10 great New England beach reads, from old standbys to new classics

WHAT: In his Pulitzer Prize winning 2022 memoir, Hua Hsu retells his turbulent college years, focusing on a friendship with someone his polar opposite who irrevocably changed his life.

WHY: The memoir, which takes place in the Bay Area and ends in Cambridge, is a mesmerizing meditation on friendship, identity, grief, and the experiences that bind us across our differences. (Young-Jin Kim)

WHAT: In this National Book Award winner for nonfiction, it’s the year 1820, when the doomed Nantucket ship Essex is sunk by a sperm whale attack, and sailors try to survive for months in the open waters of the Pacific.

WHY: A longtime Nantucket resident and premier historian of the island, Nathaniel Philbrick has crafted this gripping narrative, published in 2000, around the accounts of the ship’s first mate and cabin boy. And if the tale of the Essex sounds somewhat familiar, that’s because it directly inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick. (Matthew Reed Baker)

WHAT: Michael Patrick MacDonald’s gritty memoir takes us inside the South Boston he grew up in, one marked by white poverty, violence, corruption, and loss ― but, simultaneously, “the best place in the world.” The deaths of four of his siblings tell a story of Southie’s “lost generation.”

WHY: Like a friend who doesn’t gloss over the bad, and weaves in good bits, too, MacDonald provides an unflinching look at events that shaped today’s Boston, including the 1974 anti-busing protests that turned into riots. But instead of giving us the headlines, we get the faces of Southie. (Lisa Button)

WHAT: Law professor Talcott Garland is driven to investigate the suspicious death of his father, a prominent federal judge and former Supreme Court nominee, in this 2002 novel.

WHY: Yale Law School professor Stephen L. Carter writes incisively about upper-crust Washington, D.C., Martha’s Vineyard, and “Elm Harbor” (a thinly veiled Yale and New Haven), and weaves a complex mystery through a vast cast of characters. Political intrigue and family drama make nearly 700 pages breeze by. (Matthew Reed Baker)

WHAT: In this 1982 four-novella collection, a man wrongly convicted of murder plots his prison escape, a teenager forms a deadly friendship with a Nazi war criminal, four young friends seek the body of a missing boy, and a desperate mother gives birth in a macabre but miraculous way.

WHY: These aren’t horror, but tense, character-driven fiction that features some of Stephen King’s best writing. If the plots sound familiar, that’s because three have been made into movies: The Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil, and Stand By Me. (Matthew Reed Baker)

WHAT: This delicious, devious campus novel from 1992 is set at a veiled version of Bennington College in Vermont, author Donna Tartt’s alma mater.

WHY: It has it all: bacchic rites, a group of glamorous Ancient Greek students, love triangles, town-gown friction, murder. It manages to be at once cerebral and genuinely suspenseful, despite giving away the central plot point on the first page. I’ve easily read it 10 times. (Annalisa Quinn)

WHAT: After working for years at various resorts, Adrienne Dealey finds herself on Nantucket employed by a marquee restaurant and falling in love with its owner, who harbors a secret that involves his mysterious chef.

WHY: Author of more than two dozen novels, Elin Hilderbrand is the undisputed queen of the New England beach read. The Blue Bistro (2005) boasts her trademark island vibes and warm romance, but earns extra points for its heartbreaking subplot, luscious food descriptions, and being inspired by Nantucket’s real-life culinary fixture, Galley Beach. (Matthew Reed Baker)

WHAT: Eddie Coyle is a low-level Boston criminal, running guns to bank robbers, who gets caught in a tightening vise between the syndicate he works for and the ATF agent who wants him to become an informer.

WHY: When he was writing, George V. Higgins served Massachusetts as assistant attorney general and then assistant US attorney, and he uncannily captures the hard-boiled dialogue and gritty settings of Coyle’s world. This tautly-plotted 1970 novel launched a thousand Boston crime dramas. It’s still the best. (Matthew Reed Baker)

WHAT: Four women constituting three generations of the Kelleher family stay at the family beach house in Maine, where they must work through the haunting challenges of the past and present.

WHY: J. Courtney Sullivan — a Milton native — masterfully captures the rich history of each woman and how they’ve coped, from domineering matriarch Alice, who remembers the Cocoanut Grove fire, to granddaughter Maggie, a fiction writer who shows up at the house pregnant and alone. (Matthew Reed Baker)

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