The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit
by Graham Joyce (Doubleday)
It’s July 1976, and in the US, it’s the bicentennial; in England, a record heat wave. Joyce (“Some Kind of Fairy Tale”) takes on the latter, in his new novel about working-class college student David, who takes a summer job in Skegness, a decaying English seaside resort town where his father disappeared 15 years earlier. Strange things are happening. A man in a blue suit patrols the beach with a small child and a rope. Ladybugs plague the sands. David unlocks the secrets of his past, but not before navigating a love triangle that is too hot to handle.
When the World Was Young
by Elizabeth Gaffney (Random House)
In Gaffney’s lyrical new novel, Wally Baker is no ordinary young girl — living in her grandparents’ Brooklyn Heights brownstone, she eschews dresses and manners and loves Wonder Woman. Her mother is unstable. We see postwar NYC through her eyes, from V-J Day to the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1950s.
Whatever Happened to the Metric System?
How America Kept Its Feet
by John Bemelmans Marciano (Bloomsbury)
Americans of a certain age will remember the attempt in the ’70s to wipe us off our feet, so to speak, and give us meters and kilometers and the like. Even baseball clubs had distance in meters on their outfield fences. Marciano writes about that and goes all the way back to the metric system’s creation in France after its revolution. And he does it all with good humor.
Joss Whedon
Geek King of the Universe
by Amy Pascale (Chicago Review Press)
Before “The Avengers” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” creator Joss Whedon became a big name in Hollywood, he was a kid on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Pascale’s biography tells the story of Whedon and his family’s early days, from his TV-writer grandfather (John Whedon: “The Donna Reed Show” and “The Andy Griffith Show”) and father (Tom Whedon: “Captain Kangaroo,” “The Electric Company,”) to his childhood prowling neighborhood comic-book stores while attending the Riverdale school in The Bronx. And to the start of his career — as a video-store clerk, and his work on “Toy Story” and “Serenity.” A success story with appeal for West Coasters and West Siders alike.
Cool Code, Bro
by Nick Parish (Robot, Robot & Hwang)
Memo to “The Social Network”: Move over for the Bro Code network. In his new book, former Post reporter Parish explains the evolution the “Brogrammer,” a popular jock whose sport is not football but computer coding. Growing up with heroes like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, this bold new breed is busy “dispelling the myth of the pocket protector.”