The Unhinged Beach Reads List Nobody Asked For (But Everyone Needs)
For every mood, every type of reader, and whoever brought Lonesome Dove to the function
Every summer, the same list goes around. Pastel covers, beach chairs, a romance or two, something breezy you can read with half your attention while someone asks whether you want another drink. I love those books. I read those books every single summer.
But they don’t tell the full story of what ends up in my beach bag.
Here is my actual definition of a beach read: a book I cannot put down. That is the entire test. A beach read is any book so good that I will sit in direct sun past the point of sunburn rather than go inside and lose my place.
After all, it was reading a 900-page English history book on a beach in the Brazilian northeast that pulled me out of a 2-year reading slump.
This list reflects all of that. It holds the books I have genuinely packed for a beach vacation or want to throw into my pool bag this summer. I’ve also included your recommendations!
Summer reading should be fun and enjoyable. Here are the books I hope check those boxes for you.
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My Top Picks
Twenty books I have read and am personally vouching for. These are all books I’ve brought to a beach/pool/river/park and loved.
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In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
A Kansas farmhouse, four members of one family shot dead in a single night, two drifters, and almost no motive anyone could name. Capote spent six years reporting it, got disturbingly close to the killers, and more or less invented true crime in the process.
It is built like a novel and reads like one, except the dread never lifts because you know it actually happened. I read this the summer I was 17 and have loved true crime ever since.
Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Four famous siblings throw their massive annual party in Malibu in 1983. Over one day and one increasingly out-of-control night, every secret they have been carrying catches fire, some of it literally.
Sun, surf, fame, family, and the exact ache TJR does better than anyone alive. If you somehow have not read this yet, this is your summer.
Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The most decorated champion in tennis history, retired and thirty-seven, watches a vicious younger rival close in on her record and decides to come out of retirement to defend it. Her father, the only coach she has ever fully trusted, comes back with her.
Read it right after Malibu Rising, where Carrie turns up at the party. I love tennis-themed books, and this is one of my favorites by TJR.
Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll
A sorority house, a charming young man who turns out to be a killer, and the chapter president who got one clear look at his face on the worst night of her life. It is loosely built on Ted Bundy’s final murders, told entirely from the side we almost never hear.
Knoll is furious about the way we turn men like this into folk legends, and she writes the women back into the center of their own story. If you have ever rolled your eyes at the glorification of serial killers, this is the antidote.
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
Krakauer reached the summit of Everest in May 1996 and descended straight into the deadliest storm the mountain had ever seen. His firsthand account of who lived, who did not, and why is the most white-knuckle book I own. The chapter where the weather turns is one of the most genuinely tense things I have ever read.
You will look up hours later, sunburned and dehydrated, having completely forgotten where you were. My husband read this in one sitting on a beach in Mexico, so I’m counting this!
The Wedding People by Alison Espach
A woman checks into a grand old Rhode Island hotel completely alone, at the lowest and most desperate point of her life, only to discover the entire place has been booked out for a lavish wedding she has nothing to do with.
It is much funnier and much sadder than that setup suggests, often on the very same page. This book is far funnier and deeper than I expected. One of my favorite reads in recent times.
Lyrebird by Cecelia Ahern
A documentary crew filming deep in the remote Irish mountains stumbles on a woman living completely alone, and slowly realizes she can perfectly mimic any sound she has ever heard. They bring her back to the city to make her a star, which goes about as well as you would expect.
Nobody talks about this book, but they should be. It is gentle and strange and quietly romantic. Underneath, it is asking what we do to rare, unspoiled people the second we get our hands on them. You might cry a little on the beach.
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
August 1975: a girl vanishes from her bunk at her family’s exclusive Adirondack summer camp, the same camp her older brother disappeared from years before. A literary mystery thick with pine, old money, and the resentments of the people paid to serve it. I kept deciding I had it figured out, and I did not.
This is the kind of book that makes you quietly cancel your evening plans and read long into the night.
The Guest List by Lucy Foley
A glossy destination wedding on a tiny, windswept island off the coast of Ireland. A guest list quietly stuffed with old grudges. A storm that cuts the island off from the mainland, and a body before the night is over.
