Summer Reading.

As a child raised by a family of beach-lovers and bookworms, I spent my adolescent summers sprawled on the shores of North Carolina, frying my freckled skin while plowing through the stack of books my parents treated me to at the season's start. Of course, as I got older the need to work eventually took its toll on my languorous summer ritual; and these days, as something of an adult, I rarely enjoy even a weeklong trip to the beach. Nevertheless, I still savor the summer as the time of the year when good books were meant to be read. So here are three I recommend to anyone facing a long afternoon at the beach--or a long subway commute to work.

On Beauty (Penguin Press, $25.95, 464 pp.), Zadie Smith's latest comedy of cultural-political errors, should qualify for anyone's summer reading list. Smith's celebrated debut novel, White Teeth, dazzled critics with its Dickensian exploration of the teeming life of immigrant London; and in On Beauty (longlisted for this year's Booker Prize), she shows us she can do America, too. The novel studies the Belseys of Massachusetts, a multiracial, multicultural family of five: Howard, a hyper-intellectual British professor; his wife, Kiki, a kindly but unintellectual African-American homemaker; and their three children, who embrace an array of enthusiasms ranging from Christianity to political radicalism to hip-hop. Set in an elite university town outside Boston, the book explores the complex web of relationships that results when the Belseys' lives become intertwined with those of Howard's colleague and rival, Monty Kipps, and his family.

As in White Teeth, Smith has a tendency to catapult her readers through plot twists and turns at breakneck speed, yet, beneath the chaotic storytelling lie keen cultural observations and commentary. Her prose alternates effortlessly between hilarity and heartbreak, and she is deft enough to satirize the over-intellectualized world of an elite college campus even as she explores the intricacies of biracial consciousness within it. Despite a sometimes excessive ambition with regard to cultural coverage, Smith manages to tackle any number of subjects with surprising depth while giving a large and complex cast of characters their due. All this in a quick, funny, energetic read.

If On Beauty hurtles readers through a plot of Dickensian intricacy, Mary Gaitskill's Veronica (Pantheon, $23, 240 pp.) does almost exactly the opposite. The novel examines, with intense close focus, the friendship between Alison, a young model, and Veronica, the eccentric, occasionally caustic older woman she meets while temping at an ad agency in Manhattan. Gaitskill weaves her story through the 1970s, '80s, and '90s in flashbacks and memories, from Paris and New York to New Jersey and finally San Francisco. By the time we meet her, Alison is middle-aged, sick, and destitute. Living alone, cleaning offices for cash, she often thinks of the past, and tries desperately to reconcile the powerful nostalgia she feels for her former life with the bitter state to which it has led her. The attempt takes her back in her mind to Veronica, who has since died of AIDS, and culminates in a belated and significant movement of understanding.

Gaitskill is the author of three previous books, including a highly praised collection of stories, Bad Behavior, many about young women caught in frank and sometimes bitter sexual dilemmas. What makes Veronica so compelling is the voice she brings to Alison, and the complexity of the characters she creates. There are neither heroes nor villains in Gaitskill's fiction, but flawed characters trying to make sense of the mixed beauty and ugliness they see in the world and in themselves. Veronica could easily have become preachy, trite, or both, but Gaitskill's starkly precise prose hews to an unapologetic, bruising honesty. Through the lens of a complicated friendship she examines memory and time, beauty and cruelty, sickness and vanity. And then she shuts up, and lets her readers do the rest. The result is maybe her best work yet.

Finally, there is Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners (Harvest Books, $14, 320 pp.), a book of short stories so tasty I could savor it all summer long. Link can be both hysterically funny and darkly, dreamily sad--sometimes within the space of one perfect sentence. This wonderfully strange compilation mixes elements of fairy tale and science fiction, folktale and fantasy, borrowing from alternate worlds in order to express the essence of everyday suburban struggles. In "The Faery Handbag," a teenage girl loses her greatest love to the fairy-tale otherland of her grandmother's history; in "The Hortlak," two lonely drugstore clerks confront the zombies that wander their neon-lit aisles in the middle of the night. "Stone Animals" tells of a husband and wife who move to a big house in the country, only to realize that everything they own is becoming haunted.

Despite the magical sparkle, these stories are not actually about magic at all. Rather, they are fairy tales of marriage, love, and loneliness that Link endows with the rare quality of a dream you're not quite sure you actually had. Her originality as a writer and storyteller will have you so entranced that, by the end, she might have you believing--just the tiniest little bit--in magic. And isn't that, after all, what summer is really all about?

Lucy Madison, formerly Commonweal's editorial assistant, is now assistant to the editor of Teen Vogue.