Best Books to Read on a Beach Holiday

Every year, someone hands me a list titled something like “Ten Perfect Beach Reads,” and without fail, none of them are books I’d actually want within reach of my towel. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a breezy thriller or a glossy romance. They’re just not what I reach for when I finally have three uninterrupted hours and nowhere to be.

What I actually want on a beach holiday is a book good enough to justify ignoring the view. Something dense enough to sit with, strange enough to disorient me pleasantly, and honest enough that I come back from the trip having thought about something other than sunscreen. My beach reading pile tends to be heavier than most people’s, more likely to be in translation, more likely to unsettle me on purpose.

Here’s what’s actually gone into my bag the last few summers.

For Getting Pleasantly Disoriented

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Short enough to finish in a single sitting and unsettling enough that you probably shouldn’t. Han Kang’s novel about a woman who quietly, then not so quietly, refuses to keep participating in her own life is one of those books that changes the temperature of a room. It’s not comfortable beach reading in the traditional sense, but it’s exactly the kind of book that rewards the total stillness a beach holiday can offer.

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

Fragmented, restless, and structured like the inside of a traveller’s head at three in the morning. Tokarczuk’s Booker International winner isn’t a novel so much as a constellation of essays, stories, and observations about movement and the body, and it happens to be one of the best books I’ve ever read specifically while travelling. It asks to be picked up and put down, which makes it unusually well suited to a week where you keep getting interrupted by the ocean.

For a Slow, Strange Kind of Suspense

The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

If you want something that will keep you turning pages under an umbrella, Ferrante will do it, just not in the way a conventional thriller would. This is a novel about a woman coming apart after her husband leaves, written with a kind of controlled intensity that makes the pages feel hotter than the actual weather. I read this one over four days in a beach chair and came away slightly shaky, in the best way.

Butter by Asako Yuzuki

Part food writing, part true crime, part meditation on the impossible standards placed on women’s appetites, desires, and bodies. Yuzuki’s novel, inspired by a real case, is strange and sensory in a way that suits long, indulgent days, especially if there’s good food involved in your own holiday. It made me hungry and uneasy in roughly equal measure, which is a strange combination to recommend but I’m recommending it anyway.

For Queer Longing in the Sun

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

A novel about desire that refuses to tell you the narrator’s gender, which turns out to be the entire point. Winterson’s prose is lush and a little relentless, the kind of writing that wants your full, undivided attention and nothing less. It’s a genuinely romantic book, in its own strange, genderless way, and there’s something fitting about reading it somewhere warm.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

Twelve interconnected lives, mostly Black British women, spanning generations and told in Evaristo’s loose, breathless, almost unpunctuated style. It’s a big book to bring on holiday, both in scope and in the sheer number of lives it holds, but it’s also one that rewards the kind of extended, distraction-free reading a beach holiday makes possible. I finished it wanting to immediately start again.

For Rethinking How the World Is Built

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

Not everyone wants a data-driven feminist nonfiction book on holiday, but I’ve never regretted packing one. Criado Perez’s book about the gender data gap, how the world is designed around a default male body and what that costs women, is the kind of book that leaves you quietly seething in the best way. It’s more readable than its subject matter might suggest, and it’s the sort of thing that’s genuinely improved by being read slowly, with time to sit with each chapter.

All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks

hooks wrote this as a corrective to how casually we throw the word “love” around while rarely examining what it actually requires, and it holds up as one of the most quietly radical books I’ve read on the subject. Where Criado Perez maps how the world is built without women in mind, hooks maps how our closest relationships get built without much thought at all, and both books have a way of making you re-examine the architecture of your own life once you put them down. It’s short, direct, and far less academic than some of her other work, which makes it unexpectedly well suited to a holiday. I came back from the beach that year rethinking half my relationships, which is either a triumph for the book or an inconvenience for everyone involved.

Why I Keep Packing Heavy

I used to feel a little sheepish bringing books like these on holiday, as though a beach demands something lighter out of principle. I don’t think that anymore. If anything, a beach holiday is one of the only times I get long enough stretches of uninterrupted attention to actually do these books justice, no emails, no errands, just hours and hours of nothing but the next page.

So my beach bag stays heavy, in every sense. Sunscreen, a towel, and something that will leave me shaky by the fourth day or quietly rethinking my relationships by the last. It’s not the beach read anyone expects, but it’s the only kind I’ve ever wanted.