10 Books Set At The Beach To Kickstart Your Summer

This debut novel takes its inspiration from Persuasion by Jane Austen. It is set at a beautiful resort in Taboga, an island in the Gulf of Panama. Renya is seventeen and has lived on the island her whole life. Her first love, Aiden, returns with his Grammy-nominated band after pursuing his music career. Will the sparks fly again or has the fire died down? We get to witness what unfolds as Renya and Aiden get a second chance at the first love.

This short fun read was originally an Audible original, and has been released in other formats since. Do you wanna read something fun, flirty and steaming while basking in the sun? This book has got it all. Naomi Reyes has a low tolerance for nonsense, but ends up babysitting Donovan Taylor, who’s an insufferable creative director. If you’re looking for an enemies to lovers story set on a gorgeous tropical island, you should check this out!

As the title suggests, our protagonist Mac can’t let go of her people pleasing tendencies. She’s exhausted from the act. She wants more than anything to focus on her online business, but ends up getting a college degree on her parents’ persistence. To do this, she moves to the beach town of Avalon Bay. She meets the local bad boy Cooper Hartley, who brings our the impulses she’s suppressed for so long. They foster an unlikely friendship, but it’s threatened by the secret he’s been keeping all along.

Harriet and Wyn are the perfect couple that’s adored by everyone…except they broke up five months ago and haven’t mentioned it to anyone. So when they go on their annual vacation at their Maine cottage with their best friends, they end up in the same room. This is the last year they’ll have this place, so they want to play their part and not break their friends’ hearts. But how long can you pretend with people who know you best?

At 12 years old, Kat Steiner and Blake O’Neill meet at Camp Chickawah. They instantly hit it off, until they realise they’re also half sisters. Fifteen years later, when their father dies, they discover their joint inheritance: a beach house in Destin, Florida. Blake wants to sell the house, but Kat wants to preserve their childhood memories. They reluctantly agree to renovate the house while each are enticed by romances.

This book is set in Sag Harbor, a small village in the Hamptons on the east end of New York’s Long Island. Benji Cooper spends every summer there in a community of fellow African Americans. It’s a getaway from his life in an elite prep school in Manhattan, where he’s surrounded by white people. Benji is confused by both places and his own place in the world, but is hoping things change this summer.

Dionne and Phaedra, our sister duo, leaves their home in Brooklyn to visit their grandmother in Barbados. Dionne spends her time there looking for love and testing her grandma’s patience. On the other hand, Phaedra accompanies her grandmother in her job as a midwife, and gets curious about her mother’s past. This lyrical coming-of-age story makes for a perfect summer read.

The setting of this fun read, written by two sisters, alternates between Miami and Haiti. The story unfolds in an epistolary style with letters, emails, articles, and diary entries. Alaine is sent to Haiti on a “spring volunteer immersion project” after “the incident.” So it doesn’t feel like a vacation except she gets to flirt with a cute intern, spend time with her mum, experience Haiti for the first time, and possibly uncover a family secret!

If you’re over cheery female protagonists in every romcom that you read, you should check this out. Olive is pessimistic and considers herself to be downright unlucky. When her twin sister Ami gets married, everyone in the wedding gets sick from eating bad shellfish. The only people who are unaffected are Olive and Ethan, the best man who’s also her sworn enemy. That’s how they end up going to an all-expenses-paid honeymoon to Hawaii. They’ve got to pretend to be newlyweds, and Olive’s life seems more inconvenient than ever — until things turn, and she almost starts to feel lucky.

This book is set at the beach in its flashbacks from the California coast. The present is set in wintertime in New York. If you want to experience the charm of both seasons in one read, pick this up. It has love, longing, queerness, friendship, grief, and the need to figure yourself out as the first flowers of adulthood start to bloom. I read it because John Green described it as “a poetic meditation on loss.” I cannot describe it better.