Escapist stories you can disappear into
15 books
A literary novelist and a romance writer rent neighbouring beach houses and bet on each other's genres. Henry's debut, and the reason her name now means summer.
Ten years of summer trips, two best friends, one trip that broke everything. Henry writes the will-they-won't-they like she's daring you to put it down.
A cutthroat literary agent and her sister go to a small town for a month. The romance is with the editor; the love story underneath is between sisters.
An aged Hollywood legend chooses an unknown journalist for the only interview she'll ever give. The husbands are the frame; the real love story is the one she had to hide.
An oral history of a fictional 70s rock band that flames out at Soldier Field. Reid writes interview-by-interview and somehow the rhythm becomes the album.
A mother, three grown daughters, a Michigan cherry orchard during lockdown, and the summer-stock love story she finally tells them. Patchett at her quietest and most generous.
A retired tennis champion, thirty-seven, comes out of retirement to defend her record. Reid writes ambition the way other writers write romance — as obsession, as plot, as the whole point.
A forty-year-old gallerist and a twenty-year-old boy-band lead. Lee writes the affair with a seriousness most love stories don't earn.
A reclusive architect-mother disappears before a family trip to Antarctica; her daughter assembles the truth from emails and faxes. Funny in the way real intelligence is funny.
A plus-size influencer, a Cape Cod wedding she was not supposed to attend, and a body in the pool. Weiner can do beach and thriller in the same paragraph.
Pride and Prejudice in modern Cincinnati, with reality TV. Sittenfeld respects Austen enough to be funny without being cute.
A woman arrives at a Newport hotel planning to die there; the wedding party in the lobby has other ideas. Funnier and tenderer than that sentence makes it sound.
Four siblings of a missing rock-star father throw the party of the summer in 1983. The whole novel is one night that catches fire — literally.
A children's librarian whose fiancé left her for his childhood best friend. She moves in with the best friend's left-behind boyfriend. Henry's funniest book.
An NYU economics professor finds out her boyfriend's family is the richest in Singapore one summer. Kwan writes wealth like a foreign country with its own dialect.
