TRUE STORIES
The Skies Belong to Us
Love and Terror in the Golden Age
of Hijacking
by Brendan Koerner (Crown), out June 18
Two terrorists in love decide to hijack a plane heading from San Diego to Seattle and redirect it to Algiers. Roger Holder, a black Vietnam veteran, and Cathy Kerkow, a white party girl, concoct a half-baked air heist (which shockingly works) and spend the following years on the lam, befriending Black Panthers and French movie stars. A star-crossed, anti-hero love story that will transport you back to the ’70s.
This Town
Two Parties and a Funeral —
Plus Plenty of Valet Parking! —
in America’s Gilded Capital
By Mark Leibovich (Penguin), out July 16
Tongues are wagging in Washington over what could possibly be in this DC take-down tome — set to be the “Game Change” of 2013. No one has seen it yet, but Politco says that it will focus on “warring factions in Obama’s campaign and White House.”
CELEBS’ PICKS FOR SUMMER READS
The Astronaut Wives Club
A True Story
By Lily Koppel (Grand Central), out June 11
Behind every great man is great woman, and behind every astronaut is a desperate housewife. Marketed as “Mad Men” in zero gravity, the book chronicles the long-standing relationship among the “dutiful” space wives that remained largely in the shadow of their rock-star husbands. At first, they play the “good wives” with their bouffant hairdos, but by the end their self-effacement has come to an end and the stirring of feminism begins. Many divorces later, what remains is the enduring bonds of female friendship.
The Boys in the Boat
Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics
by Daniel James Brown (Viking), out June 6
Who knew rowing could make you cry? This story follows an eight-oar crew at the University of Washington and their quest for Olympic glory in Adolf Hitler’s Germany. The perfect underdog story — in the vein of a “Chariots of Fire” or “Rocky” — the team is made up of the sons of blue-collar workers, loggers and farmers. The movie version is already in development with Kenneth Branagh set to direct — so beat your friends to this gem and practice saying, “The movie was good, but the book was better.”
Blue Plate Special
An Autobiography of My Appetites
by Kate Christensen
(Doubleday), out July 9
Award-winning novelist Christensen’s memoir begins with a seemingly idyllic breakfast in her youth that is blackened by her father brutally beating her mother. From here, we journey with Kate through divorce, boarding school, and her writing life in Brooklyn with recipes sprinkled throughout the narrative. At its heart, the memoir a love letter to food.
CHICK LIT
Big Girl Panties
by Stephanie Evanovich
(William Morrow), out July 9
The first book from romance heavyweight Janet Evanovich’s niece Stephanie opens with the rotund Holly Brennan, a recent widow at 32, who is smushed in a plane seat beside “the Adonis” Logan Montgomery, a personal trainer. Montgomery sees Holly’s heft as a challenge and offers to get her back into fighting shape. As the pounds melt away, his heart begins to follow suit. An unlikely and very steamy affair follows. But can a man obsessed with image fall in love with a former fat girl?
Tampa
by Alissa Nutting (Ecco), out July 2
Tampa is the unsexiest sex book of the season. A gorgeous eighth-grade teacher Celeste Price has a secret: She enjoys seducing her prepubescent students. This is not for the “Fifty Shades” set; it might not even be for the “Lolita” set. If you aren’t completely turned off by the scene of Celeste pleasuring herself to a One Direction concert, you might be able to sit through a full-reading of this book. Either way, a talker.
Beautiful Day
by Elin Hilderbrand
(Reagan Arthur Books), out June 25
Weddings are headache enough, but add in an overbearing — dead — mother, and you have serious trouble. Jenn Carmichael plans the wedding of her mother’s dreams, drawn from a notebook her mother wrote before her death. Location? The notebook says Nantucket. Food? No spinach. Maid of honor? Her sister, of course. Add in sibling rivalries, drunken hookups and misbehaving bridesmaids, it’s sure to be far from a beautiful day.
Entwined with You
Crossfire Series (Book 3)
by Sylvia Day (Berkley), out June 4
Is Christian Grey still not out of your system? Sylvia Day might have a remedy for that in Gideon Cross, the smolderingly sexy star of her “Crossfire” romance series. Gideon doesn’t do BDSM, but fans say that her books are steamier, more addictive, and better written than E.L. James’ work.