The Guest List is narrated by a rotating cast who each have something to hide, so the suspicion keeps sliding around the room. It’s like watching a gossipy murder mystery unfold. Delicious.
The Once and Future Queen by Paula Lafferty
A modern woman slips back into Arthur’s Britain and slowly realizes she is meant to live out the legend of Guinevere. Sword fights, court politics, and a love triangle ensue.
This is Outlander crossed with The Princess Bride, and it has no right to be this fun or this moving. Lafferty does something genuinely fresh with a legend everyone assumes they already know.
It’s in the running for my Book of the Year.
The Parisian Heist by Jo Piazza
Two women a century apart: the real-life widow who fought to make Van Gogh famous after his death and a broke American art student scrubbing floors in 1990s Paris. Both of them circle the same painting.
This book is the best kind of armchair travel, wrapped around an art-world caper and two women who refuse to be erased from the story. Read it on a lounge chair and let it take you somewhere far away.
Note: This one comes out on July 14th, so already tag it in Libby to make sure you can put it on hold as soon as it’s available! I read an early copy, and it’s a good one!
The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston
A grieving young woman inherits her beloved aunt’s Manhattan apartment, which comes with one small catch: every so often, it slips seven years into the past, where a charming stranger is currently living his life.
It sounds like a gimmick, yet it completely earns itself. This book is a darling on BookTok, but it lived up to the hype for me!
Be Ready When the Luck Happens by Ina Garten
Before the Barefoot Contessa empire, Ina Garten was a nuclear-policy analyst in Washington who impulsively bought a tiny specialty-food shop in the Hamptons with no experience whatsoever. This is the whole story of how she built a life precisely to her own specifications.
It is cozy and candid and secretly a quiet pep talk about betting on yourself when it makes no sense on paper. It will also give you unbearable cravings for coconut cake.
You might not think that a memoir belongs in your beach bag, but this one does. Bonus: it was one of my top 5 books of 2025 :)
Künstlers in Paradise by Cathleen Schine
A floundering young man gets stranded by lockdown in his grandmother’s Venice Beach bungalow and falls into her stories of escaping 1939 Vienna for the strange paradise of Los Angeles.
Schine is so funny, it takes a beat to notice she is breaking your heart. I read this years ago, and the story still stays with me.
The Devil at His Elbow by Valerie Bauerlein
A South Carolina dynasty, a boat crash, two murders, brazen financial fraud, and lots of drugs. Bauerlein covered the case for the Wall Street Journal and writes it like Southern Gothic.
The actual crime being documented in this true crime book keeps shifting, as the family can’t stop getting themselves into hot water. It’s no surprise Netflix turned this into a miniseries.
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
A summer in a Michigan cherry orchard, three grown daughters, and the mother who finally tells them about the famous actor she loved one summer long before they existed. Get the audiobook if you can: Meryl Streep narrates, and it is a treat.
Bonus: Patchett’s new novel Whistler is out this month, too!
The Lady of the Loch by Elena Collins
Two sisters take a caretaking job at a remote, half-abandoned castle in the Scottish Highlands and start to feel a deep, specific grief leaking out of the old tower. Centuries earlier, in 1307, a kitchen maid lived a story there that was never allowed to end the way it should have.
It is a timeslip novel with real ghosts, romance, Highland mist, and an ending that genuinely got me. If you loved the eerier, more haunted corners of Outlander, this one is built for you.
The Shampoo Effect by Jenny Jackson
A WASPy little New England beach town, a tight circle of old-money friends who have summered together for decades, and the newcomer whose arrival quietly cracks open every fault line they have spent years papering over. Old grudges, newer money, and nobody behaving especially well. Nonetheless, the book offers a surprisingly poignant look at friendship and what it means to grow up.
This is exactly the kind of smart, gossipy book a pool chair was invented for.
The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown
A shy, kind New York bookseller is handed a mysterious book by a dying regular and discovers it can turn any door into a door to anywhere on earth. There are other magic books out there, and the people who collect them will do genuinely terrible things to add this one to the pile.
