25 Summer Books We're Buzzing About

On an ordinary afternoon on a highway outside London, a truck suddenly swerves across five lanes of traffic, careening cars into each other and leaving a trail of chaos and confusion. Within minutes, a pileup has amassed, and as survivors await help, their stories begin to unfold. There’s the panic-stricken husband trapped with his mistress, a widow on her way to reunite with her first love, the bridegroom trying frantically to get to the church on time and the junior doctor waiting to receive the crash victims in the ER. At the center of it all is a the only one who knows what happened: a mysterious hitchhiker who has fled the scene.

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In her seventh novel, Jensen dives into psychological wreckage. One summer, when the heat is “to die in, to go nuts or to spawn in,” therapist Gabrielle Fox takes on the case of 16-year-old Bethany Krall, who has been committed to a psychiatric hospital after murdering her mother. During their sessions, Bethany reveals the apocalyptic images in her head, including scenes of catastrophic climate change in which entire coasts dissolve. When disasters start to occur just as Bethany described, Gabrielle fears the visions have materialized. True to her subject matter, the author avoids a contrived happy ending and offers cold comfort instead. This smart, suspenseful thriller examines the toll of willful self-destruction. —CARMELA CIURARU

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“I’ve got what rich ladies need right here in front of me,” says Susan Rose, the savvy, endearing protagonist of Eisdorfer’s gripping first novel. What this Victorian-era English wet nurse is referring to, of course, are her own breasts: She feeds the babies of wealthy women who can’t, or won’t, nurse their own children. Susan started working after she gave birth out of wedlock; her father, “a man full of anger and ale,” forced her to earn money nursing others’ babies. (Her own boy later died.) When Susan has a second son following a fling with a married Jewish dentist, her father kidnaps the child and gives him away. Susan cleverly gets herself hired as the boy’s wet nurse, and it isn’t long before she hatches a plan to steal him back. —Carmela Ciuraru

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This is the true story of one of the art world’s most brazen scams. The villain, John Drewe, is an urbane British con man who posed as a nuclear physicist, a spy and an art patron. Throughout the 1990s, he sold hundreds of paintings purportedly by modern masters, including Braque and Giacometti. He commissioned imitations (so convincing they fooled experts at Sotheby’s) from John Myatt, a working-class single father who needed cash. Sophis-ticated and outrageous, the scheme depended on false doc-uments to establish each work’s chain of ownership. Drewe even slipped photos of his fakes into London’s Tate Gallery archives to establish their line-age. The detailed account of his elaborate fraud is gripping, right up to its inevitable conclusion in Scotland Yard. —Caryn James

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Imagine what it took to shock the anything-goes 1920s: Osborne’s wildly entertaining biography follows her own great-granny, Lady Idina Sackville, as she bolts through five marriages and countless affairs to become notorious in Europe and Africa. Idina left her first husband and two small sons to fly to Kenya with the man who would become her second spouse. There she soon fell in with the infamous Happy Valley crowd, a group of wealthy, hard-drinking, sexually free British expats (as hostess, she’d receive visitors while naked in her bath). Drawing on family letters, Osborne’s portrait creates sympathy not for Idina’s reckless behavior but for the emotional empti-ness that provoked her far-flung, self-defeating yet undeniably glamorous search for love. —CARYN JAMES

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Based on the troubled marriage of Charles Dickens, this lovely debut is the portrait of a woman doomed to live in the shadow of her husband, the most celebrated author in the Victorian world. The fictional Dickens is named Alfred Gibson. He has just passed away and his funeral is to take place at Westminster Abbey. But Dorothea, his wife of twenty years, is not invited. His will favors his children and his clandestine mistress. Dorothea begins to examine her life with the great author more closely, revisiting their courtship and their early days of nuptial pleasure before the birth of too many children.

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Ellen Flanagan has two precious daughters, a thriving small business, terrific friends, a home she adores, and a sexy husband. But now, at 44, she’s about to lose it all. Divorce looms, and with it, the sale of her beloved house.

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Van and Linny Luong are as baffling to each other as their parents’ Vietnameses legacy is to them both. Van, the quintessential overachiever, has applied the same studied diligence to her law career and marriage. Freewheeling Linny is grasping for a purpose when her affair with a married man takes a humiliating turn. Each is the last person her sister would call, but when their father summons them home for his American citizenship party, Van and Linny find themselves communing about their past.

