27 Beach Reads to Pack in Your Boat Tote This Summer

Lucy is back on Harbour Island, The Bahamas, but this summer won’t be like the others. She’s inherited her beloved Gran’s house and is determined to find the inspiration she’s lost, in her life and her art. Despite her best intentions, Lucy is faced with two major distractions—the alluring new guy Noah, and her ex and first love Jack. Noah and Jack that leave Lucy more confused than ever, she must confront what she wants her life to be. When a shocking secret comes to light, it’s the reckoning she didn’t know she needed.

At 17, Ruth lost her mother to cancer, and her father, unable to cope with his own grief, sent her off to Block Island to spend the summer with a renowned photographer named Diana Beckett. Ruth fell hard for the island, for Diana, and for Diana’s nephew Charlie. Ten years later, after another devastating loss, 27-year-old Ruth returns to the island with her world falling apart, only to find Charlie has a startling revelation of his own and Diana has left her a mysterious box that upends everything she thought she knew about her past. Garvey’s gorgeous, Block Island-soaked debut is the kind of book you’ll start on a Friday and finish before Sunday.

Dolly Brick has never met a problem she couldn’t solve, so when she moves back to Rhode Island for the summer to keep her dad and brother from losing the family home, she’s determined to fix that too. Then she stumbles upon Stewart Whitfield, the annoyingly handsome heir to the wealthiest family in town, fresh off a very public, very humiliating breakup. His proposed arrangement is simple: a little fake dating in exchange for enough money to save her house. Of course, as public benefits turn into sunset boat rides and lazy afternoons on the porch, the line between business and real feelings gets very blurry, very fast. It’s the perfect sun-soaked, fake-dating beach read.

What was supposed to be a relaxing Cape Cod getaway for elementary school teacher Taylor and her younger brother takes a sharp turn when they discover a dead body in their rental house. Enter Myles, a brash, motorcycle-riding bounty hunter who’s been hired to catch the killer and who absolutely does not want Taylor’s help, no matter how many true crime podcasts she’s listened to. But as the danger ramps up and the killer sets their sights on Taylor, the two are stuck together until the case is solved. Expect Bailey’s signature spice, snappy banter, and a murder mystery that keeps you guessing, all wrapped in a beachy summer package.

Ruby Wynne is a rule-following kind of woman, so when a surprise breakup blows up her carefully laid plans on her 35th birthday, she makes a wish and wakes up inside a M.A.S.H. game from seventh grade. Suddenly she’s living in a Technicolor mansion, driving a tie-dye Jeep, and running a roller-disco restaurant, with one catch: according to the game, her perfect match is Penn Hayes, her brother’s annoyingly handsome best friend. Desperate to get back to reality, Ruby hatches a plan to make Penn fall for her so the game comes true, but she might just fall for this dreamed-up life along the way. Think 13 Going on 30 with a Lisa Frank filter and all the nostalgic, opposites-attract charm you could want.

25-year-old Katie Caruso has spent the last eight years building a sparkly facade and a quiet career ghostwriting for a bestselling romance novelist. Then her brother’s former best friend (and her old crush) Tyler McNally walks back into her life as her new writing partner, and that carefully constructed facade crumbles. Whisked away to a reclusive author’s Hamptons estate to co-write a trope-filled love story, the two childhood neighbors, bound by a shared tragedy, watch as the very tropes they’re writing start playing out in their own lives. It’s a meta, slow-burn, second-chance romance that’s as heart-wrenching as it is clever, and a genuine love letter to the romance genre.

From Sophia Bannion’s first day on the Storytelling team at a luxury wellness company in New York, it’s clear something is deeply amiss. But Sophia, pushing 30, has plenty of skeletons in her closet next to the designer knockoffs and doesn’t care. Soon, Sophia is addicted to her HEBE lifestyle—especially youthjuice, the fatty, soothing moisturizer has been asked Sophia to test. But when cracks in HEBE’s infrastructure start to worsen—and Sophia learns the gruesome secret ingredient at the heart of youthjuice—she has to decide how far she’s willing to go to stay beautiful forever.

