6 of the Best Novels This Summer to Keep Your Beach Trip Lit

Soar cross-country with delicious novels set from sea to shining sea, where the beauty is bizarre, reality bends, and the rich are not all right.

‘Long Island Compromise’ by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

$32 $25

Amazon

$30 $28

Bookshop

Taffy Brodesser-Akner presents the Fletchers: In the 1980s, kidnappers ransom a Long Island Styrofoam baron under a false guise; decades later, he and his family struggle with the rippling trauma.

‘The Coin’ by Yasmin Zaher

$27 $24

Amazon

$27 $25

Bookshop

Yasmin Zaher’s hypnotic debut finds a young Palestinian trust funder with money troubles teaching at a Manhattan public school, attempting to scrub her pain away with expensive skin-care routines and becoming embroiled in a Birkin bag resell scheme.

‘Catalina’ by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

$30

Amazon

$28 $26

Bookshop

At Harvard, titular Catalina wrestles with university rituals, a nascent flirtation, and the looming threat of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in this funny, wrenching novel by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio.

‘Tehrangeles’ by Porochista Khakpour

$28 $23

Amazon

$28 $26

Bookshop

Little Women meets Keeping Up With the Kardashians in Porochista Khakpour’s biting interpersonal dramedy: A snack titan, his wife, and their four daughters clamor for reality show stardom, and then face the fallout.

‘State of Paradise’ by Laura van den Berg

$27 $21

Amazon

$27 $25

Bookshop

In Laura van den Berg’s swampy, beguiling book, a ghostwriter in Florida receives a mysterious request from her shadowy employer, her sister falls into a virtual world, feral cats congregate—and everywhere, everything is not as it seems!

‘The Heart in Winter’ by Kevin Barry

$28 $25

Amazon

$28 $26

Bookshop

Kevin Barry’s lyrical Western zeroes in on 1891 Butte, Montana, where a boozy poet and a runaway bride—“Hoodlums of Love!”—are setting out through wolf country on a stolen horse to seek their fortunes.