9 Books to Throw into Your Beach Bag This Summer

Nothing is at it seems in the latest from beach-read queen Elin Hilderbrand. This fast-paced novel begins just hours before a wedding, when the body of the maid of honor is discovered. As the police investigate, it becomes clear that everyone in the wedding party is hiding something.

Fans of Big Little Lies should pick up The Family Next Door, stat. The suburban drama follows three women and their families, whose lives are thrown into chaos when a mysterious outsider moves into the neighborhood.

Grab a margarita and settle into your favorite lawn chair: The follow-up to The Devil Wears Prada is as funny as it is addicting. It follows Miranda Priestly’s former assistant Emily, now in her thirties, as she’s summoned to Greenwich, Connecticut, to help restore the reputation of a former model facing a bogus DUI charge. 

Sometimes we want the literary equivalent of junk food, and other times we want a smart read that challenges the way we think. This one’s for the latter. Clemantine Wamariya recounts her childhood, first fleeing the Rwandan massacre and then living as a refugee in the United States, in this hauntingly beautiful book.

Four siblings visit a fortune-teller who claims to be able to predict the date of anyone’s death—and then grapple with those predictions over the course of five decades in this gripping novel.

Warning: You’ll want to clear your schedule for this thriller. After her husband’s plane goes missing in the Alps, a widow is left searching for answers and discovering the dark underbelly of the financial world. 

The house of her dreams comes at a high price for Ruthie Beamish: Every Memorial Day weekend, she has to pack up her belongings and those of her soon-to-be ex-husband and their teenage daughter so they can rent the house to the summer people. Set on Long Island, this funny book is full of an eccentric cast of characters who give an inside look at what it’s like to own a home out east.

For anyone with a soft spot for carousels, family mysteries and stories of long lost love, this lovely book is destined to become a favorite. As artist Maya Brice works to restore a carousel in her Delaware beach town, a cryptic letter leads her to the original carousel artist, who suffers from Alzheimer’s and mistakes her for his first love—her grandmother.

We were late in discovering this poignant memoir, but it’s a must-read for anyone looking for a nontraditional beach book. Part travel diary, part homage to a lost love, Traveling with Ghosts follows a marine biologist as she travels around the world attempting to come to terms with her fiancé’s unexpected death. You’ll need the tissues for this one.