of-age story

In “All This Could Be Different,” Sarah Thankam Mathews aptly captures that fleeting era when a 20-something’s life is still full of unanswered questions. In wry, staccato prose, Mathews sketches the story of Sneha, a fresh college graduate working a grueling, thankless consulting job in Milwaukee circa 2008. Obama is still president. America’s gripped by a recession. Sneha, an immigrant, is alone — her parents are in India. Lonely, she craves lovers and friends. Sneha dates women, a fact hidden from her family, and decides she will embrace a “slut” phase, though this endeavor brings mixed results.

“This is not a story about work or precarity,” Sneha tells us near the beginning, though the novel contains both. “I am trying, late in the evening, to say something about love.” Yes, she finds pals and romantic passion, but what she really stumbles upon, the love she describes, is community and belonging.

Razor-sharp theater-world memoir

In “The Critic’s Daughter,” Priscilla Gilman grapples with the ghost of her deceased, complicated father, theater critic and professor Richard Gilman. It’s a penetrating, plangent memoir, electric with emotional urgency and alive with self-awareness. She details the “dangerous romantic entanglements” she entered with difficult, melancholy men like her father, who had many vices. With deep admiration, she also recounts all that she adores about her dad, like his playfulness and intellectualism. It’s worth noting that Gilman’s mother, Lynn Nesbit, was a prominent and prosperous literary agent. Thus, Gilman and her sister grew up surrounded by literary luminaries. Toni Morrison and Ann Beattie read them bedtime stories; Michael Crichton colored with them; Susan Sontag admired their drawings.

Eventually, Gilman’s parents divorced. It was ugly, and Nesbit abhorred her ex forever after. A former academic, Gilman has the gumption to look at her father, her mother and herself with clarity and without apology. She wonders if she can make radical honesty “an act of love.” Her efforts are brave, and bracing.

Page-turner period drama

In “The Marriage Portrait,” Maggie O’Farrell takes real 16th-century historical figures and passes them through the prism of fiction. Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici, married off to the Duke of Ferrara at age 15, is our heroine. In the novel’s very first paragraph, she suspects, “with a peculiar clarity,” that her husband intends to kill her. Imminently. They’ve been married less than a year. She has not yet been able to conceive his heir.

O’Farrell sets up the stakes and describes the gilded prison that is Lucrezia’s life as she awaits her fate. It’s tense and riveting, even though an early historical note clearly states what we expect will come next. “Hamnet,” O’Farrell’s oft-praised 2020 book about the death of Shakespeare’s son in 1596, was a moving bestseller. Here, too, the author’s adroit storytelling skills are on fine display in this tale.

Dark, fanciful novel

There’s something deliciously forbidden about eavesdropping—glimpsing into the crevices of other people’s lives. In Jen Beagin’s “Big Swiss,” Greta, an L.A. transplant who moved to a bougie pocket of upstate New York, transcribes sessions for a sex therapist who intends to write a book. That work grants her thrilling access to other people’s secrets. She soon learns of a tall, blunt woman from Switzerland whom she dubs Big Swiss and finds transfixing. Big Swiss, a gynecologist, has been married for six years and has never experienced an orgasm.

Greta has just run away from a tragic life out West. When she bumps into Big Swiss in town, Greta runs toward the object of her fascination, who hasn’t a clue that Greta’s privy to her private life.

This delightfully bizarre, darkly humorous novel isn’t for everyone. Greta lives in an old Dutch farmhouse, which she shares with her friend Sabine and the hive of bees that has taken up residence in the kitchen. Yet the story’s oddity is as beguiling as the voyeuristic itch it scratches.

Spellbinding nonfiction

Novelist Herman Melville was influenced by the shipwreck of the Wager. So too was naturalist Charles Darwin and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The harrowing, hardly believable story of the 18th-century British vessel wormed into their brains and their work, and that of many others.

In 1740, a naval warship carrying 250 men left England on a secretive mission to steal Spanish treasure. The ship was widely believed to have been destroyed during a hurricane. Then, 283 days after the ship was last seen, 30 battered, undernourished men in a patched-together boat washed up in Brazil. Six months later, a smaller boat would emerge in Chile, with far fewer men, who claimed that the first batch of survivors were guilty of horrendous crimes. In England, there was a trial with clashing accounts; allegations of mutiny, murder, abandonment and cannibalism surfaced. David Grann, an author and staff writer at the New Yorker, dedicated more than five years to unearthing the truth, poring over records, logbooks, journals and even an eyewitness account from the poet Lord Byron’s grandfather. What Grann found makes “The Wager” a twisty, terrifying, stranger-than-fiction and gripping book.