BY GRACE MCQUADE
Books are meant to take readers away — out of their lives and heads to experience different points of view.
Some stories hit close to home, with characters that resemble family and friends placed in situations that test the strength of these bonds.
Bestselling author Emily Giffin writes these types of novels.
Her latest, “All We Ever Wanted” (June 26), explores every parent’s worst nightmare in our social media age when a revealing photograph of a high school student spreads like wildfire, forcing those involved, the school, and the whole community to come together.
Other books transport readers to faraway places and times.
A novel can introduce people and events existing in distant parts of the world. A travelogue can be a companion while on the road or offer a window to a remarkable journey that can be enjoyed right on your own front porch. And a memoir can tell a person’s story that cannot otherwise be imagined.
Spring brought fun trips with “Women in Sunlight: A Novel,” the latest story set in the Italian countryside by “Under the Tuscan Sun” author Frances Mayes, as well as “Nathan Turner’s I Love California: Live, Eat, and Entertain the West Coast Way” that captures the homes, people and food unique to California’s beautiful coastline.
The books of summer will continue to take readers across the country and around the globe, providing escapes like those experienced by their authors and characters. A few are running away. Many seek life-changing adventures. Others are merely trying to survive their changing homelands.
So whether you are planning to jet away, head out to Long Island’s Forks, or just kick up your feet in your own backyard this season, here are books to fill your tablets and totes.
FICTION
“The Lost Vintage: A Novel” by Ann Mah (June 19): On her quest to become one of only a few hundred certified wine experts in the world, a woman returns to her ancestral vineyard in Burgundy where she uncovers secrets from her family’s past while falling for a local winemaker.
“The Secrets Between Us: A Novel” by Thrity Umrigar (June 26): The sequel to the national bestseller, “The Space Between Us,” finds main character Bhima, once a faithful servant for an upper-middle-class Parsi household, now selling fruits and vegetables at a local market, a business partnership that reveals a true friendship and the complexities of life in modern India.
“The Lido: A Novel” by Libby Page (July 10): A woman is witnessing many changes within her London community, namely the lido, the outdoor pool where she has swum her whole life – even through WWII. When a young newspaper reporter is assigned to write a story on the lido’s closing, the two women meet and share their stories in a novel that connects generations.
“What We Were Promised: A Novel” by Lucy Tan (July 10): Set in modern-day Shanghai, this debut by Tan tells the story of the Zhen family, who achieve success in America and return home to a radically different China as each family member must reconcile their elevated place in this new society, including the prodigal son who unexpectedly arrives.
“The Occasional Virgin: A Novel” by Hanan al-Shaykh (July 10): Two thirty-something women who grew up in Beirut – one in a Christian family and the other raised in the Muslin faith – vacation by the sea on the Italian Riviera. While they each left Lebanon behind to pursue professional lives and love, they discover that they cannot easily escape their families and traditional pasts.
“South of the Clouds” by John D. Kuhns (July 17): When a prominent American investor, once featured on the front pages of New York’s business and society papers, is broken by the Great Recession of 2008, he seeks redemption in the Chinese jungle north of the Burmese border, where a beautiful karaoke girl might save him.
“Fruit of the Drunken Tree: A Novel” by Ingrid Rojas Contreras (July 31): Set in Columbia at the height of drug lord Pablo Escobar’s violent regime, the novel tells two very different, but inextricable stories about a sheltered young girl from a gated community in Bogotá and a teenage maid from the guerilla-occupied slum who form an unlikely friendship that blossoms out of desperation.
“The Third Hotel: A Novel” by Lauren van den Berg (Aug. 7): A woman arrives in Cuba to attend a Latin American film festival and sees her husband standing outside a museum. The problem? He’s supposed to be dead. Grief-stricken and baffled, the wife begins to track the man’s every move through the streets of Havana, forcing her to confront truths about their marriage.