Elizabeth Zhang has it all figured out: a 3.9 GPA at Columbia, the perfect letters of recommendation, and a clear path to Harvard Law and a high-powered corporate law career. So when Harvard rejects her, she’s stunned, and even more so when she learns a fellow Columbia classmate, Laura Kim, got in instead. Convinced Laura took the one “interesting Asian woman” spot that should have been hers, Elizabeth’s curiosity curdles into a full-blown obsession as she begins to follow Laura’s every move to figure out what makes her so special. Layered, subversive, and genuinely propulsive, this debut is a sharp, suspenseful look at stereotypes, ambition, and how far someone will go to prove they matter.

When six struggling writers are invited to spend a weekend at bestselling novelist Arthur Fletch’s private island off the coast of Scotland, they expect one of his famous literary salons. Instead, they arrive to a shocking secret: Fletch is dead, his final novel is unfinished, and his agent and editor want one of them to write the ending that could change their careers forever. What follows is a deliciously twisty locked-room mystery and a razor-sharp satire of the publishing industry itself. Bonus intrigue: “Evelyn Clarke” is the pen name of V.E. Schwab and Cat Clarke, and even Stephen King says it’s in the running for the best mystery of 2026.

The beloved author of Tom Lake returns with a luminous, quietly devastating novel about the rare connections that change the course of a life. When Daphne Fuller crosses paths with her former stepfather, Eddie, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the chance reunion reawakens a powerful bond. From there, Patchett spins an extended meditation on memory, love, and the way the past refuses to stay in the past. It’s a slower, more reflective pick for the beach bag, perfect for when you want something that lingers long after the last page.

In the present, Sacha knows the world’s in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile, the world’s in meltdown­—and the real meltdown hasn’t even started yet. In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they’re living on borrowed time.

From the author of Hamnet comes a soaring, multi-generational historical epic set in Ireland in the years surrounding the Great Hunger. It opens on a windswept peninsula in the west of Ireland, where Tomás and his 10-year-old son are working for the Ordnance Survey to map a country decimated by famine, and Tomás is determined his maps will stand as a record of the devastation. From there, the story travels across generations and continents, in a sweeping tale of land, survival, and inheritance. Atmospheric and gorgeously written, it’s the most literary, sink-into-it pick on this list.

Newly divorced and a little adrift, Jane Trevally is walking her dogs on her country estate one May afternoon when she finds a stray white terrier, with no sign of the teenage girl who’d been staying nearby. When the girl is reported missing, Jane offers to return the dog to its owner in a run-down Hampstead house called Thornwood, only to be immediately unsettled, because she has a dark, 25-year-old history with this exact house. A cagey stranger answers the door, a haunted-looking woman appears at the window, and Jane is pulled into uncovering secrets more terrifying than she imagined. Jewell at her darkest and most atmospheric, this one is for the readers who like their beach reads with a serious chill.

Sasha Cruz is all about finding the perfect person to slot into the perfect role. What she doesn’t do, however, is relationships. On a flight to Paris for work, Sasha’s seated next to a broodingly attractive mystery man, and sparks fly—but they never exchange contact information. Convinced she’s lost out on her soulmate, Sasha emails her work friend for help, but accidentally writes to the entire company worldwide! The international manhunt to find Seat F begins. Meanwhile Sasha takes matters into her own hands. She hires a smoldering detective she knew in another lifetime—who complicates matters in unforeseen (and irresistible) ways.

Most people don’t even notice the tiny figures in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. But Louisa does, and she is determined to find out their story. 25 years earlier, in a seaside town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their home lives by spending long summer days on an abandoned pier. Out of that summer emerges a painting that will unexpectedly be placed into 18-year-old Louisa’s care. She embarks on a cross-country journey to learn how the painting came to be and to decide what to do with it.

Katie Vaughn has two choices: wait to get laid off from her job as a video producer or take a career-making gig profiling Tom “Hutch” Hutcheson, a Coast Guard rescue swimmer in Key West. The catch? She can’t swim. As Katie gets entangled with Hutch, she gets trapped in a lie. Or two. Swim lessons, helicopter flights, conga lines, drinking contests, hurricanes, and stolen kisses ensue—along with chances to tell the truth, to face old fears, and to be truly brave at last.

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. She is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy and as an aunt to her niece. Until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space shuttle program. Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants, Joan begins training alongside her fellow candidates. She starts questioning everything she thinks she knows about her place in the universe. Then, on mission STS-LR9, it all changes in an instant.