Revenge Wears Prada
The Devil Returns
by Lauren Weisberger
(Simon & Schuster), out June 4
“Devil Wears Prada” — an international hit that spawned the terrific movie starring Meryl Streep — didn’t necessarily need a sequel. But, if you’d like to catch up with Andy Sachs, the disgruntled assistant, here’s your chance. Skip over good chunks of the book — do we really need to hear about her perfect marriage or her dream job running a (money-making?!) bridal magazine? — and head straight for the Miranda Priestly run-ins.
SUPERNATURAL TALES
Red Moon
by Benjamin Percy (Grand Central), out now
This book, endorsed by John Irving, plunges us into a world in the not-so-distant future where werewolves are the world’s newest brand of terrorists. Lycans are not born, they are created by a communicable virus that transmits from human to human through blood. Violence abounds. But at the heart, the book is a modern political thriller, where serious questions of immigration and human rights mingle with top-notch horror and gore.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
by Neil Gaiman (Deckle Edge), out June 18
From the dark imagination of Gaiman, who wrote children’s books “Coraline” and “Sandman,” comes his first adult novel in eight years. How to describe a book where the pond down the street is really a limitless ocean and a creepy cloth monster takes the guise as a beautiful baby-sitter? Impossible. But just know that this slim novel, gorgeously written, keeps its talons in you long after you’ve finished.
Sisterland
By Curtis Sittenfeld
(Random House), out June 25
Despite being identical sisters, they have only one thing in common: They both have “the gift.” Vi is a bisexual medium who embraces her talent, and Kate is a suburban housewife who represses hers. But when Vi receives a premonition that Missouri (their home) will be rocked by a killer earthquake, Kate must question her decision to forsake her sixth sense. Sittenfeld, author of “Prep,” offers more than another paranormal thriller. It’s a touching examination of the sibling bond.
The Kings and Queens of Roam
by Daniel Wallace (Touchstone), out now
Southern folklorist Wallace, best known for the novel and movie “Big Fish,” pens a disturbing fairy tale about the cursed town of Roam, where the walking dead outnumber the living. Two orphaned sisters, great-grandchildren of the town’s founder, are both touched by the town’s curse in opposite ways. Helen, the older sister, is as ugly as sin, and mean, too. She sees too much. Her sister, Rachel, is sweet, kind and the most beautiful girl in the area, but she is blind.
Deeply Odd
An Odd Thomas Novel
by Dean Koontz
(Bantam), out Tuesday
Odd Thomas is indeed as strange as his name. He is a line cook with the ability to communicate with the dead. In “Deeply Odd,” the sixth in the series, the cook is tasked with helping three helpless children who will be executed if he cannot intervene in time. An early run-in with the killer will hook you immediately, as he starts on a interstate manhunt with the help of an unlikely assortment of ghostly guides, including Alfred Hitchcock.
CATCH ME IF YOU CAN
Inferno
by Dan Brown (Doubleday), out now
Borrowing a page from Robert Ludlum, Brown opens with Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon waking in a hospital bed in Florence with a bullet wound to his head and no memory of how it got there. When an assassin shows up to finish the job, Langdon is saved by a beautiful and brilliant doctor with dark mysteries of her own. Langdon’s Da Lemma: evade an international black-ops outfit while piecing together his lost Italian weekend and solving Dante-inspired riddles that seem to be the key to saving the world from a new kind of hellfire. Sure, it’s formula, but “Inferno” promises to be the ubiquitous beach read of the summer (the first two Langdon novels, “The Da Vinci Code” and “The Lost Symbol,” sold 110 million copies). Abandon all hope, ye who try to put this book down.
Red Sparrow
by Jason Matthews (Scribner), out June 4
This debut novel from a 33-year CIA veteran delivers action as pulse-pounding as it is authentic. The story is mainly set in present-day Russia, where two spies on opposite ends of the continuum — Nate, a CIA officer, and Dominika, a gorgeous Russian spy — fall into a hot love affair punctuated by betrayals, patriotism and passion. “Red Sparrow” has already been optioned as a film.
