What makes a book one of the best beach reads of all time? Is it the brightly colors on the cover? A picture of a bathing-suit clad body, sitting in on the beach? Similar to “chick-lit,” the label implies an un-seriousness that belies the utter joy of the beach reads we’ve gathered below: an unconventional but supremely thoughtful—thanks to help from Zibby Owens of Zibby’s Bookshop in Santa Monica and Briana Parker, Co-Owner of Lofty Pigeon Books in Brooklyn—list of books that are genuinely, fantastically engrossing. After all, that is the true marker of a beach read, a book that can thoroughly transport you, even if you’re sitting already in an idyllic setting. As we look forward to the official start of summer, here are some books—new and old—that we think fit the bill.

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

OK, this one does have a classic summerscape on the cover, specifically, Cinque Terre, the five Italian villages, linked by hiking trails on the Ligurian Coast, which is the setting for Jess Walters, sunniest, most glamorous novel. (I’ve been a fair of his gritty, realist, Pacific-Coast-set fiction for decades, but this shimmering novel is in a different and delightful register.) The novel circles the filming of the filming of the 1963 film Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor, animating the (real life) romance that emerged from that film between Taylor and her co-star Richard Burton. Even if this kind of high Hollywood romance doesn’t seem like your cup of tea, this book has a magnetic, transporting appeal that completely consumed me when I first read it. Highly recommended for your summer reading, whatever coastal landscape you’re visiting. — Chloe Schama

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Probably Sally Rooney’s most hopeful novel, though still tinged with her trademark melancholy, Beautiful World Where Are You follows two separate love stories but the heart of it is the friendship and philosophical missives exchanged between the two protagonists. Or as my friend described it, “Ireland, existentialism, and hotness!” What more could you ask for? (Also of note: It is probably the beachiest of Rooney’s books, even if the sandscapes are of the slightly chilly Irish variety.) —Briana Parker, Co-Owner, Lofty Pigeon Books

Bonjour Tristesse by François Sagan

When it was published 70 years ago, François Sagan’s novel was both celebrated and deemed immoral. Bonjour Tristesse tells the story of Cécile, a teenage girl summering in the south of France with her libertine father. While her dad is caught in something of a love triangle between his younger girlfriend and the friend of a deceased wife, Cécile is pursuing her own love interests with an older law student. Suffused in the “haze of high summer,” as the Guardian put it in a 60th-anniversary appreciation, the story indulges the senses while enveloping you in delectably complex romantic dynamics. (Sagan, who plucked her pseudonym from Proust, wrote the book when she was a teen herself.) A slim book, you could arguably read the entire thing in a single, sun-soaked day. For years, I carried around a journal with a quote inscribed: “I lay full length on the sand, took up a handful and let it run through my fingers in soft yellow streams. I told myself that it ran out like time. It was an idle thought, and it was pleasant to have idle thoughts, for it was summer.” A beach read if ever there was one. — CS

Bad Summer People by Emma Rosenblum

Emma Rosenblum’s Bad Summer People is set on New York’s Upper East Side and Fire Island—and very much filled with the milieu you’d expect: dads who speak in financial terms even when they’re discussing their wives’ performance on the slopes of Aspen, moms whose ability to express genuine emotion is limited by how much time has passed since they last had their Botox touchup. It’s a novel of family and romantic foibles, with a murder mystery thrown in to boot—juicy in more ways than one. And if you like this one, Rosenblum has another installment (Very Bad Company) in the “bad people” canon out this year. —CS

Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

Mrs. Caliban is a wacky, weird, water-dwelling monster story first published in 1982 and republished in 2017 by the wonderful Faber Editions—just in time for my beach holiday in Croatia, where I devoured this compact little novella in one languorous sitting like a rapidly dehydrating amphibian myself. Dorothy, a suburban California housewife, begins an affair with Larry, a frog-like man—a green-tinged, muscular, very dangerous, and quite the magnetic creature. Is he a figment of her imagination or the electrifying respite she needs from her grief, loss, and hopeless marriage? Sly, subversive, stylish erotica-maybe-fantasy. — Anna Cafolla

