It's summer and it’s time to check out what books you’ll be putting in your beach bag or reading on your front porch.
Ann Patchett is an author whose works I always read, and her latest Whistler continues her streak of excellent novels. Daphne and her husband are in the Met Museum when they notice an older man following them. He turns out to be Daphne’s former stepfather, who was married to her mother for only a year when Daphne was nine.
Daphne reconnects with him, which brings forth a memory of why he left her family all those years ago. It’s a wonderful story filled with characters whom you root for, and Patchett writes beautifully. I finished it in one day and loved it so.
Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, The Things We Never Say is also a story about family. Artie is a beloved 11th grade history teacher whose best friend is a boisterous older widow who is moving away. He finds solace in his taking his boat out on Massachusetts Bay, but increasingly feels isolated and lonely.
When he learns that his wife has been keeping a huge secret from him, it upends everything and he has to decide how he will move forward. Like Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge) is a tremendous writer who encourages empathy in the reader for her characters.
Evelyn Clarke is the pen name of two authors (V.E. Schwab and Cat Clarke) who wrote a propulsive locked room mystery The Ending Writes Itself. Six authors are brought to a remote Scottish island to compete to finish a book written by a popular mystery series writer who drowned.
With two million dollars and a publishing contract at stake, each author is desperate to win, and soon one by one the authors meet a diabolical end. Who will be left standing and win the money? This is a book you will race through, and I was impressed that each character is distinct and memorable.
Other big books this summer include Douglas Stuart’s new novel John of John, also set on a remote Scottish island. This one revolves around a young gay man who is summoned back home from Edinburgh by his religious father to come help care for the young man’s ailing grandmother. He struggles with his family’s expectations and life in a small town.
Stuart’s previous novel Shuggie Bain won many accolades, and John of John”is said to be his best book yet.
Christina Baker Kline’s new historical novel The Foursome fictionalizes the story of famous conjoined twins Eng and Chang Bunker, who leave Siam to move to the United States in 1839. They marry two sisters (who are distant relatives of the author), and the story takes place over a fifty-year period as we see how the sisters deal with life married to conjoined twins. This one sounds intriguing.
Kathryn Stockett’s last book, The Help was published seventeen years ago and became an instant bestseller. Her latest historical novel is The Calamity Club, set in Depression-era 1933 Mississippi. Meg is eleven years old and lives in an orphanage. She is deemed too old to adopt and so is stuck there.
Birdie is a unmarried woman, “a spinster” who befriends Meg as she works at the orphanage. When they meet Charlie, who is on the run from something, the three become friends. They come up with an idea to open a boarding house that caters to a certain clientele.
This is big book, over 600 pages, and the themes of found family and the limited choices of women during the Depression are dealt with humor and heartache.
You need a little romance for summer, and popular sensation B.K. Borison’s second in her Heartstrings series will steam up your glasses, even though her new novel And Now, Back to You is set during winter.
Jackson is a buttoned-up meteorologist at a local Baltimore radio station who is raising his twin fifteen year-old sisters. Delilah is a delightful, friendly meteorologist on a local Baltimore TV station whose jealous boss is using every humiliating way to get her to quit.
The pair, who have a contentious relationship, are teamed up to travel to the mountains of Deep Creek, Maryland to cover a massive snowstorm headed their way. Of course they are forced to share a room with only bed, and well, you can guess what happens.
If Nonfiction is your genre of choice, Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book London Falling tells the story of a young man who dies jumping off a balcony in London. While looking for answers as to what happened to their son, his parents discover that he was impersonating the son of Russian oligarch. Radden Keefe looks for answers in this true story. If you liked Keefe's book about the Troubles in Northern Ireland titled Say Nothing, you'll want to read London Falling.
Happy summer reading!
