Pull up a hammock or a beach chair, the reading season has arrived.
THE BOOKS OF SUMMER
Here are a few recent releases to help you while away some of those lazy, hazy summer days.
The Age of Miracles, $29.95
KAREN THOMPSON WALKER
The Age of Miracles is the story of what happens when the Earth's rotation slows.
The days and nights grow longer, gravity is affected and the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia, the 10-year-old protagonist, is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life: her parents' crumbling marriage, the loss of old friends, first love and more. Author Karen Thompson Walker has written a coming-of-age tale that asks if it's worth coming of age at all in a world that might end at any minute. The Age of Miracles is about the existence of hope and if it can prevail in the face of uncertainty.
Gold , $29.95 CHRIS CLEAVE
Olympic hopefuls Zoe and Kate met a 19 when they both made the cut for the national training program in track cycling. Now 32, the women are facing their last and biggest race: the 2012 Olympics. Kate is naturally gifted, but the demands of her life have a tendency to slow her down.
Her eight-year-old daughter Sophie is fighting a recurrence of the leukemia that nearly killed her three years ago.
Intense, aloof Zoe's compulsive need to win at any cost has more than once threatened her friendship with Kate and her own sanity. Will she allow her obsession, and the advantage she has over a harried, anguished mother, to sever the bond they have shared for more than a decade?
BEAUTIFUL RUINS, $19.99
JESS WALTER
In 1962, a young Italian innkeeper looks out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea and spies an apparition: a tall, thin woman, a vision in white, approaching him on a boat. She is an actress, he soon learns, an American starlet, and she is dying. The story begins when an elderly Italian man shows up on a movie studio's back lot searching for the mysterious woman he last saw at his hotel decades earlier.
What unfolds is a dazzling, yet deeply human, roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives.
Beautiful Ruins is a story of flawed-yet-fascinating people navigating the rocky shores of their lives while clinging to their improbable dreams.
Wild, $29
CHERYL STRAYED
At 22, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed.
Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert to Washington State, and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker. Wild vividly captures the terrors and pleasures of someone forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.
True Believers, $32
KURT ANDERSEN
As junior-high-school kids back in the early sixties, Karen and her two best friends, Chuck and Alex, roamed suburban Chicago on their bikes looking for intrigue and excitement. As friendship carries them through childhood and on to college in a polarized late-sixties America the bad guys cease to be the creatures of make-believe.
Caught up in the fervor of that extraordinary and uncanny time, they find themselves swept into a dangerous new game with the highest possible stakes. Today, only a handful of people are left who know what happened. As Karen reconstructs the past and reconciles the girl she was then with the woman she is now, finally sharing pieces of her secret past.