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson has gained fame in recent years for her sometimes experimental historical fiction, but I first fell in love with this author when I read my first Jackson Brodie novel. I’m a sucker for a mystery story that is really more of a social-realist drama, and this series about a Edinburgh-based detective checks the boxes, providing a loving depiction of Scottish society while laso dispatching the detective to explain some of the iniquities at its core. In a review of her more recent work, a New Yorker piece described this series (there, are—joyfully—sever Brodie novels) as “ strictly rooted in pleasure,” and I agree. —CS

Close to Home by Michael Magee

Sean is home—back to West Belfast. Where the embers of the Troubles are said to be stilled, yet lives of family and mates stagnate in poverty, addiction, and trauma. He had done everything right: He worked hard and got into college in England. But there’s no jobs for English graduates—no jobs at all—and his split-second decision to punch another guy at a party propels life elsewhere. While dealing with such heaviness—and via casual violence, keys of coke, days-long comedowns, and happy hardcore tunes—Magee’s debut is gripping, immersive, and bold, deft in how he captures the oppressive social conditions that bind his characters, their dark humor, and fierce, complex love for each other. I didn’t want to leave Sean, Mairéad, or the others in Twinbrook. — AC

The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride

James McBride’s story is the ultimate gift to mothers. In his masterful prose, he shares the story of his mother’s life and how he grew up in poverty, one of twelve children raised in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood. Though she fled persecution and the pogroms Poland in 1921, settling in Virginia before making her way to New York, where she married a Black minister, Ruth McBride Jordan refused to admit she was white—claiming instead to be “light-skinned.” McBride layers his own experiences upon those of his mother in this beautiful, heartfelt story about love, identity, and home. —Zibby Owens

Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley

This just-released novel is a pitch perfect love-story-that’s-not-a-romance. It covers a decade of Aussie Coralie’s life in the UK, from meeting her eventual partner through all the ups and downs of their lives, loves, and family, all set against the backdrop of the tumultuous period of British politics from Brexit through the pandemic. It has a cast of fully realized, imperfect but relatable characters and infuses its unflinching look at the burdens of womanhood with warmth, compassion, and humor (get ready to laugh out loud!). —BP

Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee

Casey Han is a young Korean American woman navigating filial, romantic, and professional responsibilities as she tries to find her place between her immigrant family in Queens and the rarified Manhattan society she lands in after graduating from Princeton in Free Food for Millionaires. Min Jin Lee (also the author of Pachinko) called her first book an “emotionally accurate autobiographical novel,” and the effortless prose and immediacy of the story belies the decade Lee spent working on it. Despite the differing subject matter, similar to her later Pachinko you’ll find yourself unable and unwilling to leave the compelling characters or the story behind even 500+ pages in. —BP

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux

In Getting Lost, we find French Nobel prize winner Annie Ernaux in the passion-fraught, soul-aborbing affair she’s having with a Russian diplomat. Keeping a diary across a year and a half of her trysts with this younger married man, Ernaux writes intoxicatingly: Of teenage-like kisses and scorching sex multiple times an hour, bare skin as worship and resurrection. And then, of those long, torrid times where she is alone, gored by her own desires. While Ernaux fictionalized the same affair in her other book, Simple Passion, Getting Lost brings us closer to her oblivion. And, fantastic lines like such: “I realized that I’d lost a contact lens. I found it on his penis.” —AC

Ghosts by Dolly Alderton

The action in Ghosts, an astonishingly assured debut from the journalist Dolly Alderton, takes place after Nina George Dean turns 32. She’s a food writer with a London flat that she adores (not least because she owns it), a second book mere moments from going to press, two well-meaning parents in the suburbs, and a wide circle of close friends, including an ex with whom she’s stayed unproblematically close. When Nina meets the doting and superhero-handsome Max through a dating app—the culture surrounding which Alderton renders in all its mortifying (and hilarious) inanity—she can’t believe her luck. But her house of cards soon starts to cave in. True to its title, Ghosts teems with them—the shades of past loves and old selves, especially—besides interrogating the Internet-era phenomenon of being “ghosted,” and resorting to stalking a man’s LinkedIn profile for signs of life. Deftly observed and deeply funny, Ghosts considers where we find, and how we hold onto love with what might well be described as haunting precision. —Marley Marius

I Want You More by Swan Huntley

Think War of the Roses meets Single White Female-LGBTQ+ edition. This East Hampton-based novel shows what happens when a ghostwriter is asked to spend the summer living with a celebrity chef who wants to write a memoir, and what happens when their identities merge. Dark, bitterly funny, and a peek inside not only the lives of the rich and famous but the role of the ghostwriter, I Want You More (which will be published May 21) will be the book on everyone’s beach towels this summer. Just watch who rubs lotion onto your back. A juicy read. —Z.O.

