Summer beach novels

Is anything new under the sun except books? My own preference by oceans and lakes is for books that raise energy levels. Others prefer calming waves. So here are two of the former and two of the latter.

Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway (Viking, 2024) shows the power of DNA. Harkaway is the son of masterful British spy novelist David Cornwall, better known by his John le Carre pen name, and if I didn’t know the latter died five years ago I’d think he was still scribbling away—but by all accounts, this is all son.

Fans of the father will remember the overall ethos of the 1960s/1970s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and “the Smiley Trilogy,” which Harkaway admirably upholds through murmurings like this one from George Smiley, explaining his resignation: “I realized I’d crossed a line. I tell myself the Circus [Britain’s spies] must triumph because the other side is monstrous; that London and Washington must defeat Moscow because we understand the obligation of the ruler to the ruled, and they do not. But come to it, we abandoned our obligations and chose to be every bit as monstrous ourselves in quest of victory.” 

But enough about the contemporary DC circus! Scenes like this one about disarming a man with murder on his mind make Karla’s Choice good beach reading: “Sally Roberts laid her right arm like the diagonal of a three-point seat belt down and across Miki’s chest, the left side of her head resting gently against his own. Her other hand was on his left shoulder, or perhaps his neck…. Her hand slipped inside his coat to remove the gun, keeping contact with his chest as it moved back up so that the barrel lay across his body. When she reached the collar-bone, it went around his shoulder and into her coat pocket. ‘Now, is there anything else I need to take notice of, or are we an honest man?’”

Karla’s Choice is set in the 1960s when Russia was the clear enemy. Joseph Finder’s The Oligarch’s Daughter (Harper, 2025) has a 2018-2024 setting, with an aggressive Russia still the enemy. Finder’s protagonist is a Wall Street kid who falls in love with a beautiful Russian expatriate without counting the familial cost. He must then run for his life as her dad, a Kremlin billionaire who doesn’t believe that US borders should keep him from killing at will. Finder’s novel seems to get lost midway but then pulls everything together at the end.

While the Russia-Ukraine war continues, novelists with international themes this year should realize that bad guys have become good guys and calculate their plots accordingly. Not so with my third beach read novel, Anne Tyler’s pleasant but unsurprising Three Days in June (Knopf, 2025). The three days surround daughter Debbie’s wedding, with her divorced parents Gail and Max trying not to kill each other. Tyler’s “tart sense of humor” (book jacket talk, but true) kept me reading even when I suspected they would eventually kiss each other.

Also tart is Mr. Texas by Lawrence Wright (Knopf, 2023), a tall tale of how a Mr. Nobody from West Texas takes heroic action at a burning barn as a camera providentially rolls. A cynical political fixer turns Sonny Lamb, ready for the slaughter, into a winning candidate for the Texas legislature. Will Sonny stop lyin’ and become a lion? Wright amusingly guides us through the Austin jungle. 

Briefly Noted

Thoughts of beach reading bring me to Obbie Tyler Todd’s The Beechers: America’s Most Influential Family (LSU Press, 2024), which smoothly narrates a tale of preachers, over-reachers, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, whom Abraham Lincoln may have greeted as “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” (Todd is calm and the Beechers were sometimes hysterical, but neither should be confused with Mary Todd Lincoln, who put on such airs—with an illustrious family background—that her husband once joked about how God was satisfied with only one “d” in His name.)

Many people do not equate Bible commentary with sweet beach days, but Alex Duke in From Eden to Egypt (Zondervan, 2025) feeds readers spoonfuls of sugar as he walks us through the grasslands of Genesis. That works for seekers and the suspicious as well as longtime churchgoers and Sunday School teachers. David Gibson’s The Lord of Psalm 23: Jesus Our Shepherd, Companion, and Host (Crossway, 2023) is a well-written focus on the psalm so familiar that it may seem like three days in June but, understood properly, is a thriller.