Summer Reading is (Finally!) Here

With Memorial Day, and the unofficial start of summer, behind us, we have a summer of reading ahead of us. I’ve been planning for months which books to pack in my Bean bag to bring to the dock in Maine in August and which I’m willing to sacrifice to sand and seawater on the beach the rest of the summer. Here I’m sharing some I’m most excited about.    

In “Whistler” by Ann Patchett, publishing on June 2, a 53-year-old woman named Daphne reconnects with her former stepfather, who was only married to her mother for a little over a year when Daphne was nine. As their friendship re-develops, they go over a lifetime of choices — why he and her mother divorced, how a dramatic incident affected their marriage — and the small moments that make up a life. Like some of Patchett’s more recent novels — “Commonwealth,” “The Dutch House,” and “Tom Lake” —this is a novel about love and loss, about deep connection between people, what makes a family, and about memory, told with warmth and compassion.

We’ve done more than a few events with Meg Mitchell Moore, a Newburyport-based author. Branching out from Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Maine, her newest seaside summer setting is New Hampshire in “Down with the Shipmans,” also set to release on June 2. Three sisters return to the family summer home in Rye, their first visit without their late mother. Once there, their father announces his plans to sell the house. Engrossing drama ensues as each sister brings her own personal dilemmas into the larger problem at hand. Moore reliably delivers juicy family secrets, a bit of humor, and characters you can root for.

If mystery readers and Louise Penny fans have not picked up her latest standalone collaboration, this time with journalist Mellissa Fung, I don’t know what you’re waiting for. “The Last Mandarin” is a first-rate thriller about the race to thwart a terrorist plot and save millions of lives around the world while featuring a complicated mother-daughter relationship. Alice, a first-generation Chinese-American food blogger, and her mother Vivien, a famous Chinese dissident who escaped to America after Tiananmen Square, begrudgingly team up to use personal and family connections to solve a series of clues in order to stop a global catastrophe originating out of China. The twists and turns will have your head spinning.

Dystopian fiction is having another moment and few do it better than Veronica Roth. “Seek the Traitor’s Son,” the first in a duology, has just landed and I couldn’t put it down. It has all the hallmarks of a Roth dystopian: a prophecy that doesn’t quite go how anyone thinks it might; an underdog warrior; a slow-burn romance between ill-fated lovers. Match this with epic world-building and excellent pacing and we’ve got one of her best books to date. (“Divergent,” published 15 years ago, remains her bestselling book. She recently announced a new book in the Divergent world: “The Sixth Faction” comes out this October.) Roth has said she’s been working on this book since 2019 — and the time she has devoted to “Seek the Traitor’s Son” shows in all the best ways. Her handle on this world and its characters is complex and assured.

If you want a really delightful summer romance, pick up “Dolly All the Time” by Annabel Monaghan. The plot features a fake-dating trope and, man, is this one charming. Single mom / Kindergarten teacher Dolly returns to Rhode Island for the summer to help her dad and brother fix up their house after a small fire — but money is tight. She gets her opportunity to save the family home when the son and scion of the local royal family, the Whitfields, asks for her help pretending to be his girlfriend in order to repair his ruined image in the press. Of course this leads to more than either of them bargained for. Can Dolly learn to trust again? Can Stewart amend his workaholic ways? Fortunately they will go on plenty of delicious yacht rides in order to find out.

Dave Egger’s new novel, “Contrapposto,” is about two friends who believe they can change the world with art. I feel like that should be enough to have you running to the nearest bookstore, but if you need a little more: the novel takes place over decades and all over the world — New York, Thailand, Paris — and shows the shifting nature of a friendship over time, but also examines the cost of a creative life. In scope and grandeur and composition, it’s not so unlike “The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt. 

I’ve hardly made a dent in my list and with summer just beginning, that’s good news. There’s still so much to look forward to.