What makes for a good Summer beach read? For parents, it could be a book that is easy enough to follow while simultaneously keeping your kiddies fed, entertained, and above water. For thrill seekers, it could be a book so twisty and compelling that you can't leave your beach chair until it's finished. For romantics, it could be a book that allows you to be swept away as easily as your flip-flops if you sit too close to the ocean.
Whether your vacation pairs best with a funny romp, an addicting mystery, or an unforgettable saga, there's one thing all of these 100+ beach reads have in common: they all work best with a Summer cocktail in your hand and your toes in the sand.
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Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's hilarious debut, The Nest, tells the story of the four Plumb siblings as they come together to confront their eldest brother's destructive habits, as well as to figure out the fate of their joint trust fund, which they're all privately depending on to solve their financial woes.
Emma Straub's The Vacationers follows the extended Post family during their two-week stay in Mallorca, Spain, where they hope to leave the tension developing at home in Manhattan behind but only end up finding new ways to argue and expose one another.
In Tara Isabella Burton's haunting debut, Social Creature, a chance encounter between a socialite and a social climber spirals into an intense, obsessive, and eventually lethal friendship.
Katy Regan's Little Big Love is a sweet, smart tale about precocious 10-year-old Zac Hutchinson, who searches for clues about his absent father while his mother struggles to rebuild what was broken when Zac's father left.
Carola Lovering's debut novel, Tell Me Lies, tracks the toxic on-again, off-again relationship between Lucy Albright and Stephen DeMarco from college through postcollege life in New York City, demonstrating just how potent first love (especially a first love with the wrong person) can be.
The author of How to Survive a Summer, Nick White, returns with Sweet and Low, a collection set in the idyllic South, where the characters are not what they seem and the core qualities of Southern fiction are gradually and masterfully deconstructed.
Bestselling author Barbara Delinksy's latest novel, Before and Again, tells the story of Mackenzie Cooper, who is struggling to keep her life together after a fatal car crash that kills her daughter and tears apart her marriage. But when a friend is thrust into the national spotlight, Mackenzie must choose between her friendship and the risk of revealing her past.
Beginning on a July night in 1983, Gytha Lodge's She Lies in Wait tells the story of six teenage friends who discover that — after a night of partying — the youngest of the group has gone missing, and when her body turns up 30 years later in a hideout that only the group knew about, the five remaining friends are all considered suspects.
In Meghan Maclean Weir's The Book of Essie, a young woman who grew up in the spotlight of her family's reality television show, Six For Hicks, discovers that she is pregnant, and the show's producers must decide how to spin this scandal to preserve her family's ultraconservative image.
In Anita Hughes's California Summer, a Hollywood producer decides to leave LA — and her adulterous director husband — behind to finally realize her dream of opening a fish taco shop, hoping to get a fresh start and a second chance.
Based on the column of the same name that appeared in The Toast, Michelle Markowitz and Caroline Moss's Hey Ladies! follows a fictitious group of eight 20- and 30-something female friends through a year of email and text correspondence, following their dates, brunches, breakups, and the planning of what is sure to be a disastrous wedding.
In Judy Blundell's first adult novel, The High Season, Hamptons resident Ruthie Beamish finds herself losing both her house and her ex-husband to an ultrarich widow, but when the safety of her museum director job is also threatened, Ruthie decides to finally fight back.
Lady Be Good by Amber Brock tells the story of social-climbing Kitty Tessler, the only daughter of a self-made hotel and nightclub tycoon, who must decide between the man her father wants her to marry, the horrible but fabulously wealthy man from a powerful family, or Max, the man who shows her a world beyond her small, privileged corner of 1950s Manhattan.
In Fiona Valpy's The Beekeeper's Promise, she explores the parallel lives of two women living generations apart — heartbroken Abi Howes, who takes a Summer job at the Château Bellevue hoping for an escape, and Eliane Martin, who once tended beehives in the garden of the château in 1938 and became separated from her first love in the chaos of German occupation.
In Amy Willoughby-Burle's The Lemonade Year, food photographer Nina Griffin finds that the things she once relied on are slowly falling apart — her marriage, her job, her parents, and her family — and Nina must use her keen insight to figure out which things are worth salvaging.
