The summer read gets a bad rap, often used disparagingly to refer to supposedly trashy, easy-to-digest novels that don’t take you out of your holiday bubble. But plenty of novels make for captivating, immersive, and, importantly, enjoyable summer reads. Besides, when better to ruminate on the trials and tribulations of life, the heartache of betrayal, or the politicisation of bodies than when you’re lying on the beach with all the time in the world? Or, if you prefer something a little lighter, you can always get stuck into an evocative, mind-bending tale of sex, drugs, and, I guess, rock and roll.
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Essentially, anything can be a summer read. So, with that in mind, we’ve picked some of the best novels that are perfect accompaniments for doing absolutely nothing, in the most thought-provoking way.
Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami
As you might guess from its title, Mieko Kawakami’s English language debut, Breasts and Eggs, is about women’s bodies. About the expectations of them to be youthful, sexual, child-bearing; about the impact of poverty, work, and domesticity on them; about how those who inhabit them relate to and understand one another. More specifically, though, it’s about a 30-year-old writer called Natsuko, and a blistering hot summer spent with her sister and niece in her small, oven-like Tokyo apartment. Split into two parts, the second half is set eight years later, when Natsuko is ruminating on what her – and the – future holds, and how motherhood might come into it. Kawakami always writes with such poetic compassion and intelligence, but Breasts and Eggs is particularly spellbinding, evocative, and, at time, hallucinatory. In fact, it’s so immersive that, when Natsuko emerges from a days-long fever dream, you’ll feel like you were in it too.
What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt
In What I Loved, Siri Hustvedt’s most renowned novel, we get a glimpse behind the curtain of New York’s seductive and hedonistic art scene, and into its world of mundane domesticity, soft, comforting love, and quiet, heart-wrenching betrayal. The story traces art historian Leon Hertzberg’s meeting and eventual close friendship with painter Bill Wechsler, and follows them through their parallel lives in the same apartment block; lives that, in the novel’s second half, become engulfed in loss, grief, and, well, life. It’s a sensual, gut-punch of a novel, and one that’ll satiate your desire for summer adventure; a summer in, as Hustvedt once distinguished it, New York the idea, not the place.
Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic
While reading Olivia Sudjic’s Asylum Road, you feel a visceral response to its narrator’s unravelling, which explodes with such ferocity at the end that you have to read and re-read the final page to make sure you’ve got it right. The story begins with protagonist Anya, a PhD student and survivor of the siege of Sarajevo, from which she fled as a child, fretting about her relationship with her boyfriend, soon-turned fiancé. But, as the pair travel back to Sarajevo to visit Anya’s family, this obsessive worry gives way to the unbearable trauma of her childhood, and she suddenly finds herself relinquishing all feelings of control. Sudjic immerses you in Anya’s despair with increasingly jittery writing, making you absorb her anxiousness. While not exactly a relaxing summer read, it perfectly captures the evocative heat of the dead of summer.
I Fear My Pain Interests You by Stephanie LaCava
If you’re dreaming of a summer read brimming with nihilism and loneliness, then Stephanie LaCava’s alluring and melancholy novel, I Fear My Pain Interests You, is for you. The novel follows protagonist Margot, the almost-famous daughter of rockstar parents, as she flees to Montana from New York, in the hope of escaping life; which means, an ex. Drifting around, indulging in her isolation and misery, Margot has a chance meeting that goes some way to explain the numbness of her neglected childhood. Except only in a physical way: Margot can’t feel pain. It’s a fairly bleak but page-turning novella that cleverly aligns this fact with Margot’s all-encompassing experience of privilege and suffering.
The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante
Regardless of whether it’s too on-the-nose to recommend a book set on the beach as a summer read, Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, the fourth of the author’s Neapolitan Quartet, is a haunting, intriguing exploration of motherhood or, as protagonist Leda puts it, of “unnatural mothers”. As Leda watches a young mother, Nina, and her daughter on the Italian coast, she’s reminded of her own past – of the anxiousness of her childhood and suffocating pressures of her motherhood – and she tumbles down a path of longing and regret; a route Nina sometimes glimpses as her future. Although it packs a punch, it’s so short that you’ll finish it in half a day.
Grown Ups by Marian Keyes
Female novelists who are A. very funny and B. sell copies by the bucket load have long been sniffed at within the literary establishment, but Irish writer Marian Keyes is one who has undergone a long overdue critical reappraisal in recent years. It was down, in part, to her epic 2021 comedy Grown Ups, which spans the complicated affections and dark secrets of a modern family, covering heavy themes – alcoholism, infidelity, eating disorders – with equal parts empathy and wit. Grown Ups drew comparisons with Austen, and just as her predecessor accomplished, it’s a 600-pager that goes down as easy as a novella.
Forrest Gump by Winston Groom
It’s weird that in the immortal books-vs-film debate, Forest Gump doesn’t come up more often. Fans of the 1994 film will recall one of its charms is how it spans multiple eras as Tom Hanks’ dim-but-wise hero stumbles into various pivotal historical events. But compared to the book, it feels relatively small in scope, as in Groom’s original story, Gump flies into space and even spends time playing chess for his life with a bunch of cannibals. Narrated by Gump himself, it is far sadder, smarter, and funnier than the big screen allowed.
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
Deborah Levy is one of the few English writers working today who passes the anonymous recognition test: that is to say, if you’ve spent any time immersed in her sensual, witty prose you’ll spot a Levy paragraph or sentence a mile off. Her more recent autobiographical writing is superb, as are her short stories, but for a beach read you can’t beat Swimming Home, the Booker short-listed 2011 novel with a somewhat familiar plot line (older male poet has love affair with troubled younger woman, while on a family holiday in the South of France) but a singular voice. This is literary fiction that doesn’t compromise on any of the enjoyment.
Glue by Irvine Welsh
The first two thirds of Welsh’s most ambitious, moving and funny book – which charts the childhoods and adolescence of a gang of working class Scottish friends – has to make it one of the most underrated novels of the past 25 years. Like most of Welsh’s stories, Glue is brimming with sex, violence, and drugs but there is a warmth at its centre missing from Trainspotting and his other more famous work. The complex bonds that underpin male friendship is not exactly the stuff of fashionable fiction in 2023, but that only makes Glue feel more radical and necessary – this is a novel about how men try their best to love and be there for each other, despite their failures and shortcomings. A topic that is sorely under-examined at a time when it most needs exploring.
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Every Zadie Smith novels attempts something different – from her staggering, multigenerational comic debut White Teeth (2000) to 2013’s experimental, postmodern character study N-W. But it’s her mid-career riff on E. M. Forster, 2005’s On Beauty, that we return to most often for the sheer joy of it. About two warring families of academics on either side of the Atlantic, it deftly plays on the cultural differences of America and the UK; the tension between liberal and conservative values; marriage; parenting, and much more. Over five novels she’s never produced a dud, but On Beauty is the one it feels like Smith had the most fun with. And so will you.