Every summer, we long for a much-needed break from daily life, dreaming of self-reinvention in some distant paradise. Two of the smartest offerings in fiction this summer come from Claire Powell’s All In and Chloë Ashby’s Family Friends. In Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, Leda allows a new acquaintance, downwardly mobile young mother Nina, to use her beach cottage for an illicit rendezvous. In my own debut novel, The Decadence, a group of former university friends break lockdown to holiday in a remote Devon country house during the pandemic. We don’t always get exactly what we want from our holidays, but the adventure is in breaking away from the familiar.