Five classic novels that are also perfect beach reads

It's the Venn diagram you never knew you needed

The art of reading by the pool

There’s a job I really want, and it’s to be the person who decides which books characters in T.V. shows are pictured reading. White Lotus is the best example of a show that uses books as suggestive props: how perfect was it that Season 1’s Rachel - the conflicted newlywed married to Shane (of pineapple-suite demanding fame) - was reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend? I love The Neapolitan Quartet as much as the next person, but here the novel feels just smart and literary enough to show that aspirational, awkward Rachel is trying to keep up with the times – and exactly cliché enough to suggest she’s ever so slightly behind them. (Her partner, a real-estate billionaire-bro, is reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, which is also chef’s kiss.) Then in Season 3, we got Aimee Lou Wood reading a collection of 13^th century Persian poet Rumi’s romantic, spiritual verses – the ideal choice for an astrology-obsessed twenty-four-year-old on holiday in Thailand.

All this is to say, the book you take to the pool says a lot about you. And if you don’t want to be judged for reading that dog-eared copy of Confessions of a Shopaholic you found at the Airbnb, then here is the reading list you didn’t know you needed: five classic novels, that are also excellent beach reads. To compile this list, I’ve thought about scorching summer settings; themes of travel, romance and self-discovery; fast-paced plotting and an achievable page count; and of course, beautiful prose and enduring classic appeal. I can guarantee that any one of these novels will stay with you longer than the paint-by-numbers thriller you’ll have forgotten by the time you get home. And producers, consider this my audition for literary-televisual-consultant on White Lotus Season 4.

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1. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster

A Room With a View would have been the obvious Forster choice here, with its sultry Florentine setting and forbidden love plot. But I think Where Angels Fear to Tread scratches the same itch, while being a more daring and original work – and shorter, too. The novel, published in 1905, follows young-ish widow Lilia, whose lack of propriety is beginning to grate on the upper-class family of her dead husband, Charles. Charles’ relatives decide to ship her off on a tour of Italy, hoping she’ll be purified and ennobled by time in the Bel Paese – or at least, that she’ll be far away enough to stop embarrassing them. As her brother-in-law sees her off on the train, he somewhat condescendingly instructs her to ‘Remember… that it is only by going off the track that you get to know the country’ – but when Lilia goes off-track enough to get engaged to a working-class man from rural Tuscany, the scandal her family-in-law seems set to face goes from bad to worse. This is a sharp, funny, ultimately tragic novel about prejudice, convention, and the meaning of virtue – it’s both a witty satire and a warning cry against the idolisation, above all else, of respectability.

2. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Although it’s not my favourite Austen novel, of the author’s six finished works Northanger Abbey is the one which could most persuasively be described as a ‘romp’. Plus, a large part of it is set in Bath during the summer season, so if you’re spending your holidays in the U.K. (or want to imagine yourself there) then it’s a lovely one to read. The story follows Catherine Morland, a naïve heroine-in-the-making, who encounters all sorts of misadventures as she is introduced to a high-society world of fashion, balls, flirtation and gossip in Bath. The novel then moves to the titular setting of Northanger Abbey, and becomes a kind of gothic burlesque. Austen uses the manor setting, and the fancies of her impressionable heroine, to pastiche the popular gothic tropes of her day – there’s lots of violent storms and secret passages – while, as always, satirising the mores of high society too. It’s a fun, rollicking read with a happy ending.

3. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

This 1855 novel made the beachy list because as well as being an under-rated classic, it’s animated by a compelling enemies-to-lovers plot: although the setting is certainly grittier than Pride and Prejudice, if you’re a fan of Austen’s classic, you’ll probably enjoy this too. The novel follows headstrong but sensitive Margaret Hale, forced to uproot her sheltered existence in a gentle, privileged corner of Southern England to move to the fictional Northern mining town of Milton. There, she clashes with cotton-mill owner Mr Thornton - a successful, self-made manufacturer and proud individualist - and struggles to adjust to the harshness of life in his industrial town. In the end, both characters are forced to examine their prejudices and learn from each other. I love North and South for its deeply felt reflection on the social and cultural issues of Industrial Age England, and its excellent characterisation.

4. Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera

I was thinking of putting The Unbearable Lightness of Being on this list, but I don’t want to be responsible for people on the beach thinking you’re a poser. Unfortunately, I think reading Unbearable Lightness poolside would be a bit like Olivia in The White Lotus smugly reading The Portable Nietzsche (although the novel is one of my favourites, so if you haven’t already, you should definitely read it sometime in an unobserved setting). Instead, I’ve gone with Kundera’s Laughable Loves, a slim collection of compelling short stories which serve as an excellent introduction to his work. They’re surprising, erotically charged vignettes, both dark and illuminating, which use the games we play within relationships as jumping-off points for stories of pleasure and pain.

5. Madame Bovary by Flaubert (translated by Lydia Davis)

Madame Bovary, the story of a bored, unfaithful housewife in provincial France, whose idealistic romantic illusions and limiting circumstances as a woman/mother/wife mean she struggles to accept the reality of her existence, is one of those books that has seeped into the fabric of our cultural atmosphere: her character has become, like Auden said of Freud, a ‘whole climate of opinion’. Arguably, Emma Bovary is the archetype informing many of contemporary literature’s disaffected, neurotic, self-destructive female characters, who pursue inappropriate sexual relationships to fill a void; from Fleabag to Sally Rooney’s creations. In fact, so influential was the novel and its central protagonist that in 1892 Jules de Gaultier coined the term ‘Bovarysme’ to describe a condition of chronic affective dissatisfaction with one's life, and a tendency toward escapist daydreaming. So, it’s worth sitting down, and finding out where it all comes from. Reading a foreign classic might feel heavy for the beach, but Lydia Davis’ translation is brilliantly engaging, visual, and alive. And what could be more beachy than a story of infidelity, poisoning, and existential despair? Plus, there’s lots of shopping. So if you were still craving Confessions of a Shopaholic, then Madame Bovary has you covered.

Happy reading and happy summer!

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