9 New Beach Reads for Your Summer Vacation (or Staycation)

The Someday Garden by Ashley Poston (June 16)

This one is for readers who want their summer escape with flowers, longing and a little moss-covered magic. Sophie Drear takes a temporary job restoring the grounds at Lilymoor House on the coast of Maine, expecting hedges, blooms and a clean break from her ordinary life. Instead, she finds an estate full of quirky staffers, unstable foliage and a door that moves around and opens into a secret garden where a mysterious man is trapped. Poston, the New York Times best-selling author of Sounds Like Love and The Seven Year Slip, imbues her novel with a romantic, wistful mood and enough magic to make the summery Maine setting feel enchanted. 

Summerland Cove by Ellen Baker (June 2)

This vacation-gone-wrong story features a family in crisis, a missing husband and secrets rattling around behind the porch screens. Lindy, 48, has planned three huge events at her family’s cottage in (again!) coastal Maine: her husband David’s 50th birthday, her parents’ 50th anniversary and her daughter’s wedding. Then David vanishes before his own party. Baker sets the novel in 2010, when spotty cell service could still make a disappearance feel possible in a way it rarely does now. As Lindy, her four nearly grown children and her 81-year-old mother, Greta, search for answers, the family’s meant-to-be-perfect summer retreat falls apart. 

When You Loved Me by Beatriz Williams (June 23)

Williams returns to Winthrop Island, the fictional setting that has helped make her a best-selling name in contemporary and historical fiction. Widowed Lucy Cooper arrives at her family’s crumbling New England vacation home with her young daughter after her estranged father’s death and finds his estate weighted with debt — despite her father’s (and some locals’) longtime belief that pirates’ treasure is hidden somewhere on the property. She’s also unsettled by the appearance of Ben Ressler, once a Dartmouth football star and the source of Lucy’s most painful memories, as she wrestles with her weighty family history and buried secrets. 

Dolly All the Time by Annabel Monaghan (May 26)

This romantic novel is one of the lighter reads on the list. Overworked single mom Dolly Brick, 39, returns to her Rhode Island hometown for the summer to help save her family home when she meets Stewart Whitfield, a wealthy local scion who’s dealing with a humiliating public breakup. She agrees to help shore up his rep by posing as his new love interest, but the fake relationship soon begins to feel not so fake. Monaghan, the New York Times best-selling author of Nora Goes Off Script, keeps the story bright and comic, with enough salt to cut the sweetness. 

Down With the Shipmans by Meg Mitchell Moore (June 2)

The beach house may be lovely, but the family occupying it is something else altogether. Meg Mitchell Moore’s 10th novel brings the Shipman sisters back to their New Hampshire coast summer home for their first reunion since their mother’s death. Their father, Calvin, has news: He plans to sell the house. Jordan is a crisis communications expert with her own mess to manage. Natalie has built a tradwife brand that is about to crack under public scrutiny. Mae is attached to a troublesome rescue dog. Then Calvin’s new wife enters the picture. Funny and tense, this novel is for anyone who has watched adult siblings revert to childhood squabbles over who gets the good bedroom. 

Courtesy Mysterious Bookshop

Poppy Montgomery Gets Even by Gordon Jack (June 9)

Poppy Montgomery is 80 and fed up with people trying to manage her life: The police have taken away her driver’s license. Her daughter wants her in a retirement home. A fitness tyrant is trying to take over her water aerobics class. So she’s ready for war after her friend Ginny loses money to a scammer on a dating site for older adults. With help from her tech-savvy grandson, Poppy launches a revenge caper that evolves into a murder investigation after suspicious deaths at Ginny’s retirement home. It’s a comic crime caper with teeth: cranky and brisk, with an older woman you’ll root for. 

Courtesy Source Books

Lost in the Summer of ’69 by Eliza Knight (June 9)

Eleanor Bell is a widow and musician facing an early-dementia diagnosis as she turns 69. Wanting to seize the day while she’s still healthy, she spontaneously — and without telling her family — grabs her guitar and heads west to join the music festival circuit and chase the dream she gave up decades earlier. Her appalled daughter and reluctant (at first) granddaughter set out after her in a Lincoln Continental, always one stop behind, as Eleanor becomes an unlikely late-life sensation. The result is a delightful, multigenerational nostalgia trip.