Sanibel Beach Read Recommendations-

Sanibel Beach Read Recommendations

When traveling to Sanibel for a vacation you’re probably thinking you’ll relax, soak up some sun, take walks on the beach and get swept away into the newest bestsellers you don’t normally have time to read!

Local Sanibel bookstore, MACINTOSH BOOKS & PAPER has shared their beach read recommendations with us. You’ll want to add these to your reading list for your next beach vacation to Sanibel & Island Inn! Check them out below and start reading like a local!

#1 – The Woman In Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

When travel journalist Lo Blacklock is invited on a boutique luxury cruise around the Norwegian fjords, it seems like a dream career opportunity. But the trip takes a nightmarish turn when she wakes in the middle of the night to hear a body being thrown overboard, only to discover that no one has been reported missing from the boat.

#2 – The Cafe by the Sea by Jenny Colgan

The beloved author of The Bookshop on the Corner returns with a sparkling, sunny, soulful new novel perfect for fans of Elin Hilderbrand.

Years ago, Flora fled the quiet Scottish island where she grew up — and she hasn’t looked back. What would she have done on Mure? It’s a place where everyone has known her all her life, where no one will let her forget the past. In bright, bustling London, she can be anonymous, ambitious… and hopelessly in love with her boss.

But when fate brings Flora back to the island, she’s suddenly swept once more into life with her brothers (all strapping, loud and seemingly incapable of basic housework) and her father. Yet even amid the chaos of their reunion, Flora discovers a passion for cooking — and finds herself restoring dusty little pink-fronted shop on the harbour: a cafe by the sea.

But with the seasons changing, Flora must come to terms with past mistakes… and work out exactly where her future lies…

Funny and heartfelt, The Cafe by the Sea is a delightful summertime novel that puts a modern twist on the classic Seven Brides for Seven Brothers story.

#3 – The Bookshop at Water’s End by Patti Callahan Henry

The women who spent their childhood summers in a small southern town discover it harbors secrets as lush as the marshes that surround it… Bonny Blankenship’s most treasured memories are of idyllic summers spent in Watersend, South Carolina, with her best friend, Lainey McKay. Amid the sand dunes and oak trees draped with Spanish moss, they swam and wished for happy-ever-afters, then escaped to the local bookshop to read and whisper in the glorious cool silence. Until the night that changed everything, the night that Lainey’s mother disappeared. Now, in her early fifties, Bonny is desperate to clear her head after a tragic mistake threatens her career as an emergency room doctor, and her marriage crumbles around her. With her troubled teenage daughter, Piper, in tow, she goes back to the beloved river house, where she is soon joined by Lainey and her two young children. During lazy summer days and magical nights, they reunite with bookshop owner Mimi, who is tangled with the past and its mysteries. As the three women cling to a fragile peace, buried secrets and long ago loves return like the tide.

#4 – The Island House by Nancy Thayer

New York Times bestselling author Nancy Thayer evokes the shimmering seascape of Nantucket in a delightful novel that resonates with the heartache and hope of growing up, growing wise, and the bittersweet choices we must be brave enough to make.

#5 – The Identicals by Elin Hilderbrand

Nantucket is only two and a half hours away from Martha’s Vineyard by ferry. But the two islands might as well be worlds apart for a set of identical twin sisters who have been at odds for years. Just because twins look exactly the same doesn’t mean they’re anything alike – and Tabitha and Harper Frost have spent their whole lives trying to prove this point. When a family crisis forces them to band together – or at least appear to – the twins come to realize that the special bond that they share is more important than the resentments that have driven them apart.

#6 – Beach House for Rent by Mary Alice Monroe

Bestselling author Mary Alice Monroe returns to her beloved Isle of Palms to tell the poignant, charming story of two women, one summer, and one very special beach house. When Cara Rutledge rents out her quaint beach house on Isle of Palms to Heather Wyatt for the entire summer, it’s a win-win by any standard: Cara’s generating income necessary to keep husband Brett’s ecotourism boat business afloat, and anxiety-prone Heather, an young artist who’s been given a commission to paint birds on postage stamps, has a quiet space in which to work and tend to her pet canaries uninterrupted. It isn’t long, however, before both women’s idyllic summers are altered irrevocably: the alluring shorebirds–and the man who rescues them–begin to draw Heather out of the shell she’s cultivated toward a world of adventure, and maybe even love; at the same time, Cara’s life reels with sudden tragedy, and she wishes only to return to the beach house that had once been her port amidst life’s storms. When Heather refuses to budge from her newfound sanctuary, so begins the unlikeliest of rooming situations. While they start out as strangers, as everything around the women falls apart they learn that the only thing they can really rely on is each other. And, like the migrating shorebirds that come to the island for the summer, these two women of different generations must rediscover their unique strengths so by summer’s end they, too, can take flight in ways they never imagined possible.