What makes a good beach read? My main criterion is that the pages must turn quickly, almost as if by magic. Finding out what happens next becomes the most important thing in the world. You don’t just take the book to the beach; you take the book to the dinner table, to bed, on the bus or the boat. In other words, you cannot put it down.
A good beach read doesn’t have to be light and frothy – although sometimes that’s just what the doctor ordered when the most complex thing you can handle is applying sunscreen and floating on your back.
We’d love to hear about your favourite beach reads by Australian writers. Here are some of ours, based on both their literary merit (just because you’re reading at the beach, doesn’t mean you want to put up with sloppy prose) and page-turning qualities.
1. The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
A word-of-mouth phenomenon on its release in 2008, The Slap has a simple premise: a man at a family barbecue slaps a child who is not his own.
The Slap captured the zeitgeist of John Howard’s aspirational Australia and ignited thousands of conversations along the lines of “what would you do?”
But it’s also a page-turner – each chapter is told from a different character’s point of view, and the characters are so well-drawn that it’s a wrench to leave their worlds.
2. Joe Cinque’s Consolation by Helen Garner
A controversial inclusion: Joe Cinque’s Consolation deals with dark subject matter but it’s a real-life court story, and the unfolding trial provides the narrative drive.
In 1997 Anu Singh killed Joe Cinque with a lethal dose of heroin after she laced his coffee with rohypnol. At a dinner party and in law student circles at the Australian National University in in Canberra, a number of her friends and acquaintances had been informed of her intent to kill him. So why did no one try to stop her?
Eminently readable, like all the best true crime, the suspense lies in whether or not Singh will be found guilty of Cinque’s murder.
3. The Riders by Tim Winton
This 1994 book is a departure for Winton from his usual home turf of beachside Western Australia. Much of the action of The Riders takes place in Ireland and other locations throughout Europe and it is a joy to see him use his vivid powers of description for places outside Australia.
In many ways The Riders is a chase novel. The main character, Fred Scully, goes to Shannon airport to collect his wife and six-year-old daughter, Billie, but only Billie gets off the plane. The reader is as clueless as the loved-up, hapless Scully as to the whereabouts of his wife – and so we follow him in his frantic search for her through the Greek isles, Rome, Paris and Amsterdam. It is fast-paced and full of action, with Winton coming close to penning a thriller.
4. Stasiland by Anna Funder
These true stories of the people who were caught in the web of secret policing and industrial-strength surveillance in cold war East Germany is a gripping read.
The Australian writer Anna Funder was living in Berlin just after the wall fell, and watched history speed along while the stories of those whose lives were affected by the Stasi, the East German secret police, were being forgotten.
Including interviews with both the spies and the spied upon, Funder’s gripping account of the era has the descriptive but restrained prose of a novel.
5. A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
Steve Toltz’s 2008 debut novel, A Fraction of the Whole, is a long, engrossing read. It’s a joyful, discursive, funny romp through three generations of one strange family, the Deans. There are lots of laugh-out-loud moments in this book but amid the humour are some acute observations about Australian character and values.
Jasper Dean tries to unravel the enigma that is his father, Martin – paranoid, inventive, hilarious and full of life lessons that he regularly imparted to his son. Fixated by his own death, in life Martin embarks on a series of weird and wonderful “immortality projects”, the results of which kept me glued to the page over my summer holiday.
Other Guardian Australia writers recommend:
6. The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson
It’s an Australian classic but don’t let that put you off. It’s the late 19th century and 12-year-old Laura Tweedle Rambotham leaves her widowed mother, her younger siblings and her country life to attend boarding school in Melbourne.
Laura is imaginative, clever and speaks her mind – and finds out that such qualities might be tolerated at home but get her in trouble more often than not in the wealthy and often judgmental company she finds herself keeping in the big city. A gorgeous coming-of-age story that is both charming and deeply moving. Stephanie Convery
7. Butterfly Song by Terri Janke
Tarena Shaw is a young Indigenous lawyer facing her final exams at Sydney University. Then her mother sends her a newspaper clipping about a brooch that is up for auction – a family heirloom that disappeared when her grandmother died. Tarena is charged with getting the brooch back and, to prove her family’s ownership, she must go back to Thursday Island, to the home of her grandparents, and dive deep into her family’s memories and their accounts of the pearling days of the Torres Strait.
Part redemption narrative, part Indigenous rights parable, Terri Janke’s novel from 2005 might deal with big issues but it’s a story delivered with a light touch and a lot of heart. Stephanie Convery
8. The Broken Shore followed by Truth by Peter Temple
Why have one beach read when you can have two? Start with Peter Temple’s brilliant crime novel The Broken Shore, safe in the knowledge that you’ve got its equally wonderful companion novel, Truth, lurking in your beach bag. When you finish the first you can immediately dive into the next.
The Broken Shore (winner of multiple international crime writing awards) and Truth (winner of the Miles Franklin) are set in Victoria. Temple follows some crime-writing conventions – yes there are crimes to be solved, yes the plot thickens, yes there are flawed cops with problems of their own – but he folds in so many layers with so much style that genre becomes irrelevant.
The joy is in Temple’s writing – so tight and pared back that it almost seems to be in code. His feel for dialogue and rhythm is superb, his control and timing masterful. With these books he has pulled off no mean feat: literary masterpieces that also happen to be page-turners. Lucy Clark
9. The Watch Tower by Elizabeth Harrower
This is no page-turner in the action-packed sense. It’s a psychological thriller centred on domestic life in Sydney suburbia in the 1940s, as gripping and terrifying as any horror story.
Little by little, sisters Laura and Clare are controlled and humiliated by Felix Shaw – Laura’s husband and one of the great villains in Australian literature – who loathes women while pretending to love them.
How do they escape? Can they escape? An astonishing book first published in 1966. It was out of print and all-but-forgotten before Text Publishing reissued it in 2012. Gay Alcorn
10. Missus by Ruth Park
A prequel Ruth Park wrote 40 years after the two other books in her Harp in the South trilogy, Missus is the tale of how Hughie and Mumma Darcy got together in outback New South Wales in the years leading up to the Great Depression – before they moved to the slums of Sydney’s Surry Hills.
It’s a rollicking read, simply and vividly written (sample sentence: “The wife never saw John come through the back gate without a wickedly warm tickle in her vitals, and the sight of Eny waggling her bottom as she stirred a pot on the fire made John feel quite astray”). There isn’t a lot of plot but it’s a spirited romp, and Park’s large cast of characters leap off the page. Nikki Marshall
