There was a time not long ago when you could stroll down a beach and get ideas for your next book: Sunbathers held hardcovers in their hands; swimmers left paperbacks facedown on towels. The shoreline was an open-air bookstore window, a browsing bonanza that led straight to borrowing or buying your next read. Of course you’d have to pick up an ice cream cone on this expedition, and maybe a pound of fudge.
Books on screens have certain perks — you don’t need to put on shoes before buying one, for instance — but they also dial down literary voyeurism at the beach (or the pool or lake or wherever you sprawl on hot days).
Spare yourself the squinting this summer. Odds are, one of these novels will be glowing from a screen near you — or better yet, appearing in the flesh, its cover visible for all to see.
Take me to an island!
If you entered all the beach read ingredients into A.I., it might spit out a lesser version of Michael Callahan’s hearty chowder of a story, THE LOST LETTERS FROM MARTHA’S VINEYARD (Mariner, 304 pp., $30). The recipe includes a pair of sisters, a stash of mysterious correspondence, a charming seaside cottage, a generous dollop of old Hollywood glamour and a sexy fisherman who turns out to be secretly wealthy.
Like many of its seaworthy forebears, “The Lost Letters” chugs along on two timelines. On one, we have Kit, a junior television producer who stumbles into the scoop of a lifetime while cleaning out her grandmother’s house; on the other, there’s Mercy Welles, a rising starlet who dropped out of moviemaking as quickly as she arrived. It was easy enough to figure out how the women’s paths would converge, and I’ll admit a slight bias toward Mercy’s story. If you’re looking for a quick jaunt to Martha’s Vineyard, here’s your ticket.
I love wedding shenanigans.
The opening portion of Alison Espach’s THE WEDDING PEOPLE (Holt, 384 pp., $28.99) takes place in the lobby of the Cornwall Inn in Newport, R.I. Phoebe Stone is there on her own, without luggage, having left her husband in St. Louis to, shall we say, sort some things out. Everyone else has arrived for a wedding, and they have the gift bags to prove it. Right away we’re thrust into a collision of diametrically opposed life events and general drama, the likes of which we haven’t seen since Maggie Shipstead’s “Seating Arrangements.” How will Phoebe’s plan affect the wedding? How will these shiny, happy, complicated strangers — and one insistent bride — change her future?
Espach has an eye for the full gamut of emotions that go hand in hand with lifelong commitment, from humor to self-involvement to pathos. She reminds us — as does Amanda Eyre Ward in “Lovers and Liars,” another worthy contribution to the season’s fictional wedding chicanery — that “love was an invisible wire, connecting them always.” Whom that wire attaches to is the question at the center of this novel, as it so often is in life.
I need a reminder that work is far, far away.
I understand the impulse to disconnect from work while you’re on vacation; by all means, cue up the least friendly, most passive-aggressive out-of-office message you can get away with while you’re gone. But let’s not underestimate the schadenfreude of delving into fictional office drama from a safe distance, on a day when you didn’t wake up to an alarm.
Natalie Sue’s I HOPE THIS FINDS YOU WELL (William Morrow, 352 pp., $28) over-delivers in this department, putting a funny twist on misery in cubicle land. Jolene Smith is gritting her teeth as an unappreciated “administrative technician” at Supershops Inc. when she acquires an unexpected superpower: She can see emails and direct messages sent by everyone in her department, even if they aren’t meant for her. It’s bcc gone wild!
Suddenly Jolene knows too much about the precarity of her own employment and the secrets simmering beneath her colleagues’ phony politesse. But the pity is the worst part: “I feel bad for Jolene,” writes Armin — “a guy who once reheated a day-old hot dog (bun, ketchup and all)” in the office toaster oven. Then there’s Caitlin, Jolene’s nit-picking nemesis, who makes Angela on “The Office” look like a sweetheart.
Sue takes a clever concept and ratchets up the stakes while “shining a light,” as corporate folk like to say, on the dusty plants, awkward birthday cakes and printer paper politics that loom large in workaday life.
Give me a love story infused with pop culture.
We can forgive Abraham Chang for implanting an ear worm of Don Henley’s “The Last Worthless Evening” on the first page of his Gen X nostalgia fest, 888 LOVE AND THE DIVINE BURDEN OF NUMBERS (Flatiron, 400 pp., $29.99). And that’s saying something.
Young Wang is, to quote Judd Nelson in “The Breakfast Club,” a “neo maxi zoom dweebie” of the highest order. He approaches pop culture as a science. Tiffany and Debbie Gibson smile from his bedroom walls. He’s a college student of his time, which begins, for the reader, in 1995, and quickly rewinds to the ’80s. (Of course there are mix tapes.)
Only the most gifted writers can pull off the second person without seeming presumptuous — “You’re not sure why George Lucas didn’t go with ‘Dark Vader’ and ‘lifesavers’” — so true! — and Chang is one of them. The plot of “888” took a bit longer to take hold: Young falls in love with Erena, whose dialogue is reminiscent of Michelle Williams’s character in “Dawson’s Creek” (clever to the max). Is she Young’s sixth great romance, or is she lucky number seven — as in, the one, according to his uncle’s numerical system? The answer can only be revealed by examining Young’s first five relationships.
Actually, how about an escape fantasy?
Emily Giffin’s THE SUMMER PACT (Ballantine, 352 pp., $30) is about a group of friends — always a foolproof setup, in my book. And the group of friends includes, get this, a man, which shouldn’t be as remarkable as it is on Planet Beach Read. The shell on top of this sand castle is the reunion tour, a decade after college, inspired by a long-ago promise to turn to one another in times of need.
Which leads me to the impetus behind the so-called summer pact, and to the trigger warning at the front of the book. Once upon a time, there was a fourth friend in the group: Summer, a runner and aspiring doctor from Naperville, Ill., who ends her own life in the prologue. Her absence casts a shadow over the book — and, of course, over Hannah, Lainey and Tyson. They take turns narrating their trip to the Italian island of Capri, where closure may or may not await.
“The Summer Pact” is sunnier than I’m making it sound. But, if the foundation it’s built on sounds too much like quicksand, Elise Juska’s “Reunion” is a solid alternative. Also new, also featuring a mixed-gender friend group, and the circumstances of the pilgrimage aren’t quite as fraught.
