Beach Reads for the Because Reader

Businessmen as Lovers by Rosemary Tonks (1969)

Two Englishwomen, Mimi and Caroline, are off to an Italian island on holiday. There they join an eccentric and glamorous community of guests, where the vacation setting disavows any sense of responsibility, and pranks, affairs and general disarray become part of their daily life. Tonks is a lovely and underrated writer with wit by way of Waugh or Spark, and Cooper’s eye for the comedy of sex. No doubt a wonderful model for any forthcoming girls trip.  

Grand Rapids by Natasha Stagg (2025)

The doyenne of downtown writing, Natasha Stagg’s latest work and her second novel, Grand Rapids, has an opposite feel, pulling from the author’s upbringing to tell the story of fifteen-year-old Tess, phlegmatic with grief and anti-depressants after the death of her mother forces her to move to Grand Rapids, Michigan. For those for whom summer evokes memories of suburban discontent and the malaise of teenage boredom, this novel distils that feeling perfectly.

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Armin (1922)

The novel credited with putting Portofino on the map, The Enchanted April is not dissimilar to Businessmen as Lovers in its premise: four women, strangers of entirely different contexts and temperaments, cohere to rent a castle on the sunny Med to escape the doldrums of the miserable English weather and their miserable English husbands and seek spiritual renewal abroad. Armin’s novel is a very charming and moving account of the restorative powers of travel and the joy of female friendship. 

Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott (1929)

Another well-timed reissue (Tonks being the first), Ursula Parrott’s novel was first published anonymously and slandered as pornographic trash shorn of all morality. Now, we might be more appreciative. Really, Ex-Wife is an unmistakably prescient, entertaining read about a 24-year-old soon-to-be divorcée, Patricia, as she navigates issues as relevant then as now (friendship, hangovers and casual sex) with acid insight. Critics in search of analogy have compared Parrott to Rhys, but my advice is to read Ex-Wife exactly for what it is. 

Flamboyance by Jack Parlett (2026)

Not a novel, but rather part memoir and part social history, Flamboyance tracks Parlett’s discovery of everything flamboyant, from gothic architecture to Lil Nas X. This straddling of high and low, interweaved with his biography and inner mind, does a wonderful job of eschewing mawkishness or frenzy, markedly lucid and personable despite the vastness of subject matter and emotion underpinning it. Read an extract here.

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