Into the Woods by Tana French

You could do worse than making your way through the entire Dublin Murder Squad series, the set of novels about an Irish police force that established Tana French as the thinking person’s mystery writer, but maybe start here, with her debut. French writes a kind of psychological Irish noir, sidling up to darker episodes of history writ large and small, all while keeping the plot churning in the present. As Hillary Kelly put it in an essay in The Atlantic, French’s protagonists aren’t just “detectives; they’re close readers of the human psyche.” —CS

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

This is a novel of escape gone wrong, so it scratches two summery itches. The book, which became a Netflix series starring Julia Roberts (among others), is the story of an upper-middle-class New York City family that rents a house on Long Island, only to have the owners show up, claiming they need refuge. Something is going very wrong in the “real world” that the vacationers have left behind, and the gradual unfolding of that nightmare is the eerie backdrop for this delightfully skittish novel of suspense. —CS

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

The hapless failed novelist Arthur Less decides to travel the world on various invitations to literary events in order to avoid the wedding of his former lover. His hilarious misadventures are a worthy companion for any vacationer, but the poignancy and insight of his reflections on life and love and send-up of the tragic queer archetype make this one stick with you. —BP

Little Bee: A Novel by Chris Cleave

This novel came out 15 years ago, but I can still feel the sand in my feet as I sat reading it. In Little Bee, we follow the life of a Nigerian 16-year-old orphan who has just been released from a UK refugee center. She has nowhere to go in the UK except to visit a British couple she once met at the beach. When she arrives, the husband’s funeral is taking place. Little Bee and the widow Sarah form an unlikely alliance as both of them come-of-age at different parts of their life, until the threat of a rift arises. You won’t be able to tear yourself away. —ZO

Lovers and Writers by Lily King

Lovers and Writers is the story of a 31-year-old woman determined to be an artist at a time of life when most of her friends and peers are settling into more practical pursuits. The protagonist is poised at that pivot point between youthful idealism and a more mature practicality, and the two men she falls in love with—an older man with children of his own and a more mercurial artist type—mirror the dimensions of her dilemma: to what extent do you sacrifice for art and love? King has a lovely, light touch, and this novel is an effervescent read, a page-turner with real heart. —CS

Marjorie Morningstar: A Novel by Herman Wouk

Written in 1955, Marjorie Morningstar, is the story of a 17-year-old Jewish girl who leaves the posh setting of her Upper West Side life and tries to become an actress. Despite some blaring warning signs, she falls headlong in love with a powerful man. (One warning sign, he tells the titular character: “I eat little girls like you.”) In its depiction of her search for identity in a world not set up for her success, Marjorie Morningstar has become a (somewhat controversial) feminist classic. Less controversial: It is extremely readable. —ZO

Open: A Memoir by Andre Agassi

Propulsive. Evocative. Sensory. Andre Agassi’s memoir, ghostwritten by J.R. Moehringer, is one of my favorite memoirs ever. (Yes, I was a tennis fan in the 1980s and remember when Andre burst onto the scene with acid-washed jeans and his crazy hair.) But the memoir is something else: a reckoning with an unwanted gift, the pressures of perfection, the grind of the professional tennis world, the power of mentors, the ability of the body to withstand more and growing up. (For those of you who have read my essay for Vogue, you’ll see why this book might hold some personal significance.) —ZO

