Picture it: you’re lounging on a beach chair with the sound of waves crashing all around you, and seagulls squawking playfully overhead. Could there possibly be a better setting for settling back with a good book? Here are a few suggestions for juicy summer reads that you can really sink your teeth into.
Nonfiction:
Crossing the Borders of Time
By Leslie Maitland
Investigative reporter Maitland tells the true story her German Jewish mother who was madly in love with, and engaged to, a Catholic Frenchman in pre-World War II France. The couple ended up separated by the war. And, though Maitland's mother survived and ended up in NYC married to another man, she harbored a lifelong obsession over her former lover, exacerbated by the fact that she never knew what became of him. So Maitland tells not only their story, but also her own, too, of growing up haunted by curiosity about this Frenchman whom she never met but who lived on in her mother's photos, and heart.
Fiction:
Semi-Charmed Life
By Nora Zelevansky
Beatrice Bernstein, a sheltered college-aged Upper West Sider, gets swept up in the seductive, glittery sphere of socialite Veruca Pfeffernoose whose world seems to offer glamour, worldliness and, most important of all, life outside Bernice’s insular Manhattan world. A fresh read for adults and young adults alike.
Romance:
The Newlyweds
By Nell Freudenberger
A question that’s fascinating for our current age: What happens when you court someone online and then discover, once you've brought them home, that it was false advertising? This is a story of cross-cultural love -- in the modern age.
Memoir:
Apron Anxiety
By Alyssa Shelasky
Shelasky, the editor of New York Magazine's “Grub Street” food blog, wasn't always a foodie. In fact, her unlikely journey into the world of food happened because of a broken heart; when the hard-partying, kitchen-shy Shelasky found herself lonely and struggling after a breakup, she started cooking as a way to find peace and put the shattered pieces of her life back together again.
Read all you like, just be sure to leave room in your beach tote for sunscreen, too.