“French Exit: A Novel” by Patrick deWitt (Aug. 28): A wealthy New York City socialite becomes an Upper East Side pariah after the scandalous death of her husband so she flees to Paris with her grown, ne’er-do-well son where they encounter further potential ruin in a story that is both a send-up of high society and a moving mother/son caper.
“Lake Success: A Novel” by Gary Shteyngart (Sept. 4): A narcissistic and stressed-out hedge-fund manager abandons his affluent life in New York on a Greyhound bus in search of a simpler existence with an old college sweetheart while his wife, a first generation American, discovers the pitfalls that come with wealth in Shteyngart’s piercing and poignant tale of the 0.1 percent.
NON-FICTION
“The Debatable Land: The Lost World Between Scotland & England” by Graham Robb (June 12): Two years ago, Robb moved with his wife to a distant part of England near the Scottish border known as the Debatable Land, the site of legends and battles throughout history. So Robb decided to explore this 13-mile stretch on foot and by bicycle while reimagining the region’s colorful past.
“Life in the Garden” by Penelope Lively (June 12): In her philosophical and poetic memoir, Lively shares her lifelong passions for art, literature and gardening, taking readers from the courtyards of her childhood home in Cairo, to a family cottage in Somerset, to her own gardens in Oxford and London, bringing these lush worlds and the sanctuaries of writers like Virginia Wolfe to life.
“Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy’s Food Culture” (June 12) by Matt Goulding: Town by town, bite by bite, Goulding brings Italy to life through intimate portraits of its food culture and the people behind it — from three globe-trotting brothers who became the mozzarella kings of Puglia, to the Barolo Boys who turned the hilly Piedmont into one of the world’s great wine regions.
“My Twenty-Five Years in Provence: Reflections on Then and Now” by Peter Mayle (June 26): When Peter Mayle and his wife were rained out of a vacation on the Côte d’Azur 25 years ago, they went to sun-filled Provence where they have lived ever since. Mayle now reflects on the lessons learned, culinary delights enjoyed, and inevitable changes that have occurred in this still magical place.
“A Course Called Scotland: Searching the Home of Golf for the Secret to Its Game” by Tom Coyne (July 3): From the author of the bestselling “A Course Called Ireland” comes this heartfelt and humorous celebration of his quest to play golf on every links course in Scotland, the birthplace of the game he loves.
“On the Ganges: Encounters with Saints and Sinners on India’s Mythic River” by George Black (July 17): Flowing through northern India and Bangladesh for more than 1,500 miles into the Bay of Bengal, the Ganges has long been a magnet for foreigners like Black, who traveled to this exotic place — from the glaciers of the Himalayas to the “hundred mouths” of the Ganges Delta.
“The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places” by Williams Atkins (July 24): Restless, unhappy in love, and intrigued by the world’s driest and hottest places, Atkins decided to travel to eight deserts across the globe, including the Empty Quarter of Oman, the Gobi Desert of northwest China and the Great Victoria Desert of Australia, revealing the humanity in these often inhumane places.
“South Toward Home: Adventures and Misadventures in My Native Land” by Julia Reed (July 31): With a foreword by Jon Meacham, this warmhearted and funny new book chronicles Reed’s adventures through the U.S. South, visiting dive bars, the Delta Hot Tamale Festival and an impromptu shindig on a Mississippi River sandbar, among other places, while revealing the soul of the region.
“Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road” by Kate Harris (Aug. 21): Longing to live the life of an adventurer, Harris set off with a friend on bicycle down the fabled Silk Road where East meets West, pedaling in some of the remotest places on the planet as wild as her imaginings.
Summer comes to a close with the return of Khaled Hosseini, author of the beloved novels “The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns,” who delivers a short work of fiction inspired by the current Syrian refugee crisis, “Sea Prayer” (Sept. 18), that not only reveals the perils and sacrifices of war and refugee life, but also gives those lucky to live in a free world a reminder that perhaps there’s no place like home.
