Sun, sea, sand... and being engrossed in an amazing book that you don't want to put down even for a second. When it comes to relaxing this summer, finding the right book to enjoy on holiday is nothing short of perfection.
Whether you're a chick-lit lover, a fan of the celeb autobiography or ready to play detective with a riveting crime-filled thriller, there's a page-turner out there to entice you, and the summer months are the perfect time to plunge into something totally new - and to try something really long.
When's the last time you picked up a tome that's over 500 pages? Since lengthy books tend to take up large chunks of time, we often shy away from them, with good reason (I am still recovering from the toll the Game of Thrones saga took on my social life, even though it was totally worth it in the end). When we do commit to big books, we want them to be worth the effort and the commitment, to engross us in their pages and entrance us with their characters, real or fictional.
While monster-sized books can often feel intimidating and hard to get into, some of the greatest works of both past and present (Tolstoy's War and Peace, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Franzen's The Corrections, Eugenides' Middlesex, to name a few) are over 500 pages long.
The past year has seen some phenomenal - and beastly sized - literature worth digging into, from Eleanor Catton's Man Booker Prize-winning The Luminaries to Donna Tartt's Pulitzer Prize winner, The Goldfinch. These literary heavyweights have become compulsive page-turners for the public as well as critically lauded works, illustrating that sometimes, bigger is indeed better.
Don't miss these nine recent books over 500 pages that are worth taking your time over and let us know what your favourite book with 500+ pages is in a comment below.