It is high-concept and pure, galloping momentum. This is the kind of book that makes a long travel day simply vanish. Bring it on the plane and watch the hours melt away.
Sarum by Edward Rutherfurd
Ten thousand years of English history, all of it rooted in one patch of ground around Stonehenge and carried by five families whose bloodlines braid in and out across the centuries.
I know. It is 800+ pages, and it sounds like assigned reading. Here is the thing: I was two years into a brutal reading slump, took this doorstopper to the beach so I’d have something to last the week, and it broke the spell completely.
If you have ever loved a sweeping family saga, start here and clear your schedule.
What’s on My Holds List
Here are the books I’m planning to read this summer, as soon as my hold comes in. One won’t be released until late this summer, but I call that delayed gratification.
28 Summers by Elin Hilderbrand
Mallory and Jake meet on Nantucket over a Labor Day weekend in 1993, fall hard, then make a quietly devastating pact: they will spend that one weekend together every single year, no matter what their real, separate lives become. Their lives become a great deal, including a presidential campaign.
A secret love stretched thin across twenty-eight summers set on Nantucket? Exactly my kind of bait.
The Island Club by Nicola Harrison
Balboa Island, 1956. Three very different women whose polished, enviable lives are quietly falling apart find one another through the island’s exclusive club and its tennis courts, and hold on for dear life.
Tennis for me has similarly been a lifeline, so this book called to me. I just hope my hold comes in before summer is over, or I might have to buy this one.
People Watching in the Desert by Cali Adeline
A young woman who has spent her entire life observing other people from the safe edges of the room comes into an unexpected windfall and checks into a luxury desert resort, where, almost against her will, she finally gets pulled into the middle of other people’s lives.
My own life changed directions thanks to a trip to a desert hotel, so this definitely piqued my interest.
The Unknown by Riley Sager
In 1926, five women vanished overnight from an island commune of spiritualists on a remote Vermont lake. A hundred years later, a struggling actress arrives on that same island to film a movie about the disappearances, and they begin again.
Note: This doesn’t come out until August 4, which is exactly why I am telling you now: tag this book with “Notify Me” right now in Libby. Sager does creepy-séance-on-an-island better than anyone, and I want to be first in line.
Beach Read by Emily Henry
A romance writer who has lost all faith in happy endings and the brooding literary-fiction golden boy in the beach house next door spend a summer daring each other to write in the other’s genre. She has to attempt Serious Literature, and he has to try for joy. I’m guessing they fall for each other ♥️
This is more or less the book that kicked off the entire modern beach-read wave, and somehow, I have never read it. I am closing it this summer, ideally with a margarita in hand.
The Au Pair by Teddy Wayne
A washed-up literary novelist in Brooklyn, his marriage to a high-powered wife crumbling, becomes infatuated with the beautiful young Norwegian au pair who happens to revere his forgotten books. What starts as a private obsession spirals into a national scandal and a tabloid trial.
Who says a sleek thriller can’t be a beach read?
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Two aging former Texas Rangers leave their dusty border town to drive a cattle herd across a frontier that is staggeringly beautiful and trying to kill them at every turn. It is widely, seriously called the great American novel.
It is 945 pages, and I am taking it to the beach anyway, because this is finally the summer I sit down to read this. I have been circling it for years, but it’s been recommended to me too many times to put off another season.
Member of the Family by Dianne Lake
Dianne Lake was handed over to the Manson Family by her own parents at fourteen, lived inside it through the murders, and eventually became a key witness against Charles Manson himself. This is the cult from the deep inside, told by its youngest member.
True crime memoirs almost never come from this far inside the story, and I have wanted to read this one for ages. Exactly the kind of dark, what-happened-to-this-person book I cannot put down.
Starkweather by Harry N. MacLean
Nebraska, 1957. A teenage couple goes on a killing spree across the plains that terrifies the entire country and goes on to seed everything from Badlands to Springsteen’s Nebraska.