Ann Mah's The Lost Vintage tells the story of Kate, a young woman who — while awaiting her last chance to pass the notoriously difficult Master of Wine examination — discovers documents that introduce her to a relative she never knew existed, a great–half-aunt who was a teenager during the Nazi occupation.
In Samantha Irby's first essay collection, Meaty, she explores everything from chin hair to bad sex to taco feasts to inflammatory bowel disease, all with her trademark wit and painfully relatable candor.
Final Girls author Riley Sager's latest thriller, The Last Time I Lied, tells the story of Emma Davis, a rising star on the New York art scene who returns to her childhood Summer camp to investigate the truth behind a tragedy that happened there 15 years prior.
The Optimist's Guide to Letting Go by Amy E. Reichert is about a recent widow who — in the aftermath of her mother's serious stroke — learns that the man she thought was her father may not actually be, compelling her to learn about a past that her status-obsessed mother never shared with her.
Janna King's debut novel, The Seasonaires, tells the story of six 20-something Summer brand ambassadors whose growing social media followings get them caught up in a world of corporate greed, substance abuse, and — eventually — murder.
Elaine Neil Orr's Southern coming-of-age novel, Swimming Between Worlds, takes place in 1960s Winston-Salem, NC, telling the story of a disgraced high school football star and his recently orphaned former classmate who befriend a young African-American man and suddenly find themselves at the center of the civil rights struggle.
In Catherine Steadman's Something in the Water, a documentary filmmaker and an investment banker on their honeymoon in Bora Bora discover something menacing while scuba-diving, and they must decide whether to reveal it or keep it secret.
In Alice Feeney's Sometimes I Lie, a woman wakes up in a hospital unable to move, speak, or open her eyes, and though she doesn't remember how she ended up there, she suspects her husband had something to do with it.
Lisa Jewell's Then She Was Gone tells the story of Laurel Mack — a mother trying to put her life back together after her 15-year-old daughter goes missing and her marriage crumbles — who meets a man whose daughter reminds her viscerally of her own missing child.
Roz Nay's Our Little Secret tells the story of Angela Petitjean, a woman who is taken into questioning after the wife of her high school sweetheart goes missing, even though she hasn't seen her old boyfriend in eight years.
K.A. Tucker's Keep Her Safe tells the story of Noah and Gracie, the son of a decorated police chief and the daughter of a corrupt cop, who band together to uncover the dark truth about the Austin Police Department's past.
In her debut novel, Wench, Dolen Perkins-Valdez introduces Tawawa House — an Ohio retreat for the Southern white men who vacation there every Summer with their enslaved black mistresses in the years preceding the Civil War — where everything runs smoothly until a new woman arrives and begins talk of rebelling against their masters.
Lisa Jewell's The Girls in the Garden tells the story of Pip and Grace, two sisters displaced to their mother's home in an idyllic London community after their father suffers a psychiatric break. Though the community seems safe, Pip discovers Grace unconscious and gravely injured in the garden during a neighborhood party, causing the community members to question how well they really know one another.
In Dorothea Benton Frank's Southern comedy of manners, By Invitation Only, a privileged young woman from Chicago is engaged to marry the son of hardworking South Carolina peach farmers, and their families struggle to support their relationship while wondering how their own lives will now change.
In Kate White's The Secrets You Keep, a self-help author, Bryn Harper, is already troubled by recurring nightmares of her devastating car accident when she encounters a new issue: her husband, Guy, seems to be hiding something. When a woman hired to cater their dinner party is brutally murdered, Bryn must turn to her dreams to unlock the truth and reveal the murderer.
Diksha Basu's debut novel, The Windfall, tells the story of a middle-class East Delhi family, the Jhas, who come into a huge lump sum of money when Mr. Jha sells a website, and how this family learns to acclimate to their new riches — and their new social status.
In Laura Sims's dark and twisty debut, Looker, an unhappy and unstable woman finds herself becoming increasingly obsessed with her neighbor, a well-known actress, though what starts as an innocent preoccupation and a covetous desire soon spirals into a full-blown addiction after the two have a disastrous interaction at the neighborhood block party.
Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn follows two sisters in Jamaica. The older of the two hustles at an opulent resort in Montego Bay while hiding her secret preference for women, and the younger one is sent to school and survives on her older sister's profits.
Set in Ilesa, Nigeria, Ayobami Adebayo's Stay With Me follows a woman who, four years into her marriage and attempting to conceive, is still not pregnant. This only becomes a matter of concern when she learns that her husband has taken a younger second wife and that the only way to save her marriage is to have a baby.
Sarong Party Girls by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan tells the story of Jazeline "Jazzy" Lim, a 26-year-old working-class girl in Singapore who goes on a fervent quest to find a rich white husband before her 27th birthday.
In Kirstin Chen's Soy Sauce For Beginners, a 30-year-old San Franciscan woman with a collapsing marriage returns to her parents' home in Singapore, where she is thrown back into the crazy world of her father's artisanal soy sauce business. She must decide whether to return to her graduate studies and her marriage or to desert it all for the family business.
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez tells the story of a woman who, in the wake of her best friend's suicide, finds herself burdened — and eventually bonded — with the unwanted Great Dane he left behind.
In The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson, two siblings — the children of eccentric performing artists — are brought back to their family home years later when their parents go missing, hoping to figure out whether their parents are really gone.
In The Gunners, Rebecca Kauffman, author of Another Place You've Never Been, tells the story of a man suffering from macular degeneration who reconnects with his childhood friends after one of them commits suicide.
In Holly Goddard Jones's debut novel, The Next Time You See Me, Ronnie Eastman vanishes after leaving a late-night bar in a small Kentucky town, and the search for Ronnie connects her sister, Susanne, with a former baseball star turned detective, an awkward teen, and a local factory worker, their four narratives working together to solve the mystery of what happened to Ronnie.
Told in three distinct sections, Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry is about a young editor and her relationship with a famous older writer, an Iraqi-American man detained by immigration officers, and the thread that ties these two seemingly disparate stories together.
Still Lives by Maria Hummel is the story of avant-garde artist Kim Lord, whose new exhibition — comprised of self-portraits depicting herself as famous murdered women — is set to debut, but when opening night comes, Kim is nowhere to be found.
Annie Liontas's debut, Let Me Explain You, tells the story of a Greek immigrant and proud diner owner who — believing he only has 10 days to live — attempts to settle all of his grievances with his skeptical ex-wife and three adult daughters.
In Peng Shepherd's The Book of M, people start losing their shadows and society breaks into two factions: the shadowed and the shadowless. Married couple Max and Ory try to escape by holing up in a remote hotel in Virginia, but when Max loses her shadow, the pair must contend with the consequences.
Set in Paris during World War II, Whitney Scharer's debut, The Age of Light, reimagines the life of Vogue model turned professional photographer Lee Miller, who convinces the famous Surrealist artist Man Ray to take her under his wing, inciting a relationship that's both incredibly sexy and deeply complicated.
Written by The Light We Lost author Jill Santopolo, More Than Words follows the story of an heiress to a hotel chain who loses her father to cancer, prompting her to question whether she should settle for her longtime and totally devoted boyfriend or take a chance on an up-and-coming mayoral candidate who also happens to be her new boss.
The Hating Game author Sally Thorne is at it again with 99 Percent Mine. The story follows a woman who will stop at nothing to win the heart of a sexy house-flipper as he helps her restore her grandmother's old cottage, even though something major stands in her way: her twin brother, who is best friends with her crush and unwilling to relinquish him.
In rom-com novel legend Sophie Kinsella's I Owe You One, Fixie — a woman burdened with maintaining her late father's legacy and his housewares shop — has a chance encounter with Sebastian, an intriguing investment manager. Though she initially hopes Seb will help her lazy crush get a job, a series of IOUs challenges Fixie to question what (and, more importantly, who) she really wants in her life.
In Sonya Lalli's sexy and darkly funny debut novel, The Matchmaker's List, a traditional Indian grandmother attempts to help her almost-30-year-old modern granddaughter find a suitable bachelor. Though Raina initially gives in to family pressure, what results is a series of disastrous blind dates — as well as the unexpected reappearance of Raina's old flame, Dev.
