A Sultry, Summery Escape: Seven Hamptons Novels to Read This Winter

It’s winter in New York, which means everyone’s miserable. But the eternally elusive prospect of escaping the city and its grey slush beckons, and there’s no better escape than these sultry, summery Hamptons novels. Plenty of artists and writers have been captivated by the East End, and many of them even famously called it home (John Steinbeck! Truman Capote! Kurt Vonnegut! Betty Friedan!). For the rest of us, it’s living vicariously through these sun-soaked tales of lust, betrayal, and beach houses.

In my new novel, set during the offseason in her sometime-lover’s family beach house, ‘lover girl’ floats from boy to boy, beach to city, and ultimately to Paris, searching for ever-elusive meaning, love, and inspiration. Here are other novels that offer that sort of escape.

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Four Blondes by Candace Bushnell

Yes, she wrote Sex And The City, but she is also a brilliant satirist who wrote this linked story collection (before they were cool). Bushnell’s women are constantly swanning around town doing their hair and having affairs. If only life could be so perfectly beautiful! A must-read for any dreary February night.

A Touch of Jen by Beth Morgan

This brilliantly acerbic novel is set up as a millennial comedy of manners, but when Remy and Alicia head to the Hamptons for a surf weekend with Instagram-baddie Jen, a pair of glowing eyes in the bushes is just the first indication that things are very, very wrong. Read it if you like surfing, skincare, or polyamory.

The Guest by Emma Cline

The summer this came out, every linen-clad maniac was clutching this in their greasy hands on their morning stroll past The Golden Pear. A classic tale of a beautiful young woman just tipping her prime and freeloading with a boring older man. Our fearless heroine gets into all sorts of trouble, and what started out as a charmed vacation ends up becoming a horrific, picaresque nightmare. Read it if you like age-gap relationships or beautiful sentences about sand dunes.

Montauk by Max Frisch

An age-gap love affair causes a middle-aged man to reflect on his past failures and impending death. This one has Murakami-level descriptions of women’s bodies but it’s set in Montauk so we forgive it! Also, it’s autofiction and toys cleverly with the boundaries between storytelling and confession. Read it if you like taking your lovers on hikes or talking about Knausgård at parties.

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

A coming-of-age story set in Sag Harbor in the eighties, told through the perspective of a prep-school teen boy spending his summer at the beach and navigating the racial politics of the East End. Read it if you like cocaine or The Smiths.

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

Not quite the Hamptons, but Long Island, so we can call it close enough. Not exactly a breezily escapist tale of party-girl antics, this is more of a dystopian novel about the inevitable tech-apocalypse, told through the story of a family on vacation from Brooklyn. Only read this if you like getting freaked out by the prospect of our capitalist overlords killing us all.

Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut

A real boy book: a fictional autobiography of an old man who just wants to be left alone, but it’s very funny, and Vonnegut lived in Sagaponack. Read it if you’re a surrealist painter or a lonely curmudgeon.

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Lover Girl by Nicole Sellew is available from Clash Books.