Sizzling Summer Reads to Get Lost in at the Beach

Ruthie Beamish owns the perfect summer getaway, a gorgeous beachfront home in a cozy Long Island village. But it ain’t cheap, so, in order to hold on to her hot property, she has to rent it out every summer so someone else can have her idyllic experience. You’ll feel like one of Ruthie’s guests, vicariously experiencing all the balmy fun and scorching intrigue as the wealthy and elegant summer visitor Adeline Clay starts to steal every bit of Ruthie’s life, from her home to her ex-husband.

Every summer for the past six years, flash-in-the-pan cartoonist Rich Fischer teaches a four-day intensive to aspiring graphic novelists. But while he exhorts his students to mine their personal lives for material, Rich—who hasn’t published anything in six years—faces a surfeit of inspiration in the temptations of his hedonistic colleagues and the FOMO of wondering just how well his family is faring without him.

Just when Eveleth Drake is ready to leave her husband, he dies in a car crash—and suddenly she’s a widow who can’t grieve “right,” stuck in their massive seaside Maine home. But when she unwittingly becomes landlord to Dean Tenney, a former MLB pitcher afflicted with “the yips,” Evvie realizes that nothing’s stopping her from trying to be someone new. Holmes, host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, is herself no stranger to new identities, as a debut novelist.

First comes love, then comes marriage, right? Not in Guillory’s world, where the stress of wedding planning brings together people who might never have met otherwise. Like Alexa and Drew in The Wedding Date, and now Maddie and Theo, Alexas’s best friends, who despise one another. Both will do anything to make Alexa’s big day perfect, even obligatory wedding party commitments that put them in close quarters. Until they become bridal-party-members-with-benefits and begin to wonder if this spark will last after “I do”…

As the summer of 2015 winds down, sixty-something friends Lincoln, Teddy, and Mickey reconvene on Martha’s Vineyard to reminisce about their college days and summers long gone… like that Memorial Day weekend in 1971, when their beloved fourth musketeer Jacy Rockafellow bafflingly vanished. Pulitzer Prize-winning Russo’s first standalone novel in over a decade will get your pulse racing once more even as you can feel the first cool breezes of fall beckoning.