15 Beach Reads That Distracted Moms Might Actually Be Able to Finish

In Anita Hughes's California Summer, a Hollywood producer decides to leave LA — and her adulterous director husband — behind to finally realize her dream of opening a fish taco shop, hoping to get a fresh start and a second chance.

Jane Delury's debut novel, The Balcony, is set in a small village near Paris and follows the story of several generations of inhabitants in a single estate, including a young American au pair, a Jewish couple hiding from the Gestapo, and a housewife who begins an affair while renovating her downstairs.

Janna King's debut novel, The Seasonaires, tells the story of six 20-something Summer brand ambassadors whose growing social media followings get them caught up in a world of corporate greed, substance abuse, and — eventually — murder.

The Optimist's Guide to Letting Go by Amy E. Reichert is about a recent widow who — in the aftermath of her mother's serious stroke — learns that her the man she thought was her father may not actually be, compelling her to learn about a past that her status-obsessed mother never shared with her.

In Karma Brown's The Life Lucy Knew, when Lucy wakes after a traumatizing accident to discover that the man she believes herself to have recently married is actually someone she hasn't spoken to since their breakup four years earlier, she must question all of her memories, as well as contend with the fact that who she really is may not be who she wants to be.

Ann Mah's The Lost Vintage tells the story of Kate, a young woman who — while awaiting her last chance to pass the notoriously difficult Master of Wine examination — discovers documents that introduce her to a relative she never knew existed, a great–half aunt who was a teenager during the Nazi occupation.

In Dorothea Benton Frank's Southern comedy of manners, By Invitation Only, a privileged young woman from Chicago is engaged to marry the son of hard-working South Carolina peach farmers, and their families struggle to support their relationship while wondering how their own lives will now change.

In Amy Willoughby-Burle's The Lemonade Year, food photographer Nina Griffin finds that the things she once relied on are slowly falling apart — her marriage, her job, her parents, and her family — and Nina must use her keen insight to figure out which things are worth salvaging.

In Samantha Irby's first essay collection, Meaty, she explores everything from chin hairs, to bad sex, to taco feasts, to inflammatory bowel disease, all with her trademark wit and painfully relatable candor.

In Judy Blundell's first adult novel, The High Season, Hamptons resident Ruthie Beamish finds herself losing both her house and her ex-husband to an ultrarich widow, but when the safety of her museum director job is also threatened, Ruthie decides to finally fight back.

Elaine Neil Orr's Southern coming-of-age novel, Swimming Between Worlds, takes place in 1960s Winston-Salem, telling the story of a disgraced high school football star and his recently orphaned former classmate who befriend a young African-American man and suddenly find themselves at the center of the civil rights struggle.

Based on the column of the same name that appeared in The Toast, Michelle Markowitz and Caroline Moss's Hey Ladies! follows a fictitious group of eight 20-and-30-something female friends through a year of email and text correspondence, following their dates, brunches, breakups, and the planning of what is sure to be a disastrous wedding.

In Meghan Maclean Weir's The Book of Essie, a young woman who grew up in the spotlight of her family's reality television show, Six for Hicks, discovers that she is pregnant, and the show's producers must decide how to spin this scandal to preserve her family's ultraconservative image.

Lady Be Good by Amber Brock tells the story of social climbing Kitty Tessler, the only daughter of a self-made hotel and nightclub tycoon, who must decide between the man her father wants her to marry, the horrible but fabulously wealthy man from a powerful family, or Max, the man who shows her a world beyond her small, privileged corner of 1950s Manhattan.

In Fiona Valpy The Beekeeper's Promise, she explores the parallel lives of two women living generations apart — heartbroken Abi Howes, who takes a summer job at the Château Bellevue hoping for an escape, and Eliane Martin, who once tended beehives in the garden of the château in 1938 and became separated from her first love in the chaos of German occupation.