The 20 Best New Paperback Beach Reads

Finally, the blockbuster mystery is out in paperback. If you haven’t read it yet, read it now, before the film version (out on October 3) reveals all of its fiendishly clever twists and turns.

To buy: $15, amazon.com.

Sullivan delivers a sparkling novel of modern relationships, intertwining four stories inspired by a singularly brilliant advertising slogan—“A diamond is forever”—and the real-life, never-wed ad woman who wrote it.

To buy: $16, amazon.com.

If you like to dip in and out of a book between dips in the water, you can’t go wrong with this collection of essays from the sardonic, entertaining Sedaris.

To buy: $17, amazon.com.

The buzz around this top-notch detective novel reached fever-pitch when its unknown author was unmasked as the creator of a series about a certain boy wizard.

To buy: $18, amazon.com.

You want to talk about buzz? We’re sneaking this into a roundup of new paperbacks using the “reprint with an updated cover to tie in with a movie” loophole because you don’t want to miss this pop-culture phenom. NB: Pack tissues in your beach bag.

To buy: $13, amazon.com.

Much like Unbroken and Seabiscuit, this true story of beating the odds—here, the young men from working-class American families who bested Hitler’s squad of rowers at the 1936 Berlin Games—is nothing short of gripping.

To buy: $17, amazon.com.

More real-life inspiration from the era: the little-known story of a mystery-shrouded town in Tennessee and its role in ending World World II, as told by the then-young women who were recruited to work there.

To buy: $16, amazon.com.

Take a Jane Austen classic and skew it through the eyes of the family housemaid and you have Longbourn, Baker’s imaginative retelling of Pride and Prejudice.

To buy: $16, amazon.com.

In the latest from Pulitzer Prize winner Strout (Olive Kitteridge), two brothers flee their tragic past and small Maine hometown for divergent lives in New York City. Then a family crisis—a nephew in serious trouble—calls them back home.

To buy: $15, amazon.com.

Following The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini opens his third novel in prewar Afghanistan, but moves it westward from there (to Greece, France, and the States), in a generation-spanning story of siblings separated by tragedy and hardship but bound by love.

To buy: $16, amazon.com.

Get swept up in the fascinating life of T.E. Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia of cinematic fame. History told in the most compelling way for anyone interested in the complex development of the modern Middle East.

To buy: $18, amazon.com.

Long after the summer of 1974 ends, a group of teens who bond at artsy Camp Spirit-in-the-Woods enter and exit one another’s lives in Wolitzer’s beautifully crafted, epic novel of friendship and all its joys and heartaches.

To buy: $17, amazon.com.

Can love be a science? Socially bumbling genetics professor Don Tillman hopes so, as he sets out to find a wife in an orderly, evidence-based fashion. What he doesn’t count on is chemistry with a totally unlikely candidate. Charming, funny, and endearing.

To buy: $16, amazon.com.

“Charming, funny, and endearing” could also be the mantra of stand-up comic Gaffigan, who muses on life as the father of five young children in short pieces made to be read between fielding requests for beach snacks and breaking up water-splash fights.

To buy: $16, amazon.com.

Beautiful and witty, as glittering and fast-living as any of her husband’s famous Jazz Age characters, Zelda Fitgerald was equally as doomed. But when she wasn’t Mrs. Scott Fitzgerald, half of one of the most notorious couples in the literary world, who was she? If you love historical fiction, this is for you.

To buy: $16, amazon.com.

It’s no exaggeration to say that just a few short weeks in an earlier summer changed the course of history—American and otherwise—as Lindbergh took his solo flight over the Atlantic, the first talking motion picture debuted, and Al Capone ruled the Chicago underworld, all as the seeds of the Great Depression were sown.

To buy: $17, amazon.com.

A reclusive, Salinger-esque author’s breakdown at his friend’s funeral kicks off this rich, insightful, and even funny take on the deeply complicated relationships between fathers and sons.

To buy: $16, amazon.com.

Two teenage girls escape the stifling heat of a July night in rough-and-tumble waterfront Red Hook, Brooklyn, by taking a moonlit paddle into the harbor. One washes up ashore, barely alive; the other disappears. As the locals are drawn together by the event, characters gradually reveal themselves in a mystery that will keep you riveted.

To buy: $16, amazon.com.

Two tightly bound brothers find themselves at opposite sides of the world—and at the opposite ends of the political spectrum. But when tragedy befalls one brother, the other must pull together their shattered family. The dazzling second novel from Pulitzer Prize winner Lahiri (Interpreter of Maladies).

To buy: $16, amazon.com.

Rachel Chu thinks that her boyfriend, Nick Young, is a sweet, unassuming history professor—until, that is, she goes home with him to Singapore and finds that he’s not only rich, he’s crazy rich, and the country’s most eligible bachelor. A wickedly funny look at the over-the-top world of the Asian jet set.

To buy: $15, amazon.com.