Twelve years after six people destroyed Anna Matheson’s family, she’s ready for retribution. Anna has lured those responsible onto a luxury train from Philadelphia to Chicago, an overnight journey of 13 hours. Her goal? Confront the people who’ve wronged her, get them to confess their crimes, and deliver them into the hands of authorities waiting at the end of the line. But Anna’s plan is quickly derailed by the murder of one of the passengers. Someone else on board is enacting their own form of revenge—and they won’t stop until everyone else is dead.

Sybil Delling is a Diviner. In her dreams she receives visions from six unearthly figures known as Omens. From them, she can predict terrible things before they occur, and lords and common folk alike travel across the kingdom to learn their futures. Just as she and her sister Diviners near the end of their service, a mysterious knight arrives at the cathedral. The knight Rodrick has no respect for Sybil’s visions, but when Sybil’s fellow Diviners begin to vanish one by one, she has no choice but to seek his help in finding them.

Joni Lark is one of the most coveted songwriters in LA, and yet she can’t write. She hopes returning to her hometown will spark inspiration. But when Joni gets there, nothing is how she left it. How can Joni write when her world is leaving her behind? Until she hears a melody in her head, belonging to a wry musician with an emptiness of his own. He has a plan for breaking their inconvenient telepathic connection: finish the song haunting them both and hope they don’t risk their hearts in the process.

When she first meets Adam, Coralie is new to London and feeling adrift. But Adam is clever, witty, and (he insists) a quarter inch taller than the average male. His charming 4-year-old daughter only adds to his appeal. But 10 years on, something important is missing from the life Coralie and Adam (though let’s face it, mostly Coralie) have built. Or maybe, having gained everything she dreamed of, Coralie has lost something else she once had: herself.

Eva Mercy is a single mom and bestselling erotica writer. Shane Hall is a reclusive, award-winning novelist. When the two meet at a literary event, sparks fly, raising not only their buried traumas but also the eyebrows of the Black literati. What no one knows is that when they were teenagers, Eva and Shane spent one crazy week madly in love. They can pretend they’ve never met, but they can’t deny their chemistry—or the fact that they’ve been secretly writing to each other in their books through the years.

It was supposed to be the perfect weekend away. Six very different women travel to a sun-soaked Greek island for a bachelorette trip to celebrate Lexi’s upcoming wedding. From the glorious ocean views to the quaint tavernas and whitewashed streets, the vacation seems too good to be true. But dangerous undercurrents run beneath the sunset swims and midnight cocktails—because each of the women is hiding a secret. Someone is determined to make sure that Lexi’s marriage never happens—and that one of them doesn’t leave the island alive.

Hollis Shaw’s life seems picture-perfect. She’s the creator of the popular food blog and is married to Matthew, a dreamy heart surgeon. But after she and Matthew get into a heated argument one snowy morning, he leaves for the airport and is killed in a car accident. So when Hollis hears about something called a “Five-Star Weekend,” where one woman organizes a trip for her best friend from each phase of her life, she decides to host her own Five-Star Weekend on Nantucket. But the weekend turns out to be anything but a joyful Hallmark movie.

Harsha Godbole has never felt love from her family, but she’s always been surrounded by their Bollywood business mogul wealth. Fearful of showing up to her cousin’s upcoming wedding as a failure, Harsha decides to put her trust fund to good use by hiring her favorite barista as her fake boyfriend for the wedding bash. Her plan is received surprisingly well by Veer Kannan, who hopes this will be his ticket to Bollywood. But Harsha and Veer get way more than they bargained for in this heartwarming journey to finding unexpected love and courage

It was supposed to be a romantic getaway weekend in New York City with her new boyfriend. But when Bree comes downstairs their final morning, there’s a stranger lying dead in the foyer, and Ty is nowhere to be found. The dead woman is none other than Janelle Beckett, the missing woman the entire internet has become obsessed with. As the police and a social media mob close in, Bree realizes that the only way she can help Ty—or herself—is to figure out what really happened that night.

Odessa Cross spent life kneeling—to the god’s will and to her father’s. As a princess, her only duty is to wear the crown and obey the king. But everything changes when she’s forced to cross treacherous lands beside a warrior who despises her as much as she despises him—bound to a future she didn’t choose and a husband she barely knows. Everyone wants her to be something she’s not—a queen, a spy, a sacrifice. But what if she refused the role chosen for her? What if she made her own rules? What if there’s power in being underestimated?