Nine Intelligent Beach Reads

Utterly riveting and often profound books to pack for your next vacation

This princess is definitely about to park it and settle down to a good time with a great book

This summer several friends reached out and asked me for poolside or vacation reading recommendations. I realize it’s August now, so maybe your summertime activities are winding down. It’s still blazing hot where I am and I wish I could teleport to a balmy beach with one of the following books in hand.

What I want in my vacation reading is both style and substance. I want an absorbing, delightful, and thoughtful novel that I will remember for years to come. A tall order maybe, but if you’re looking, options do abound.

All of the these titles take place on, near, or around a beach. Some of them have only dazzled me recently. The others I’ve mentioned in one place or another, but they’re worth repeating so you can bookmark them for the next time you need an unfailingly good read whether you’re headed to the beach or not.

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The Feast by Margaret Kennedy (1949)

This really is what I think of as the paragon of the ‘intelligent beach read’ genre. A rollicking, gripping, and often funny mystery that also functions as an exploration on weighty themes of virtue and vice and heaven and hell. The Feast is the first book I recommend to anyone who has asks me what they should pack for vacation reading. As I said in one of the first essays I ever wrote on here: just be sure if you do take it with you on vacation that you are pure of heart and not headed somewhere with cliffs of questionable structural integrity.

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Apricot Sky by Ruby Ferguson (1952)

Pure happiness is what this quintessentially summer book is. Part country house novel, part Swallows and Amazons adventure, and mostly romance, Apricot Sky is about Cleo, who just has come to home to the Scottish Highlands after a stint working abroad in America. Cleo’s sister Raine is engaged to be married and much of the novel is taken up with wedding plans, but then there’s a whole ‘will-they-won’t-they’ romance plot going on for Cleo too. And there are shenanigans among the other members of the family. And there’s the loveliest interlude to the Isle of Skye. It’s such a joyous, funny book. One of my very favorite offerings from Furrowed Middlebrow.

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No More than Human by Maura Laverty (1944)

This is admittedly a sequel, and though it could be read separately, it is best in tandem with the first book Never No More. But No More than Human, in which Delia Scully leaves her native Ireland to become a governess in Spain, is the more summery of the two, not least because of a dramatic scene in which Delia gets into hot water with her employer for appearing on the beach in a scarlet bathing suit. If you do not have the opportunity to jet off to Spain any time soon, you can experience it secondhand through Delia’s wonderful narration about its people and places and food (the glorious food!)

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The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff (1931)

Sometimes when I recommend books, I forget that plot generally matters very little to me. It’s always the writing that I care most about. But many other people are looking for something pacey and plotty in their pleasure reading and if that is you, keep scrolling, because this is not the book for you.

The Fortnight in September follows the Stevens family on their yearly holiday to Bognor Regis that they’ve taken since since Mr. and Mrs. Stevens were newlyweds. Their two children are looking to the future as they are just coming into adulthood and the family can feel the tide of change coming to their lives. But the novel is taken up with ordinary details: all the organizing and packing and then the people they encounter and the small events that make up the days of their holiday. It’s a testament to the meaning and goodness of an ordinary life and one that I resonated with very much.

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The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett (1896)

Another largely plotless one, but one that envelops you in the loveliness of a Maine summer. Our nameless narrator is a writer who has rented an empty schoolhouse for a summer to work on her book (I mean, what a dream.) Instead, she becomes involved in the life of the coastal Maine village. She is boarding with an older woman, Almira Todd, who is a somewhat of village wise woman, dispensing both advice and homemade botanical tinctures to others. This read to me like a New England version of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford and it really made me want to spend a summer in Maine.

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A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie (1964)

Any destination Christie would do here. (I’m very partial to Death on the Nile and They Came to Baghdad). I just happen to currently be in the middle of the audiobook of A Caribbean Mystery and I’m reminded all over again what a pleasure Christie’s writing is. I’m also reminded again how funny Miss Marple is when she is at her most acid:

But it wasn’t really scandals Miss Marple wanted. Nothing to get your teeth into in scandals nowadays. Just men and women changing partners, and calling attention to it, instead of trying decently to hush it up and be properly ashamed of themselves.

And also of how amusing it is to watch all the other characters grossly underestimate Miss Marple:

As usual she sat and knitted and listened to what went on, and very occasionally joined in the conversation. When she did so, everyone was surprised because they had usually forgotten that she was there! Evelyn Hillingdon looked at her indulgently, and thought that she was a nice old dear.

