The Best Beach Reads to Keep You Flipping Pages All Summer

For fans of Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (one of our favorite books of 2023), this dramatic romance thrums amid the high-stakes world of biotech startups. Harvard students Jack and Zoe are drawn to each other’s brilliance, and together they invent an anti-aging drug that might promise immortality. But as recklessness pushes their success and their relationship to dizzying new heights, a shocking betrayal proves that they have even farther to fall.

This claustrophobic and darkly beautiful thriller is a Gothic, dystopian inversion of The Secret Garden. Elderly sisters Evelyn and Lily have always lived within their tightly walled garden, barely eking out a living through apocalyptic dust storms. When a boy gets through their crumbling walls, the first male they have seen in years, Evelyn watches with rising horror as her relationship with her sister and everything she knows begins to unravel.

The author of Daisy Jones & The Six and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo returns with a dramatic queer romance set in the 80s. NASA has just begun accepting women, and Joan and Vanessa are determined to become astronauts. But between intense training, a deadly space accident, complicated families and an undeniable attraction to each other, will they make it to the stars and safely home again?

An “endling” is the last of its species — unique, much like this brilliantly bizarre novel. Nastia and Yeva work in Ukrainian romance tours, entertaining men for money. Yeva does it to support her conservation work rescuing rare snails, Nastia to rebel against her mother. Meanwhile, an author struggles with the devastating effects of the war in Ukraine. This might be the smartest thing you’ll read all summer (but don’t forget the tissues).

Love Island meets The Hunger Games in this book that’s as compelling as reality TV. On a desert compound, contestants can complete tasks to win fabulous prizes, but they must be romantically coupled or get sent home. As the tasks become more intimate and more violent, the prizes get better — and the betrayals get bigger. How far will beautiful but desperate people go to be the last one standing?

Welcome to the Namaste Club, a weeklong yoga retreat. In attendance are best friends Indira and Jess, both recently divorced and getting on each other’s nerves; Daniel, a hot yogi with more sex appeal than substance; Barbara, a trust fund hippie who has taken a vow of silence; Carol Ann, a gun-toting, book-banning right-winger; and Bubba, the property’s giant bull alligator. What could go wrong? In this juicy satire, just about everything — from gossip-fueled fights to murder.

This is a smart, sexy, Shakespearean portrait of a woman’s descent into madness. It’s the 1950s, and actress Margaret feels destined to play Lady Macbeth. But when she does, it leads her into psychosis — she can’t stop seeing the bloody character in the mirror. She agrees to a platonic “lavender marriage” to protect her gay best friend and her sanity, but when they stage a play and both get involved with the same man and his drugs, Lady Macbeth returns, and Margaret's life rapidly goes off the rails.

Bex was Lizzie’s best friend until Bex ghosted her, resurfacing years later as a “trad wife” influencer on Instagram with six kids and a perfect farm. But social media is not reality, and Bex’s life is more complicated than making sourdough bread and hawking supplements. After Bex’s husband is brutally murdered, Lizzie must dodge jealous influencers and their schemes in the race to find answers or else lose her friend again — this time forever.

This darkly funny feminist book asks big questions about cancel culture, art and revenge. Theater critic Alex Lyons gives Hayley’s one woman show a devastating one-star review, then sleeps with her before it is published in the next morning’s newspaper. Betrayed and humiliated, Hayley puts on a new show to expose Alex’s misdeeds, igniting a cultural reckoning that may burn out of control.

This love-triangle tale makes for a breezy beach read. Joe is an uninspired Cambridge student until he meets Esi, a tourist from a future in which Joe is a poet as famous as Lord Byron. But while Esi tries to help him meet his beloved muse and fulfill his literary destiny, their feelings for each other might just knock their fates off course.