Five Books to Pack for Greece This Summer.

Greece has a way of doing something to the pace of a story. The light helps. So does ouzo.

This is what we think you should be reading.

Big Nobody by Alex Kadis

One to read on the ferry. Connie Costa is half-Greek, half-British and furious, growing up in 1970s East London under the rule of her father, whom she has named The Fat Murderer. Her evenings are spent in conversation with the David Bowie poster on her wall, plotting escapes that grow increasingly elaborate. Her only real social life is the weekly Greek nights her father organises for their immigrant community, which she attends under sufferance and refers to as Freak Night. She belongs nowhere, and knows it, and her narration of that condition is one of the funniest, most alive things we’ve read in years. The Guardian called it a debut that sparkles like Marc Bolan’s eye makeup, and they are absolutely right. It is also, underneath all the comedy, genuinely tender in the way that books written very close to the bone tend to be. And where better to read about the Greek diaspora than on the way to Greece?

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

One to read by the pool. Preferably with an ice-cold coffee. Everyone’s talking about this novel, and with reason. Natalie Heller Mills is a tradwife influencer with a perfectly curated life. Homemade jam, soft-focus children, a husband whose hands are always clean. Then she wakes up in the nineteenth century and discovers that the life she’s been performing is, in practice, quite grim. The firewood needs hauling. The clothes don’t wash themselves. Nobody’s filming it. Burke’s debut is a sharp, darkly funny satire about what women perform and for whom, and it moves at pace. Vogue named it one of the best books of 2026, which is accurate, but they perhaps undersell how genuinely unsettling it is alongside the comedy. Yesteryear is a book where you look up and realise an hour has passed and the sun has moved considerably and you cannot quite believe what just happened in the last chapter. Bring this one for that.

Beneath the Orange Blossom by Emma Cowell

One to read on the beach. Emma Cowell’s new novel is set in Kardamyli, a village on the Mani coast of the Peloponnese, and it is exactly the book you want in your hands when you have sun on your back and the sea in front of you and nothing that needs doing. Ellen returns to Kardamyli with her best friend Penny to recreate a summer they spent there as teenagers, when she fell for a local man called Alexandros and a secret forced her to leave without looking back. What she finds there is the kind of story that makes you miss your stop, or your dinner, or the sunset. Cowell writes about Greece with the authority of someone who has given her heart to it, and Kardamyli is one of those mainland spots that doesn’t always make the tourist trail but should. If you’re spending time on the Peloponnese, or if you simply want Greece in your hands before you arrive, this is where to start. Milly Johnson called it fragrant and fabulous, brimming with tender romance and hope, and she’s not wrong. Sometimes a book knows exactly what it is, and this one does.

The Ending Writes Itself by Evelyn Clarke

One to read before you fall asleep to the sound of the waves. Six struggling writers are lured to a private island with the promise of finishing a dead man’s final novel. One will win a life-changing sum. All of them have secrets. Bodies follow. It’s a wicked, twisty, completely entertaining locked-room mystery and a satire of the publishing industry that has absolutely no interest in being kind about any of it, written under the pseudonym Evelyn Clarke by the formidable duo of V.E. Schwab and Cat Clarke. The New York Times called it chilling, thrilling, satisfyingly pulpy and smart. We would agree with all of that. We’re saying nothing about the fact that you may be reading it on an island. At a literary retreat. With other writers. We are simply recommending it warmly and suggesting you perhaps leave it on your bedside table, rather than reading excerpts at dinner.

The Three of Us by Ore Agbaje-Williams

One to read on the plane home. A perfect, claustrophobic little debut about a married couple and the wife’s best friend, trapped together in an apartment during a heatwave. It’s a masterclass in tension. The dialogue’s so sharp it could cut glass. Short enough to finish on a flight, and gripping enough to live in your head long after you’ve landed.

And here’s two more, because five books are never enough.

Land by Maggie O’Farrell is her first novel since The Marriage Portrait, and if you loved Hamnet, this is what to read next. It follows a 19th-century Irish cartographer and his reluctant ten-year-old son as they map a desolate Atlantic peninsula for the British Ordnance Survey, a little over a decade after the Great Hunger. What looks on the surface like a family story becomes something far larger: a deep mapping of place and people, of how land holds the memory of what the people who lived on it would sometimes rather forget. It is also, as you would expect from O’Farrell, extraordinarily beautiful sentence by sentence. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review and called it devastating yet tender. Save it for a long evening and somewhere comfortable to sit.

And finally, because a trip to Greece deserves a classic and classics deserve to be reread: 

My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell.

Published in 1956 and not going anywhere, this is the book to press into people’s hands when they say they don’t really read travel writing. It’s not really travel writing. It is a comedy of manners disguised as a zoological memoir, written about the five years Durrell’s eccentric British family spent on Corfu in the 1930s after his elder brother Larry announced, without much apparent consultation, that they were leaving England immediately. The island in his telling is so alive it practically hums. The neighbours are strange and wonderful. Larry, the budding writer who is brilliant and entirely ungovernable, will be recognisable to anyone who has ever spent time around writers.

If you have already read it, read it again. It will be different out here. Books always are.