BEST BOOKS ON... BEACHES

THERE are few annual choices more tantalising than what books to take on your summer holiday.

Should you be ambitious, or go easy on yourself? Before I had children I saw holidays as selfimproving, at least in literary terms. From my sun-lounger, I would work my way through War And Peace’s winter campaigns or the dark twists of Dickens’s Bleak House.

With motherhood, my holiday reading stalled dramatically. I would pack three to five books, then barely find the energy to open one.

The harassed parents of a toddler share the telling of Sabine Durrant’s Take Me In, her follow-up to the bestselling thriller Lie With Me.

It opens with an achingly familiar scene: a fretful, exhausted British couple feeling out of place on an idyllic beach. A Greek island should, of course, be the most relaxing place in the world. But with a toddler in tow, a beach can transmogrify into a place without boundaries, fraught with peril. Are they too near the sea? Is the tide in or out? Where have they wandered off to?

In the few minutes Tessa is changing, Marcus drifts off, losing sight of his son, Josh. A stranger, Dave Jepson, someone about whom Marcus has already made snobbish observations, wades in as their saviour. But how much do they then owe him?

Beaches, in fiction, often serve as places of fantasy. In Thomas Mann’s novella Death In Venice it is the vision of a beautiful adolescent playing at the water’s edge on the Venetian Lido that leads the widowed author Von Aschenbach to try to recapture his own youth in a series of desperate measures that eventually precipitate his death.

In Alex Garland’s cult Nineties bestseller The Beach, it is the idea of discovering virgin, pristine territory, unmentioned in the travel guides, that propels a young English backpacker towards seeking out a much-mythologised traveller’s beach. When he finally gets there, he does encounter heartstopping beauty, but also the rot of a hippie dream darkening.

Frankly, if I get 15 minutes with a book on a Dorset beach this week, I’ll feel I’ve regained Paradise.