Best of the Summer: 8 New Books to Read on Vacation

Summer is for book lovers! If your idea of the perfect summer vacation is finding a great new read, Garden City Reference Librarians Laura Flanagan and Ann Garnett have selected eight new books for you to consider for your summer reading getaway.

There is no one definition of a great summer book. It can be a 600-page family saga, a critically acclaimed literary novel or a comic mystery. Whatever you choose, your summer read should be able to sweep you away to another world, real or imagined. Here are eight new titles that critics, librarians and readers are talking about this summer:

• The bestselling author of The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini has written a new novel And The Mountains Echoed that spans several generations and travels back and forth between Afghanistan and the West. Hosseini’s latest book is a powerful, haunting story of a young boy’s tragic loss of his sister.

• Beautiful Day by Elin Hilderbrand tells the story of two families gathered on Nantucket for a wedding that changes everyone's lives. In the days leading up to the wedding, love will be questioned, scandals arise and hearts will be broken and healed.

• Carl Hiaasen’s Bad Monkey is a comic mystery set in Florida and the Bahamas. The complicated but humorous plot involves a voodoo princess, a bad-tempered monkey, greedy real estate developers and a renegade detective Andrew Yancy.

• J. Courtney Sullivan, the author of Commencement and Maine, has written a new novel The Engagements which spans nearly a 100 years. The Engagements follows four different couples to the altar while tracing the history and symbolic role of diamonds in America.

• Daniel James Brown’s The Boys in the Boat is the true story of the 1936 University of Washington crew team that won the Berlin Olympics. Nine working class boys stormed the rowing world, transformed the sport and captured the attention of millions of Americans as they rowed for the gold in front of Hitler.

• Kathleen Tessaro’s The Perfume Collector weaves through the decades of the 1920s to the 1950s from New York to Monte Carlo, Paris and London. This is the story of an inheritance from a mysterious stranger, an abandoned perfume shop and three perfumes that hold a memory and a secret.

• Philipp Meyer’s The Son is a 600-page multi-generational family saga that traces the history of Texas from before the Civil War to contemporary times. It begins with the story of family patriarch Eli McCollough and continues to his great-granddaughter Jeannie, who presides over the family oil empire.

• Beatriz Williams has written a fast-paced, old-fashioned summer romance A Hundred Summers that is told in parallel narratives set in the summers of 1931 and 1938. The characters confront an emotional storm as life changing as the epic East Coast hurricane of 1938.

Stop by or call the Reference Department for more suggestions about what to read this summer. Tell the librarians about what you enjoy reading too - they love to swap titles with other readers! In the coming weeks, the librarians will begin a new monthly column that will discuss popular and forthcoming bestsellers.

Submitted by the Garden City Public Library