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The Horses of the Sun: A Novel of Italy by Oriel Malet (1960)

I just finished this up this week and I hate to tell you that it is very out of print. It would make a fantastic reprint for the British Library Women Writers series or for Persephone Books (who have reprinted Malet’s novel Marjorie Fleming), but for now it can be found on Internet Archive, which is how I read it, or if you’re lucky, you can score a reasonably priced secondhand copy. Anyway, Oriel Malet was a friend of Daphne du Maurier, and though she is a less enduring author, I enjoyed The Horses of the Sun loads more than Rebecca which I also read for the first time this year.

Liz, the daughter of a contessa’s secretary, lives an unorthodox life free ranging all over the grounds of a villa on the coast of the Isle of Elba. Liz is a wonderfully written child character—highly imaginative, emotional, and not easily won over, having built up defenses around her heart after early traumatic experiences. One of the few people that understands Liz is the formidable Contessa herself. But when the villa is invaded by summer guests, including one unexpectedly from the Contessa’s past, both Liz’s and the Contessa’s lives are shaken up.

Malet’s writing is gorgeously visual and reading this novel felt like watching a film from the 50s or 60s like Roman Holiday or The Moonspinners. Absolutely absorbing. I wanted it to go on and on.

“They walked up into the town by a flight of shallow stone steps, and were at once in a world as complete and enclosed as the villages in medieval pictures, where everything can be seen going on at once. There were no streets inside the walls, but only endless flights of steep stairways leading from one level of houses to the next. The houses were old, and leaning sideways; they looked as if they held secrets, and not always pleasant ones. Although the inhabitants, used to summer visitors, paid no attention to them, they had the feeling that some momentous event was about to take place the moment their backs were turned. There was an air of secret excitement about even the most ordinary actions, an old woman who was shaking a feather bed out of a window, a child drawing water at the fountain. No sunlight fell between the high, narrow houses; it was dark and quiet. They stopped in the tiny central piazza, where the fountain was, and sat on a wooden bench under some trees, whose low, thick branches made it darker still. The sound of the fountain splashing made the silence intense.”

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The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay (1956)

My sister would probably say heck no to this one, because she found it irritatingly rambly and the plot loosey-goosey. I imagine she’d call it frustrating rather than beachy. But I loved it from its iconic and whimsical first line (“Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, climbing down from that animal on her return from high Mass.”) to its emotional crescendo of an ending. The Towers of Trebizond follows three English travelers: narrator Laurie, Aunt Dot or Dorothea ffoulkes-Corbet, and high church Anglican priest Fr. Chantry-Pigg, on their travels in Turkey for various reasons—as a mission to convert the Turks or to work through a personal and spiritual crisis. It’s a zany, often hilarious, ride for the reader, but I also found it profoundly moving—a meditation on the things that keep us from Christ. You just have to realize you’re signing up for a reading experience with a narrative voice that sounds like this:

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The Forgotten Smile by Margaret Kennedy (1961)

Would you believe it if I told you that I loved this book from Margaret Kennedy even more than The Feast? Really, it’s one of the most moving things I’ve read all year. Former acquaintances meet unexpectedly on a remote and mysterious Greek island and undergo a transformative experience. It’s a novel that moves back and forth through time and across countries exploring themes of chance, fate, providence, hope, and redemption. I insisted a friend of mine read it when I had finished and she declared it was the novel that made her want to read everything from Margaret Kennedy. I’m writing my next full-length essay on The Forgotten Smile. Read it so we can discuss!

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Other beachy themed reads that for one reason or another don’t work for me but may very well work for you:

Madame, Will You Talk by Mary Stewart

I am determined to give Mary Stewart another chance (perhaps, The Moonspinners!), but I found Madame, Will You Talk over-the-top melodramatic for me.

Murder in Cyprus by M.M. Kaye

Again, I’m allergic to the melodrama. Nevertheless, I did enjoy racing through this book in a day. If you like this one, you’re in luck, because M.M. Kaye wrote a whole series about plucky young women solving mysteries in various exotic locales.

Poppies for England by Noel Streatfield (writing as Susan Scarlett)

I have read two adult novels from Streatfield-as-Scarlett and found them pleasant but too feather-light for me. This one takes place directly after WWII. The fathers of two theater families have just come home from the war. They reconnect and decide to spend the summer performing with their wives and children at a seaside family holiday camp. Throw in the drama of young love for a memorable summer. But unfortunately not memorable enough for me.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

This did nothing for me. The narrator has zero backbone. Maxim has zero attraction. I felt like du Maurier simply set out to write a bestseller, turning up the drama to the nth degree at every possible moment. Clearly, she succeeded, but it really soured me on her writing.

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Have I missed your favorite beach read? I’d love to hear it!

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