4 Authors I Reach for When I Want a "Literary Beach Read"

When you want a book that'll punch you in the gut but go easier on your brain.

Hi, friends.

For a long time, I struggled when people asked me for beach read recommendations. To be honest, I don’t read many light, happy books. My idea of a fun reading experience is either a high-stakes fantasy adventure with lots of worldbuilding (800-page chonkers don’t scream “bring me to the beach” to most people) or the kind of hard-hitting literary fiction that leaves you in a puddle at the end (have you ever tried to find a happy Booker Prize nominee?).

Of course, any book can be a beach book if you bring it to the beach. I’m more than willing to lug those chonkers in my beach bag or chip away at something that comes with trigger warnings. But I know people have something specific in mind when they ask for this kind of recommendation.

These days, if someone really wants a happy book, I’ve got a few in my back pocket. But you don’t need those from me, because there are already a million and one summer reading lists out there with that kind of romance novel and celebrity book club picks on them.

Instead, I give my literary fiction friends recommendations that fit the genre but also feel “beachy” to me. And by that, I mean a book that keeps you turning the pages AND feels easy to dip in and out of — all with the excellent character work, beautiful prose, and hard-hitting emotions we love from literary fiction. To me, this isn’t the place for those “all vibes, no plot” books or those that require you to read closely. This is for books that feel like a vacation for our brains without losing the substance — because we literary fiction readers live for the substance.

Four authors come to mind when I think about literary beach reads.

Emma Straub

Emma is always going to be first on this list. Her books feature vivid, fun characters, and the relationships between them are nuanced and real. Sometimes the stakes are big and sometimes they’re small, but either way, her books always have a compelling plot (usually one driven by those relationships). She’s funny, too!

This Time Tomorrow — about a woman with an ailing father who wakes up suddenly a teenager in the 80s again — is my favorite Straub so far, but just know it’s a bit more of a tear-jerker than her others since she wrote it after her own father passed away. Still, it’s zany and fun and I can’t recommend it enough.

Elizabeth Strout

Okay, so Elizabeth Strout’s books are not exactly happy, but they do somehow feel cozy (in the literary sense of the term, not the curled-up-by-the-fire sense of the term). Her beautiful, flawed characters burst off the page via stories that focus on the minutiae of their daily lives and emotions. But don’t mistake small stakes for fluffy — these books hit deeply. Plus, many of her books read like connected short stories, which can fit well with the short, interrupted reading sessions vacations often bring.

Strout has a few different series featuring different casts of characters that tend to cameo between one another. Her Pulitzer winner is Olive Kitteridge, which continues with Olive, Again. She also has the Amgash books, starting with My Name Is Lucy Barton and continuing with Anything Is Possible and Oh, William! and Lucy by the Sea. Then there’s The Burgess Boys, which crosses over with the Amgash books slightly, and most recently, Tell Me Everything, which brings alllllll those characters together at long last. My rec is to start with Olive Kitteridge!

Ann Patchett

I love Ann Patchett (who doesn’t?!?), and so many of her books would be great on the beach. She writes novels and essay collections that hit hard but read quickly, which is an incredible balance to achieve. Also, she and Emma Straub are good friends, which is extra fun for the purposes of this list.

I think her most recent novel, Tom Lake, is a perfect summer read. It’s even a seasonal match, featuring a woman telling her adult daughters the story of a summer she spent performing at a regional theatre company. Big adult summer camp vibes. (Caveat: I would NOT put Bel Canto, Patchett’s Women’s Prize winner about a hostage situation in Central America, into this summer category. You should read that book because it’s excellent, but maybe save it for the fall.)

Louise Erdrich

Hopefully Erdrich completists will agree with me, as I’ve only read a few of her many many books, but in my experience, she’s another author who writes plotty but deeply resonant stories filled with excellent characters.

Well, maybe The Sentence isn’t as beachy as some of her others (it takes place during the 2020 pandemic protests following George Floyd’s murder), but her most recent, The Mighty Red, definitely feels like a good one. She spends the whole book building toward a big reveal of something that happened in the past, and hoo boy did it pay off. Tragically, perhaps, but grippingly and suspensefully.

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As always, thanks for sharing your corner of the internet with me! It would mean a lot if you were to take a second to like this post. I’d love to hear about your favorite literary beach reads in the comments, too.

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Until next time,

— Deedi (she/her)