Written by the same authors who brought us The Wife Between Us, Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, An Anonymous Girl tells the story of a woman who agrees to take part in an ethics psychological study as a test subject, and though she's hoping just to make some easy money, she instead finds herself no longer able to distinguish between what is real and what is part of the experiment.
Thea Lim's An Ocean of Minutes tells the story of Polly, who — when her boyfriend, Frank, catches the deadly flu pandemic sweeping America — decides to travel into the future as a bonded laborer to get Frank the life-saving treatment he needs. And though the pair plan to reunite 12 years later, what Polly doesn't expect is being rerouted an extra five years in the future.
In Heidi Perks's debut novel, Her One Mistake, a woman named Charlotte accidentally loses track of her best friend Harriet's only child at a school fair, and though Harriet vows in her grief never to speak to Charlotte again, the police investigation into the child's disappearance uncovers some dark secrets, forcing Harriet to accept that confiding in Charlotte may be the only way to see her daughter again.
In Every Note Played, Still Alice author Lisa Genova tells the story of a concert pianist suffering from ALS and the ex-wife who must become his reluctant caretaker.
Elisabeth Cohen's The Glitch is the story of Shelley Stone, a high-profile Silicon Valley CEO and mother of two who has everything . . . until a woman claiming to be a younger version of her appears, forcing Stone to question if she is buckling under pressure.
Kimmery Martin's debut, The Queen of Hearts, tells the story of best friends and medical doctors Zadie and Emily, whose friendship is put on the line when the unexpected reappearance of a man from their past forces both women to examine the difficult choices made at the beginning of their careers.
In Stefan Merrill Block's Oliver Loving, a new medical test promises to unlock the mind of a boy who has been trapped in a coma for 10 years, which could finally allow his family to figure out the truth of what happened 10 years earlier.
In Jonathan Miles's Anatomy of a Miracle, a paraplegic who finds himself suddenly able to stand is thrust into the limelight, and the secret behind the injury that put him in the wheelchair threatens to be revealed.
From the popular dating columnist for New York magazine, Mandy Stadtmiller, Unwifeable is a memoir about countless failed high-profile hookups and blackout nights in the New York comedy and writing scene.
Will Boast reimagines the myth of Daphne and Apollo in his debut novel, Daphne, in which a woman who suffers degrees of paralysis when faced with intense emotion meets a shy, charming man, and she must decide whether to continue her life in isolation or risk attempting real intimacy.
In her debut novel, Lies You Never Told Me, Jennifer Donaldson tells the parallel narratives of Gabe and Elyse, two high-schoolers who have never met but both make the mistake of falling — and falling hard — for the wrong person, and they must contend with the unexpected (and deadly) consequences.
In Elizabeth J. Church's All the Beautiful Girls, a woman who survived the childhood car accident that killed her family moves to Las Vegas with the hope of being a troupe dancer, but she instead lands work as a showgirl.
Caitlin Macy's Mrs. is the story of Philippa Lye, an elegant Upper East Sider with a shadowy past, whose precariously balanced life is challenged by a childhood acquaintance and an insightful newcomer.
Jen Beagin's debut, Pretend I'm Dead, is about a cleaning lady on a quest for self-acceptance after her relationship with a lovable junkie goes awry.
Based on true events, Joanna Goodman's The Home For Unwanted Girls is about a young unwed mother forcibly separated from her daughter at birth in 1950s Quebec and their journey to find each other years later.
Tara Westover's memoir, Educated, is about her unconventional upbringing by Mormon survivalists who homeschooled her and her six siblings.
Set in Cape Town, South Africa, Yewande Omotoso's The Woman Next Door is about a rivalry between next-door neighbors — both widowed, both successful, and both harboring resentment against each other that grows with age — until an unexpected episode allows the two women (one of whom is white, and the other black) to finally find some common ground.
Rachel Lyon's debut, Self-Portrait With Boy, is about an ambitious young female artist who accidentally captures a boy falling to his death in the background of her self-portrait — an image that could jump-start her career but would irrevocably damage her relationship with a new friend, who happens to be the fallen boy's mother.
Anna Todd's The Spring Girls is a modern retelling of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, in which the Spring sisters — Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy — live on a New Orleans military base and struggle to escape from their humble station in life.
