In honor of The Year of Second Chances going on sale on Kindles everywhere, I’ve compiled a list of my five favorite “beach reads.”
Are they traditional beach reads, in that they are light, breezy, and oh-so-sexy and fun? Sometimes!
Do they all take place on beaches? Most of time, yes!
And are they challenging, absorbing, and worth every sun-soaked hour? Absolutely.
I’d like to think The Year of Second Chances meets this criteria, too, but you’ll have to check it out for yourself. It’s now only $1.99 on that infamous e-reader paper book purists like me say they will never get, but are now tempted for the convenience.
Happy Rest of Summer!
Beach: Zipolite (aka “the Beach of the Dead”), Oaxaca, Mexico.
Plot: One autumn afternoon in the late 1980s in Mexico City, seventeen-year-old Luisa decides not to come home from school. Instead, she follows a boy to a beach where myth and reality melt together, and where—among a cast of eccentric beach-dwellers—she learns hard truths about solitude, purpose, and young adulthood. Read for a sense of that haze that washes over you on trips to the beach; that sun-soaked feeling, slightly guilty but mostly indulgent, losing track of time and making friends with people you will never see again yet you will always remember.
The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante
Beach: Ischia, Italy.
Plot: Book two of my favorite literary series of all time follows Lenu, a now teenager in the wake of WWII, as she leaves her working-class Naples neighborhood for the first time to take a job on one of the most beautiful beaches on the Mediterranean, the shoreline of the island Ischia. As the sun and sparkling water bakes her skin golden-brown, she witnesses her friends shed their childhoods in the most exciting, unsettling ways, and becomes introduced to her own power, lust, and heartbreak. Read for a page-turning, chest-clutching account of first love and betrayal, swirling with compulsively underline-able insights on friendship, class, and human nature.
28 Summers by Elin Hilderbrand
Beach: Nantucket, Massachusetts, U.S.
Plot: Mallory and Jake have a problem: they love each other, but they’re both married. Mallory is only figuratively hitched—to an inherited beach cottage on beautiful Nantucket Island, where she lives a rich, full life raising her son and teaching at the local high school. Jake is literally married to one of the most powerful politicians in the United States. While the lovers in Casablanca have Paris, Mallory and Jake have Labor Day. Every year, every summer, they promise to meet on the wild, temperate Nantucket shores and spend the weekend together like a “real” couple. But life and consequences—some even fatal—get in the way of their romance. This is a classic, fast-paced, juicy beach read in the hands of an absolute *expert* writer of beach reads. I’d go so far as to call Hilderbrand the queen. Get your hands on this or any of her other novels for the kind of afternoon where you are enjoying a book so much, you blaze through it in a day.
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
Beach: Montego Bay, Jamaica.
Plot: What do a private school girl, the CIA, a gang leader, a kid from Kingston’s slums, a Rolling Stone journalist, and a ghost (well, multiple ghosts) have in common? In this expansive novel, they all are involved—in some form or fashion—with the attempted assassination of musician Bob Marley. Based on the shockingly true story of CIA interference in Jamaica’s revolutionary politics via sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, A Brief History is gut-wrenching, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and anything but brief. Though this story opens on a tourist resort off of Montego Bay, read to be immersed in the lives and voices of characters from of every walk of life (and death) from the real Jamaica of the 1970s and beyond.
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
Beach: Unnamed remote coastal area, somewhere in the UK.
Plot: Famous playwright Charles Arrowby retires from the hustling, bustling theatre scene in London to an isolated home by the sea. There, he plans to write his memoirs, but instead ends up recording a succession of strange sightings and visitors that will shake his sense of reality and rekindle his passion for a childhood love, who has incidentally settled just a stone’s throw away from his refuge. Read for a hilarious, deluded, gripping journey into the human psyche that somehow never leaves the seaside. And for a bonus, Murdoch’s inimitable wit and epic descriptions:
“Today there is a pleasant, very light haze over the whole sky, and the sea has a misleadingly docile, silvered look, as if the substantial wavelets were determined to stroke the rocks as hard as they could without showing any trace of foam. It is a compact, radiant, complacent sort of sea, very beautiful. There ought to be seals—the waves themselves are almost seals today—but still I scan the water in vain with my long-distance glasses. Enormous, yellow-beaked gulls perch on the rocks and stare at me with brilliant glass eyes. A shadow-cormorant skims the glycerin sea. The rocks are thronged with butterflies. The temperature remains high. I wash my clothes and dry them on the lawn. I have been swimming every day.”
Lara Avery 