The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer

Penelope Mortimer wrote her semi-autobiographical novel The Pumpkin Eater in a flash spring of 1961, and it was made into a film in 1964. Her Mrs. Armitage, a married woman four times over, with her rich, insufferable, and unfaithful partner, and her legion of children, is one of the most compelling characters I’ve ever read. We meet her amid a breakdown in the linen department of Harrod’s, crushed to collapse under the weight of the facts that another child and another marriage might not be the salve for her domestic and emotional sordidness. She is unhinged, a drain, and screaming funny. I have read it several times over in quick gulps, and get that same jolt of energy from Mortimer’s unbridled, perilous prose that captured the stifling social conditions of women before The Feminine Mystique gave it a name.—AC

Seating Arrangements: A Novel by Maggie Shipstead

When I read Seating Arrangements in the summer of 2012, I was absolutely hooked. Who was this author? I wondered. Shipstead went on to write the acclaimed novel The Great Circle, but this is my favorite Shipstead novel. A family wedding draws home a cast of characters to the New England island of Waskeke where the patriarch, Winn Van Meter, and his wife Biddy, host their daughter Daphne’s wedding. I can still hear the screen door slamming and the boards creaking in their kitchen. Daphne, her sister, her bridesmaid, the groom, the best man; everyone is up to something unexpected in this weekend-long escape. The perfect houseguest gift. —ZO

Slow Horses by Mick Heron

I dubiously bought this a few years back, when I asked a British bookseller to tell me about a book that he loved that was unknown to Americans. I am not the conventional mystery type, but, like Atkinson and French’s, this delightful book is a thriller packed with nuanced characters. Nominally the story of a band of misfit, burnt-out, washed up, or otherwise problematic former MI-5 employees who have been banished to “Slough House”—a kind of holding pen for officers and agents who are no longer useful to the security service, but who cannot, for various reasons, be released into civilian society. The hero is an officer who suspects he has been sidelined for nefarious reasons, and sees in an unfolding disaster an opportunity to redeem himself. This story became the basis for an excellent Apple TV+ series, but read the book first. You won’t regret it! —CS

Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table by Ruth Reichl

You might know Ruth Reichl as the former editor of Gourmet magazine or perhaps as the current New York Times best-selling author of The Paris Novel. But I fell in love with Reichl when I read her debut memoir back in 2010. Reichl takes us back to her childhood and invites us to the table at her Berkeley commune where she started her own restaurant and wrote her first cookbook. Her voice is witty, delicious, soulful, and unique. The perfect read for anyone who loves to eat and loves to hear stories. Isn’t that all of us?! —ZO

This is Where I Leave You: A Novel by Jonathan Tropper

I read this years ago for a UJA-sponsored book club event at which the author would be speaking. I couldn’t put it down. After Judd Foxman’s dad passes away, the whole family converges for the first time in a while to sit shiva, a Jewish custom in which families mourn the loss of a loved one by welcoming visitors in for seven days. Judd’s wife has just cheated on him so he’s mourning both relationships at once. A story about family dysfunction, love, betrayal, and ultimately humor, this is one of the funniest novels about loss. —ZO

You Are Here by David Nicholls

Two somewhat unremarkable (but fully realized) middle-aged people take a long hike across the somewhat unremarkable (but beautifully described) English countryside, and somehow it’s impossible to put it down. Maybe it’s the dry-witted and frequently hilarious prose (I still think about the image one of the protagonists conjures when describing his ex-wife moving out during the pandemic as “seizing her opportunity between lockdowns as if rolling under a descending metal shutter”), the honesty of its characters, the romantic and narrative tension that slowly builds, or the quiet reflections on life that are all the more effective for their simplicity. —Briana Parker, Co-Owner, Lofty Pigeon Books

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

I was so into Z when it came out in 2013 that I would prop Fowler’s novel up against my breast pump. When Zelda falls for F. Scott Fitzgerald, she’s only 17 years old and the darling of a country club dance in Alabama. “Scott” isn’t exactly what her father deems an appropriate match. But he’s convinced he’ll be a successful writer soon. (If only every author were that confident.) When Scott’s first novel sells, Zelda marries him, and the two are thrust into the spotlight like the Taylor and Travis of their time. As the couple jets between the south of France and the Hamptons, Paris, and LA, this novel explores what Zelda was really going through behind the scenes—and it wasn’t always this side of paradise. —ZO