What better place to get a head start on your annual reading goals than lying on the beach? Here are our favourite fun, breezy, and compulsive page-turners, for those beach days when you want to be entertained!
The Heir Apparent by Rebecca Armitage
Lexi Villiers is a 29-year-old Englishwoman doing her medical residency in Hobart, working too hard, worried about her bank balance, and living with friends. It’s a good life, and getting even better, because as the dawn is breaking on New Year’s Day, Lexi is about to kiss the man she loves for the very first time.
But by midnight, everything will change. Because Lexi is in fact not an ordinary young woman. She is Princess Alexandrina, third in line to the British throne – albeit estranged from the rest of her family and living in voluntary exile on the other side of the world. But following a terrible accident, Lexi – the black sheep of her family and, until this moment, always destined to be the spare – is now the heir apparent, first in line to the throne once her grandmother, the elderly Queen, dies. Called back to do her duty, she arrives in London to a Palace riven with power plays and media leaks, all the while guarding painful secrets of her own. Palace waters are treacherous, rumours are rife, and selling each other’s secrets is a family tradition. And with the Crown
We Are All Guilty Here by Karin Slaughter
Welcome to North Falls.
A small town where everyone knows everyone. But nobody knows the truth.
Emmy Clifton has lived here all her life. She thinks she knows her neighbours. She’s wrong.
She thinks it’s just another hot summer night: a night like any other. She’s wrong.
When her best friend’s daughter asks for help, she thinks it’s just some teenage drama. She thinks it can wait. She’s never been more wrong in her life.
As the town ignites in the wake of the girl’s disappearance, Emmy throws herself into the search. But then she realises: You never really know a town until you know its secrets.
Is Emmy ready for the truth?
The Princess Knight by Cait Jacobs
‘A romantasy for the (middle) ages’
THE DAILY CHAINMAIL
‘This blonde is a knight to behold – and the queen of our hearts’
ROLLING THRONE
‘Great gowns, beautiful gowns’
COURTLY LIVING
Prince Domhnall and Princess Clía are the perfect royal match – that is until he ruins everything by refusing to propose. Heartbroken but determined, Clía wins a place at Domhnall’s military academy to win him back. After all, how hard can duelling really be?
Warrior Ronan has no time for blonde princesses. Even if she is…well, cute. He tells himself there’s no harm training her. Even if his heart does race around her. Even if Domhnall is his best friend.
But, as they say, love is a battlefield – and unfortunately for them, a very real war is looming on the horizon. It’s a fight that will threaten their kingdoms…and their hearts.
Paper Heart by Cecelia Ahern
Pip’s world is small. But it’s about to become a whole lot bigger.
For years she’s tucked away her dreams, shrinking herself into the space left behind – like the delicate origami she creates alone in her room.
Then hope comes from an unlikely place: an astronomer from the local observatory. He teaches her to look up at the stars, and to see a world far bigger and more beautiful than she ever imagined.
And perhaps in that big, beautiful universe there’s someone waiting for her. If she can find the courage to open her heart.
Pip never stopped dreaming, but now it’s time for her to live – and maybe even to fall in love.
One of Us by Elizabeth Day
In this compulsive story of betrayal, old bonds and buried scandals, one British establishment family comes face to face with the consequences of privilege and the true cost of power.
Martin and Ben were friends for decades — best friends, Martin would have said — before the terrible events at Ben’s 40th birthday party tore them apart. So when Martin receives a surprise invitation back into the inner sanctum of the dazzling Fitzmaurice family after seven years of silence, he can’t resist the chance to get his revenge.
Ben has risen through the ranks of power, and is now touted as the next Prime Minister. But Martin can’t help but notice certain flies in the ointment… Ben’s wife, Serena, for instance, whose privileged existence is beginning to feel like a gilded cage. Or their daughter, Cosima, an environmental activist fighting against everything her parents once stood for. Or the disgraced MP Richard Take, determined to make his big comeback. And then there’s Fliss, the Fitzmaurice black sheep, whose untimely death sparks more suspicion than closure. Through their intertwined stories, we see a family – and a nation – unravelling under the weight of its secrets.
With everyone watching, the stage is set for a reckoning. It’s time for Martin and Ben to confront what love truly means when everything—family, power, and loyalty—is on the line.
Loved One by Aisha Muharrar
‘For years I’d known exactly who I was to Gabe. It was a long story but I could tell it confidently, like a bartender sharing a recipe for her signature cocktail. Now things were so jumbled, I didn’t know where to begin…’
When Julia’s first-love-turned-close-friend Gabe, a successful indie musician, dies unexpectedly aged 29, Julia is launched into an intercontinental quest to recover the possessions he left with friends and acquaintances across the world.
The search for these items leads Julia to Elizabeth, the last woman Gabe loved, in an interaction that leaves Julia with more questions than answers. Both women, it turns out, have something to hide, and soon find themselves engaged in a complex dance of withholding and revelation.
Together, the two must reconcile their conflicting memories of Gabe and who he was to each of them…and who they now are to each other.
From the Emmy Award-winning writer behind Hacks and Parks and Recreation, Loved One is a wise, witty and profoundly moving coming-of-age story with a powerful love at its heart, set to become an instant classic.
A Smart Girl’s Guide to Second Chances by Steph Vizard
What happens when the man who broke your heart reappears just before your wedding?
The new romantic comedy from award-winning author Steph Vizard for fans of Beth O’Leary, Mhairi McFarlane and Lizzy Dent.
To Do List
1. Replace decapitated groom cake topper
2. Complete twenty-page questionnaire for second-choice celebrant
3. Break family curse
4. Ignore ex-boyfriend / current client
Rebecca, a super-smart consultant, is determined to defy the family marriage curse, which claims no woman marries their first fiance, and prove that Matt is The One.
Although the wedding planning lurches from one disaster to the next and she has to steer a major work project before the big day, Rebecca is sure she can stay on top of things. That is until Alex – the ex who dramatically broke her heart at Oxford University – reappears in the boardroom as her new client. How dare he still be as infuriatingly clever and hot as before? And since when did he start wearing shirts with collars?
As Rebecca’s past and present collide, she realises her choices can’t be resolved with a trusty pros and cons list. Before she makes it down the aisle, she’ll have to finally come to terms with the age-old question: head or heart?