MacLean spent decades on the murders that taught America to fear the open road. If In Cold Blood is the gold standard for this kind of thing, this belongs on the shelf right beside it. Reading true crime during the summer just works for me.
What Subscribers Are Bringing to the Beach Club
I asked my subscribers for their beach read suggestions, and wow did they deliver! You all made this list meaningfully more unhinged than it already was, which I mean as a sincere compliment.
Finlay Donovan is Killing It by Elle Cosimano
A broke, single-mom suspense novelist is overheard at a Panera describing the plot of her next book. The woman at the next table over assumes she is a contract killer for hire. Rather than correct the misunderstanding, Finlay sort of takes the job. It only escalates from there.
Recommended by: Rich Kacy
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Ten strangers, each hiding a guilty secret, are lured to a cut-off island mansion and then murdered one by one. Each death eerily matches a line of an old nursery rhyme. It is the best-selling mystery novel ever written and will keep you turning pages long after sunset.
Recommended by: Jamie
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Jim Hawkins discovers a map leading to the buried fortune of the notorious Captain Flint. Jim joins a perilous sea voyage, only to uncover a mutinous plot led by the cunning cook, Long John Silver. Nothing is more summer than pirates.
Recommended by: Charles Moritz
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
On the glittering French Riviera in the 1920s, a charismatic American psychiatrist and his beautiful, fragile wife dazzle everyone around them while their marriage quietly rots from the inside. It is Fitzgerald’s most personal novel, and the one many say is his best.
Recommended by: Tarik O.
June Baby by Shannon Garvey
Sent to Block Island the summer she turned seventeen, in the raw aftermath of losing her mother, a young woman has one season that changes everything, then comes back years later to face all of it again. Salt air, grief, first love, and the places that make us who we are.
Recommended by: Anne DeGumbia
The Martha’s Vineyard Beach and Book Club by Martha Hall Kelly
A dual-timeline historical fiction novel about two sisters keeping their family farm afloat during World War II, while simultaneously dealing with German U-boats, a Nazi spy on the island, and the mystery of their descendants decades later. Dual timeline and Martha’s Vineyard? Perfect for summer.
Recommended by: Sarah Fowler Wolfe
The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons
This one follows a contented couple living in an affluent Atlanta suburb. Their peaceful lives are shattered when a sinister, ultra-contemporary house is built next door. Over time, they realize the house is malevolent and is driving its occupants to tragedy and madness. Stephen King called it one of the finest and most original haunted house stories ever written. The perfect way to give yourself chills on a hot summer day.
Recommended by: Alexandra Sokoloff
Man Overboard by Kathleen Rooney
A man goes over the railing of a cruise ship in the dark, and the entire novel happens in the water as he treads and waits, confronting her life and memories, not even sure anyone has noticed he is gone. Recommending a book about possibly drowning as a beach read may be the most unhinged thing on this whole list.
Note: This book will be released on July 7, 2026.
Recommended by: Zoe Zolbrod
The Love Haters by Katherine Center
A documentary producer flies to Miami for a job that forces her into close quarters with the one person she has been dreading. All that proximity turns dread into something far more complicated and a lot more fun. Sunny and swoony, with a cover practically engineered for a beach bag.
Recommended by: Maryanne
To a Summer of Excellent Reading
Whatever you pull off this list, I hope your summer is full of the kind of reading that makes you almost forget to reapply sunscreen.
If you want a little structure with your chaos, come join my summer reading challenge. It is low-pressure, genuinely fun, and built for exactly this kind of mixed, unhinged, anything-goes reading life. Plus, there’s a surprise at the end for those who complete it!
One last thing before you close the tab. If I missed a book that you’re putting in your beach bag this summer, leave it in the comments! So many readers have told me how many amazing books they’ve found through your recommendations in the comments :)
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Great suggestions! I usually end up reading some dark history because it's when I have the brain space to properly get immersed in it. Everyone with their pastel book covers and me reading something about the Nazis
Fantastic list! I feel like Malibu Rising and Carrie Soto don't get enough love--usually it's Evelyn Hugo (great book) or Atmosphere (still haven't read) that get all accolades for TJR.