4 New Books that are Begging to Be Read By the Pool
Few things go better with a sweating glass of lemonade than a hot-weather thriller to wash it down with. Or a featherweight romance. Or a summer-set family drama unfolding in a vacation town a million miles away from your lawn chair. These new releases are just asking to be paired with a big ol’ bowl of watermelon and your next day off:
The Vacationers, by Emma Straub
Don’t be too jealous of the Post family’s two-week vacation on the hyper-colored island of Mallorca, celebrating the 35th anniversary of parents Franny and Jim. Joined by their kids and a handful of friends, the Posts head to paradise in spite of the potentially marriage-ending events of the weeks leading up to their departure. Consider this character-driven dysfunctional family story the perfect fictional companion to your own, hopefully-mostly-functional family’s summer vacation.
Summer House With Swimming Pool, by Herman Koch
You’ll want a nice dip in a cold pool after spending a few hours with Koch’s sleazy characters, including Marc, a sociopathic celebrity doctor who practices medicine despite his crippling distaste for the human body, and Ralph, the predatorial actor who invites Marc’s family for a stay in his summer home. At the book’s start, Ralph is dead by Marc’s hand in an apparent case of medical malpractice. But as Koch traces the vile events of the summer, darker possibilities emerge. Take heed: Koch’s blunt, visceral prose, first introduced to an English-speaking audience in The Dinner, is not for the faint of heart.
Mr. Mercedes, by Stephen King
Where King goes, readers follow, even if he’s taking us to a frostbitten midwestern job fair (a far cry from the sun-drenched fairgrounds of last summer’s Joyland). In the hours before sunup, the unemployed hopefuls gathered in a frozen parking lot are terrorized by a driver in a stolen Mercedes, who uses the car to kill eight people before escaping unidentified. But this is no whodunit: King enters the mind of the broken, psychopathic killer, and that of his adversary, a depressed cop who comes out of retirement to stop Mr. Mercedes before he strikes again.
Delicious!, by Ruth Reichl
Like Reichl herself, the protagonist of Delicious! is a food magazine employee (a lowly editorial assistant to Reichl’s Gourmet editor-in-chief) who finds herself at loose ends when her magazine closes shop unexpectedly. In her first work of fiction, beloved memoirist Reichl starts with a cake and ends with a cake (and an accompanying recipe, bless her heart), and in between comes romance, a secret cache of letters, a dip into World War II–era history, and pages and pages of lush, mouthwatering descriptions of food. We suggest you do things backward: bake the gingerbread cake on the last page first, then flip to page one.
June 21 is the first day of summer! What’ll be your first read of the season?