Visitation Street
by Ivy Pochoda
(Dennis Lehane Books), out July 9
Thriller writer Dennis Lehane read this literary mystery and was so impressed that he asked to have it published under his own namesake imprint. The setting is Red Hook in the summertime. Two teenage girls decide to take a raft out on the polluted bay. When only one of the girls makes it back safely, all hell breaks loose in the neighborhood.
The Execution of Noa P. Singleton
by Elizabeth L. Silver (Crown), out June 11
Noa P. Singleton is guilty. She slept during her trial, offered no defense, had a clear motive and remained unapologetic to her victim’s mother. Now she’s on death row. But six months before her execution, her victim’s mother offers her a clemency petition. Why now? Why ever? What was once believed to be a cut-and-dried case in no longer, as Noa begins to let her guard down, and the truth simmers to a boil, bit-by-bit.
No Regrets, Coyote
By John Dufresne
(W.W. Norton & Company), out July 15
Wylie “Coyote” Melville, a therapist and “consultant,” is not professionally trained, but his powers of perception rival those of literature’s great Holmesian crime detectives. When called to a Christmas Eve crime scene, where a family of four is killed execution style, the experts declare it a “murder-suicide.” Coyote isn’t so certain. What follows is an investigation through Florida’s corruption and grime.
HIGH LIT
The Son
by Philipp Meyer (Ecco), out Tuesday
This is a burly book — hefty in size (over 500 pages), wide in scope, masculine in tone — but with artful prose that cuts like a knife. The story is saga of the American West broken up by three narrators: the patriarch, who lives in the 1800s in the Republic of Texas, his son, and his great-granddaughter. This book is not for the faint at heart. One scene that describes the rape and murder of two women by a group of Comanches is one of the most graphically violent we’ve read.
Big Brother
by Lionel Shriver (Harper), out now
Shriver, a National Book Award winner, doesn’t shy away from difficult topics. She’s tackled school shootings, the American health-care system and population control. In “Big Brother” she writes about obesity. The opening scene — in which the narrator cannot recognize her own brother because of how much weight he has gained — is so devastating, you won’t be able to stop reading.
The Silver Star
by Jeannette Walls (Scribner), out June 11
If you liked her memoir “The Glass Castle,” which spent more than six years on the New York Times best-seller list, you’ll find a novelized kindred spirit in “The Silver Star.” Like her memoir, there is a crazy mom and absurdly mature and resilient children. In this story, though, the decaying family dynasty in small town Byler, Va., supplies the backdrop to a remarkable coming of age tale.
The Yonahlossee
Riding Camp for Girls
By Anton DiSclafani
(Riverhead), out June 4
Mean girls on horses — is there a more terrifying combination? Set in the 1930s during the Great Depression, Thea Atwell, 15, is cast out of her Florida home under mysterious circumstances and is forced to spend her summer at a posh equestrian camp populated by Southern belles. Girls that age can be so cruel, and if you’ve ever been on the receiving end (who hasn’t?) you’ll remember your own horror stories.
AND ONE FOR THE KIDS
Twerp
By Mark Goldblatt
(Random House), out Tuesday
Reminiscent of “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” this young-adult book is in the form of a school-assigned journal written by a sixth-grader to his teacher. Julian Twerski did something really bad (bad enough to get himself suspended), but he won’t talk about it, not yet at least. Based on the author’s experience of growing up as a kid in the late 1960s in Queens, you don’t have to be a twerp to read this book.
Book of the Summer!
The Shining Girls
by Lauren Beukes (Mulholland Books), out June 4
This snappy supernatural thriller has got everyone talking — and some say it’s this summer’s answer to last year’s mega-hit “Gone Girl.” A time traveling serial killer targets special, bright young women who “shine.” The murders are as gruesome as they are creepy (the killer stalks each girl at different stages in their lives, leaving mementos in his wake) and the body count is high, until we meet Kirby Mazrachi, the only girl to survive his attack, who makes it her mission to track down the monster.