From Frances Mayes, author of Under the Tuscan Sun, Women in Sunlight is about an American writer living in Tuscany, Kit Raine, whose work is waylaid by the arrival of three women new to Italian culture and in need of Kit's friendship and guidance.
From Rebecca Makkai, author of The Hundred-Year House, comes The Great Believers, a novel weaving together the stories of a Chicago art gallery director who loses his friend (and soon everything he knows) to the 1980s AIDS epidemic, and his friend's sister, who grapples with her own loss 30 years later in Paris.
Eileen author Ottessa Moshfegh's latest novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, tells the story of a recent Columbia grad with everything at her disposal who questions what would happen if she were to simply stop trying. Her extended hibernation from the world shows just how imperative self-imposed alienation can be.
In the legendary Anne Tyler's 21st novel, Clock Dance, a woman yearning to be a grandmother impulsively flies across the country to Baltimore after receiving a mysterious phone call, and it is there that she discovers the community she wanted but was never expecting to find.
An American Marriage by Silver Sparrow author Tayari Jones follows two newlyweds, Roy and Celestial, in the New South. Their picture-perfect lives are disrupted when Roy is arrested and sentenced to prison for a crime that Celestial knows he did not commit, compelling her to turn to a childhood friend — who was also her husband's best man — for comfort.
In Jade Chang's The Wangs vs. the World, a charismatic cosmetics mogul suddenly loses the empire he built due to a financial crisis. And so Charles Wang sets off with his family on a cross-country trip from their repossessed Bel Air estate to upstate New York, where the eldest Wang daughter lives.
In Dead Letters, Caite Dolan-Leach tells the story of Ava, who is forced to fly home from her new life in Paris to her parents' failing vineyard in upstate New York when she learns of the death of her twin sister, Zelda. However, given Zelda's penchant for tricks, Ava can't help but suspect Zelda is still alive — especially once she starts to receive a cryptic trail of clues.
Paul Tremblay's latest novel, The Cabin at the End of the World, is a terrifying tale about a family vacation in a remote cabin in New Hampshire and the mysterious strangers who crash their trip with an unexpected request.
In Nico Walker's debut novel, Cherry, a freshman college romance quickly blooms into a long-distance marriage when the protagonist flunks out and joins the Army. When he returns, the marriage is even further tested by PTSD, the Midwest opioid crisis, and, eventually, bank robberies.
The Broken Girls by Simone St. James tells the story of journalist Fiona Sheridan, who is haunted by the death of her older sister 20 years earlier. Though her sister's old boyfriend was tried and convicted of murder when her body was found near the ruins of Idlewild Hall, Fiona still feels that something in the case isn't right, and she decides to investigate the mysterious Idlewild Hall.
In his latest novel, Southermost, the legendary Silas House explores the aftermath of a destructive flood in a small Tennessee town and an evangelical priest who opens his home to two gay men, forcing him to question his past, his prejudices, and everything he once held true.
In AJ Pearce's debut, Dear Mrs. Bird, an adventurous young woman living in World War II London takes a job as a typist for a renowned advice columnist, and though she is told to disregard any letters involving unpleasantness, her inability to resist responding leads to her own secret advice service.
Crystal Hana Kim's debut novel, If You Leave Me, is the saga of Haemi and Kyunghwan, childhood friends turned forbidden lovers, who are separated by civil war in Korea and brought together years later, when Haemi must choose between love and loyalty.
In her satirical story collection Days of Awe, A.M. Homes depicts an America in crisis through characters who aren't the people they wish they were, but who aren't sure how to become those people either.
In Gaël Faye's Small Country, 10-year-old Gabriel's comfortable life in Burundi is shattered by the beginning of the civil war and genocide in neighboring Rwanda, illustrating the loss of innocence as seen through a young child's eyes.
In Lucy Tan's debut, What We Were Promised, a family returns from chasing the American dream in suburban America to join an elite community in a radically transformed Shanghai, and it is only when the estranged son returns to the family that they must confront the choices they made to ascend to this life.
In Karma Brown's The Life Lucy Knew, when Lucy wakes after a traumatizing accident to discover that the man she believes herself to have recently married is actually someone she hasn't spoken to since their breakup four years earlier, she must question all of her memories, as well as contend with the fact that who she really is may not be who she wants to be.
