When we talk about beach reads, we don’t mean just any book that happens to exist in your bookcase. There’s a specific rubric involved. First, there’s the literal lightness (physically, not necessarily in theme - we’re not scared of a little existential dread between swims). Then comes length (short enough to finish in a few long afternoons), followed by portability, and let’s not pretend the cover design doesn’t matter. We pulled together a few picks that hit those marks. Are they our all-time favourites? Maybe yes maybe no, who knows? But we’ve read them, we liked them, and they feel like just the right mix to start your summer stack.
Alexandra’s picks
Hiroshima Mon Amour by Marguerite Duras
A book I truly love and one I picked up from a favourite NYC bookstore, Albertine, is Hiroshima Mon Amour. It’s a heart-crushing story set during and after WWII, told from a female perspective just behind the lines. Technically, it’s the script of Alain Resnais’ iconic film, written by Marguerite Duras, blending sparse dialogue with photographs and directorial notes. On the surface, it’s a conversation between a French actress and a Japanese architect in postwar Hiroshima. But underneath, it’s a meditation on memory, trauma, and the impossibility of truly understanding another’s pain. The story unfolds through a series of striking juxtapositions: the serene beauty of the actress’s hometown of Nevers contrasted with the ruins of Hiroshima; love and devastation; personal memory and historical trauma. The script also includes moments that didn’t make it into the final cut of the film, and vice versa. It’s a short read, but not a light one.
Hilaria: Récits intimes pour un féminisme révolutionnaire by Iréné
I picked up this book from my local Adad Books in Petralona Square on a day I really needed to read something that felt both inspiring and grounding. Feminism has always insisted on the power of personal stories, and this book lives in that space, where lived experience, political thought, and history collide. Irene, the writer, draws from the life of her ancestor Hilaria, a working-class Basque woman and widow raising her children alone in the 1930s. Despite the tragedy and instability of that time, Hilaria’s spirit -her joy, her determination to imagine and build a better world- never faltered. Her life becomes a kind of manual for feminist resistance today. With fascism creeping back into power across Europe and US, and with liberal, reformist feminism falling short, it’s Hilaria’s feminism we need to return to: one that is anarchist, antifascist, anticapitalist, and abolitionist at once.
*Tip: Only buy it if you can read French.
The Violet City (Η Μενεξεδένια Πολιτεία) by Angelos Terzakis
I first found this book one summer, years ago, tucked into my childhood bookcase. A true Athenian novel, pocket-sized, with short, inviting chapters, and very easy to read in under a week. What began as a random pick became a slow, emotional drift through a softer, more melancholic Athens during the interwar period, around 1937, a time when neither Greece nor the world was in its brightest hour. We see the city through the intertwined lives of characters who all, in one way or another, share dreams but live within a kind of eroding inertia. They are torn between moral ideals and a world subtly shifting around them. The story is rooted in a small bourgeois circle, full of introspection, fragility, and understated tension. The characters feel incredibly human, especially in their contradictions. What makes the book feel uncannily relevant today is its portrait of a city day by day losing its soul —not yet to mass tourism, overexploitation, or the commodification of everything, like today’s Athens— but to early modernisation, emotional drift, and growing disconnection among its people. The Violet City is an elegy: a gentle, precise meditation on beauty, memory, and the ache of inevitable change.
*Tip: Only buy it if you can read Greek.
Valisia’s picks
Even on holiday, I like my books a little twisted. Give me intrigue, manipulation, and a touch of melodrama over something “feel-good” any day. Some people bring romance to the shore —I bring dysfunction in fabulous outfits. This summer, I’ve packed three books full of schemers, sunbathers, and glamorous doom. SPF 50 recommended.
Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
A novel of letters, lies, and high-society sabotage. The Marquise and the Vicomte don’t flirt —they orchestrate ruin. Actually, they pull you into a world where even the sound of the waves feels like part of the plot.
“The complex moral ambiguities of seduction and revenge make Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature. The subject of major film and stage adaptations, the novel's prime movers, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, form an unholy alliance and turn seduction into a game - a game which they must win.”
Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie
A glamorous seaside hotel, one dead beauty, and enough secrets to fog up your sunglasses. Classic Christie at her sunniest and shadiest. “The beautiful bronzed body of Arlena Stuart lay facedown on the beach. But strangely, there was no sun and she was not sunbathing... she had been strangled. Ever since Arlena's arrival the air had been thick with sexual tension. Each of the guests had a motive to kill her. But Hercule Poirot suspects that this apparent 'crime of passion' conceals something much more evil.”
Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
A pill-popping, wig-snatching spiral through fame, friendship, and heartbreak. It is camp, it is tragic, it is iconic. Best read poolside, preferably with a martini and dramatic eye makeup.
“Dolls: red or black; capsules or tablets; washed down with vodka or swallowed straight-for Anne, Neely, and Jennifer, it doesn't matter, as long as the pill bottle is within easy reach. These three women become best friends when they are young and struggling in New York City and then climb to the top of the entertainment industry -- only to find that there is no place left to go but down -- into the Valley of the Dolls.”
Stella’s picks
Hitchcock/Truffaut by François Truffaut
A gift by a dear friend who knows my love for cinema and especially for the Grand Master= Alfred Hitchcock. What makes this book so exceptional isn’t just that it’s a comprehensive interview with Alfred Hitchcock — it’s that the conversation partner is none other than François Truffaut (in my opinion, one of the greatest film lovers there has ever been)! The result is a fascinating dialogue between 2 cinematic giants whose styles and cultural backgrounds couldn’t be more different. Together, they move through Hitchcock’s filmography one title at a time, unpacking his methods, themes, and creative decisions. First published in 1967, while Hitchcock was still actively directing, the book was later expanded by Truffaut to include the director’s final works. For anyone curious about Hitchcock’s approach to filmmaking — his craft, his obsessions, his dry wit — this is perhaps the most compelling and accessible entry point. It's also full of gems, like Hitchcock's revelation that Psycho’s infamous shower scene relied entirely on editing trickery: “the knife never touched the body.”
House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories by Yasunari Kawabata
I had to read Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauty first to discover my true favourite from the collection: One Arm. For me, the “and other stories” subtitle ended up holding the real gem. In these three stories, eroticism is woven together with nostalgia, loneliness, and reflections on lost love.
House of the Sleeping Beauty centers on a man who visits a peculiar brothel where elderly patrons spend the night beside unconscious virgins in scenes that are oddly chaste yet undeniably perverse. As he contemplates the beauty of the girl beside him, memories of his past affairs surface, leading him to muse on aging and desire.
In One Arm, a young woman detaches her right arm and gives it to the narrator to take home. What unfolds is a strange and sensual encounter, as he soothes and embraces the disembodied limb, even going so far as to replace his own arm with it — an intimate, surreal act of possession.
The final tale, Of Birds and Beasts, follows a man who finds deeper connection with animals than with people. Though he sees beauty in all living things, he relates to them as aesthetic objects — sources of pleasure that he ultimately regards with indifference, or even quiet cruelty.
Hypnos by René Char
I was listening to one of my favorite shows on the Trito Programme while driving one day when they began reading excerpts from Feuillets d’Hypnos (in French). I ended up parking and staying in the car for 45 minutes just to listen to the entire broadcast and the accompanying analysis. First published in 1946 and praised by poet Paul Éluard as an “absolute masterpiece,” René Char’s Hypnos stands as both a literary landmark and a vital testament to the French Resistance. Drawn from the journal Char kept while serving in the Maquis, the book blends stark, often cryptic reflections — efforts to orient himself in the moral and political darkness of Occupied France — with vivid narrative episodes that illuminate the gravity and danger he faced as a Resistance leader. At once a tribute to the brave men and women who fought alongside him, Hypnos is also a meditation on the redemptive force of poetry — its quiet power to resist terror and reawaken the beauty that sustains human life.
Happy reading! x