Books We’ll be Reading This Summer
Just as Hollywood saves its best popcorn movies for the summer, so do publishers save some of their best books for beach season. There’s a lot of buzz about several new releases this summer and we have added some of the best to our pre-order lists. Here they are by publication date.
The High Tide Club by Mary Kay Andrews
In this novel by “Queen of the Beach Reads” Mary Kay Andrews, eccentric ninety-nine-year-old heiress Josephine Bettendorf Warrick summons attorney Brooke Trappnell, Brooke travels to Shellhaven and meets the cagey Josephine, whose home is a crumbling pink mansion at the edge of the turquoise sea. Josephine wants Brooke to help her make amends with the heirs of the women who were her closest friends, the girls of The High Tide Club, so named because of their youthful skinny dipping escapades. But in doing so, Brooke unleashes the makings of a scandal that could make someone rich beyond their wildest dreams, or cause them to be the target of a murderer. Publication date: May 8.
While this beautifully written, Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Andrew Sean Greer is out in hardcover, the paperback (perfect for tucking into your beach bag) will be available on May 22. In Less, a struggling novelist, Arthur Less, accepts invitations to literary events around the world to avoid an awkward wedding – that of his ex-fiance. Full of misadventures and misunderstandings, Less is ultimately a novel about the human heart. Paperback release: May 22.
The Summer I Met Jack: A Novel by Michelle Gable
Based on a real story – in 1950, a young, beautiful Polish refugee arrives in Hyannisport, Massachusetts to work as a maid for one of the wealthiest families in America. Alicia is at once dazzled by the large and charismatic family, in particular the oldest son, a rising politician named Jack. The Summer I Met Jack by Michelle Gable is based on the fascinating real life of Alicia Corning Clark, a woman who J. Edgar Hoover insisted was paid by the Kennedys to keep quiet, not only about her romance with Jack Kennedy, but also a baby they may have had together. Publication date: May 29.
When Life Gives You Lululemons by Lauren Weisberger
New York Times bestselling author Lauren Weisberger returns with a novel starring one of her favorite characters from The Devil Wears Prada–Emily Charlton, first assistant to Miranda Priestly, now a highly successful image consultant. She’s working in Hollywood as an image consultant to the stars, but recently, she’s lost a few clients. Emily is hopeless with social media. The new guard is nipping at her heels. She needs a big opportunity, and she finds it in Karolina Hartwell – A-lister, former model, wife of a Kennedy-esque senator, and just arrested for a DUI with a Suburban filled with other people’s children. Together, they’ll navigate the social landmines of life in America’s favorite suburb on steroids, revealing the truths–and the lies–that simmer just below the glittering surface. With her signature biting style, Lauren Weisberger offers a dazzling look into another sexy, over-the-top world, where nothing is as it appears. Publication date: June 5.
The Summer Wives by Beatriz Williams
In the summer of 1951, Miranda Schuyler arrives on elite, secretive Winthrop Island as a schoolgirl from the margins of high society, still reeling from the loss of her father in the Second World War. When her beautiful mother marries Hugh Fisher, whose summer house on Winthrop overlooks the famous lighthouse, Miranda is catapulted into a heady new world of pedigrees and cocktails, status and swimming pools, a world she’s not quite comfortable in. Beneath the island’s patrician surface, there are really two clans: the summer families with their steadfast ways and quiet obsessions, and the working class of Portuguese fishermen and domestic workers who earn their living on the water and in the laundries of the summer houses. In summer of 1969, Miranda returns to Winthrop, as a renowned Shakespearean actress hiding a terrible heartbreak. What’s more, Miranda herself is no longer a naïve teenager, and she begins a fierce, inexorable quest for justice for the man she once loved . . . even if it means uncovering every last one of the secrets that bind together the families of Winthrop Island. Publication date: July 10.
The Masterpiece by Fiona Davis
From the author of The Dollhouse and The Address, Masterpiece is centered around another iconic New York City landmark, Grand Central Station. This time, Fiona Davis takes readers into the glamorous lost art school within Grand Central Terminal, where two very different women, fifty years apart, strive to make their mark on a world set against them. It is 1928, and twenty-five-year-old Clara is teaching at the lauded Grand Central School of Art. A talented illustrator, she has dreams of creating cover art for Vogue, but not even the prestige of the school can override the public’s disdain for a “woman artist.” Nearly fifty years later, in 1974, the terminal has declined almost as sharply as Virginia Clay’s life. Recently divorced, she has just accepted a job in the information booth in order to support herself and her college-age daughter, Ruby. But when Virginia stumbles upon an abandoned art school within the terminal and discovers a striking watercolor hidden under the dust, her eyes are opened to the elegance beneath the decay. She embarks on a quest to find the artist of the unsigned masterpiece–an impassioned chase that draws Virginia not only into the battle to save Grand Central but deep into the mystery of Clara Darden, the famed 1920s illustrator who disappeared from history in 1931. Publication date: August 7.
Opening photo: Pixabay.
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