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Tragedy strikes Nate and Irene Stanley when their 15 year old son Shep is killed shortly after they settle into a new home in Oregon. Irene battles with her grief and desire for vengeance, but ultimately decides she must forgive her son’s killer if she is to have any life at all. She begins a secret correspondence with Daniel, the young man who awaits execution for the murder of Shep. When Nate discovers the friendship that has developed over the years between Irene and Daniel, he has an explosive confrontation with his wife and a shocking truth about the fateful day is revealed.

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After her boss is caught up in a political scandal, fledgling lobbyist Dempsey Jo Killebrew is left almost broke, unemployed and homeless. Out of options, she reluctantly accepts her father’s offer to help refurbish Birdsong, the old family home he recently inherited. Her father insists a little TLC can turn the house into a real estate cash cow, but Dempsey is in for a surprise when she arrives to find duct-taped windows, a driveway full of junk and grumpy old lady squatting on the property.

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Reeling from heartbreak, Kate Robinson finds herself stranded in an Irish Seaside village. The struggling fashion designer settles into the village and befriends a group of local lace makers who teach her the secret of their craft. Kate finds the creative inspiration she’s been looking for and soon she and the women work together to craft a line of lingerie—and to sort out their personal lives.

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The author takes on Bronte’s voice to weave a captivating tale based on her personal correspondence, published works and biographies.

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Emily Ascher is newly engaged to the man she loves. But with the promise of settling into the new comes a difficult look at how her family has been torn apart since the death of her brother.

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This book follows the life trajectories of extraordinary women, now in their seventies and eighties, who share to a remarkable extent a set of qualities that produced their successful lives. From the heyday of Good Housekeeping—the era of the silent majority—to World War II, when the absence of men at home set a new measure of independence for women, through the sexual revolution and the civil rights and women’s movements, these women have accumulated powerful stories that address the essential facets of women’s lives: family, work, and love.

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In 1926, an American teenager named Trudy Ederle captured the imagination of the world when she became the first woman to swim the English Channel. This is the story of her incredible feat and her return to the United States when she became one of the most famous women in the world and just as quickly disappeared from the public eye.

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Divorced ad-exec Lila Nova buys her first plant at a Manhattan market. The man who sells it to her is David Exley, an intoxicating “country sexual,” who introduces her to a mysterious man named Armand. Soon Lila is captivated by Armand’s tale of the nine plants of desire: if she can possess them all, her wildest dreams will come true. She sets off into the wilds of the Yucatan to try to do just that.

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Blogger and local food fanatic Carpenter transforms her inner-city Oakland home into fertile ground for a vegetable garden, a chicken coop and two 300-pound pigs.

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In 12-year-old Gwenni Morgan’s Welsh village, bad news spreads at breakneck speed and townspeople do their best to keep secrets buried. When the father of the children she babysits vanishes, this 1950s-era Harriet the Spy, sets out to solve the mystery of his disappearance.

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The Nation columnist returns to her poetry roots with this collection about parenthood, love and marriage.

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When Sarah Rexford, a half-American, half-Japanese 14-year-old, goes to visit her family in Japan she learns a shattering secret—and the tricky rules by which her mother, aunt and grandmother live.

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The title characters have been friends since childhood, but strangers as adults. When April’s brother dies, they are reunited amidst overwhelming grief and destructive secrets. Is Oliver saving April from her pain? Or is it the other way around?

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Margaret Snow is a window dresser at Saks when she suffers a loss that paralyzes her emotionally and professionally. To cope, she takes up her old childhood pursuit: bird watching. The birds inspire her to create—and to open herself back up to the world.

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When Rachel (Riding the Bus with My Sister) and Hal’s house gets burglarized, the couple decides to move. Unable to sell, and with Hal being an architect, they soon realize they should renovate instead. Rachel is prepared for disagreements and minor disasters—and surprised by the emotional journey she finds herself on.

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Wondering if you should wax your mustache or if you’re having the right amount of sex? Watson has the answer in this funny guide to finding love and looking good (without borrowing your daughter’s wardrobe or blowing your 401K).

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There’s a reason for the unrelenting stream of literature about moving to Italy—it’s everyone’s fantasy. Cusk details her family’s three-month tour of the country in this delightful romp through rented villas, Amalfi beaches and plenty of pasta and gelato.

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