Brit Bennett's debut novel, The Mothers, follows a 17-year-old beauty from a black community in Southern California who — while mourning her mother's recent suicide — finds herself an expectant mother herself when a former high school football star accidentally gets her pregnant.
Everything You Want Me to Be by Mindy Mejia tells the story of Hattie Hoffman, an 18-year-old aspiring actress who is found brutally stabbed in an abandoned barn in her rural Minnesota community. When Sheriff Del Goodman starts to investigate the high school senior's final days, he discovers her dangerous online relationship, and he's forced to question whether Hattie was a victim or a master manipulator — or perhaps both.
In Anna Quinn's The Night Child, a high school English teacher is pushed toward a psychological breakdown when she is visited by a childlike apparition.
In Ling Ma's Severance, first-generation American Candace Chen tries to contend with the recent death of her Chinese immigrant parents by sticking to the routine of her dull Manhattan office job — until Shen Fever sweeps the city and Candace suddenly finds herself part of a group of survivors led by a megalomaniac IT tech.
Spanning five decades, Ann Patchett's Commonwealth tells the story of two families that become intertwined by an affair and the famous author who turns their story into a bestselling novel, exploiting the childhood and the private tragedies of the Keating and Cousins children.
In J. Courtney Sullivan's Saints For All Occasions, a funeral brings together two estranged sisters — a cloistered nun and the matriarch of a large Irish family — for the first time since they journeyed from their small village in Ireland to Boston 50 years earlier.
From the author of The Widow, Fiona Barton's The Suspect tells the terrifying tale of two 18-year-old girls who go missing in Thailand and the journalist who is eager to get the inside scoop on the developing story — even though she's still haunted by her own missing son, whom she hasn't seen since he left to do some traveling of his own two years before.
We Were Liars by E. Lockhart tells the story of Cadence, the daughter of a wealthy and distinguished family, who suffers a serious head injury that erases her memories of one Summer, the events of which she only begins to remember two Summers later, when she returns to the family Summer home to find everything changed — and no one willing to talk about what happened.
Nina LaCour's We Are Okay revolves around a college freshman whose anticipated Winter break spent alone on campus is interrupted by the arrival of her old friend, who forces her to contend with the tragedy she's been trying to escape since the previous Summer.
In Half of a Yellow Sun author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, two lovers leave military-ruled Nigeria for the West, pursuing separate lives in America and London until they are reunited 15 years later with each other and with their homeland in a newly democratic Nigeria.
Matt Haig's How to Stop Time tells the story of Tom Hazard, a man approaching his 440th birthday — though he looks no older than 41 — and the captivating French teacher he falls for, despite the number one rule for people with anageria, the rare condition Tom suffers from: never fall in love.
Lexi Freiman's wildly funny and satirical debut, Inappropriation, tells the story of 15-year-old Ziggy Klein, who begins school at a prestigious Australian girls' academy and — finding herself ostracized and utterly out of her league — turns to feminist texts and the internet to try to understand her dark sexual fantasies and ever-changing sense of self.
Jane Delury's debut novel, The Balcony, is set in a small village near Paris and follows the story of several generations of inhabitants in a single estate, including a young American au pair, a Jewish couple hiding from the Gestapo, and a housewife who begins an affair while renovating her downstairs.
In her hilarious dark debut novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite introduces two Nigerian sisters: the beautiful Ayoola, who is possibly a sociopathic murderer, and her older sister, Korede, who must figure out a way to stop her sister from killing any more of her boyfriends.
In Maria Semple's hilarious Where'd You Go, Bernadette, 15-year-old Bee dives into her digital and written correspondence to try to find her eccentric mother, Bernadette, after she disappears without explanation.
In Jeannette Walls's memoir, The Glass Castle, she recounts her poverty-stricken childhood and the eccentricities of her family, who constantly migrate between places with periods of homelessness.
Martha Southgate's The Taste of Salt follows a senior-level marine biologist who, though she has tried to leave her childhood and her alcoholic father in Cleveland behind, finds herself pulled back into the past when her beloved brother succumbs to an addiction of his own.
