GET STARTED ON BEACH READING
June is rapidly approaching, and you know what that means, don’t you? It’s the beginning of the beach reading season. There are quite a few great beach read candidates coming out in June, so I have come up with a select list from which to choose, depending on your reading tastes.
No summer would be complete without new beach reads by Mary Kay Andrews, Elin Hilderbrand and Luanne Rice.
Andrews’ Spring Fever is a fun romantic read. Annajane really believes she’s over her ex-husband, Mason, until she goes to his wedding. Suddenly she understands she might want him back. It won’t be easy, but Annajane is determined to win back Mason and the happy life they once had, no matter what obstacles might be placed in her path.
Summerland by Elin Hilderbrand can be summed up in one charged sentence. One summer night four lives are changed forever by a fatal crash.
Luanne Rice, an author of local interest as she has a summer home in southeastern Connecticut, brings us Little Night. Clare Burke tried to protect her sister, Anne, from an abusive husband but ended up in prison for assault. Her prison sentence was mostly based on Anne’s testimony, all lies. Clare has been estranged from her sister ever since.
For historical fiction fans, the hottest historical novel of the season is The Queen's Lover by Francine Du Plessix Gray. The gallant Swedish Count Axel von Fersen meets the alluring 19-year-old Dauphine Marie Antoinette at a masquerade ball in Paris in 1774. Their fateful encounter begins a lifelong affair that lasts through the French Revolution.
Mystery and suspense junkies should try Gillian Flynn’s new novel, Gone Girl. Nick and Amy Dunne are supposed to be celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary on a lovely summer morning in Missouri. But Amy has disappeared. As the police investigate, revealing the lies, deceit and just plain bad behavior of the Dunnes’ marriage, everyone in town is asking themselves how well they know the one that they love. Did Nick kill his wife? And if not, who did?
A large contingent of beach readers can never get enough of Jason Bourne. Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Imperative by Eric Van Lustbader continues the Bourne saga. The man Jason pulls from a frozen lake is nearly dead, shot, bloody and drowning. He awakens with amnesia, with no memory of his identity or why he was shot – something that sounds all too familiar to Bourne.
Memoir readers should pick up a copy of Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails: A Memoir by Anthony Swofford. Swofford, a former marine and the author of Jarhead, writes a riveting account that questions our ideas about masculinity, about the relationship between fathers and sons and about the nature of love.
I haven’t forgotten literary fiction fans. I am very excited about two second novels by Glen Duncan and Robert Goolrick, authors whose first novels were literary fiction successes and favorite book club picks.
Talulla Rising by Glen Duncan is the thinking person’s werewolf novel, part two. When last we met in The Last Werewolf, Talulla Demetriou was left alone and pregnant by the violent death of Jake, the last male werewolf and her lover. All alone and hunted by enemies, she must go on the run to find a secret place to give birth to Jake's baby. Once the baby is born, Talulla is still not safe as now she must race against time to save both herself and the baby from the hunters of the World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena (WOCOP), blood-drinking religious fanatics and the oldest living vampire.
Heading Out to Wonderful by Robert Goolrich is the eagerly awaited follow-up to his wonderful A Reliable Wife. Goolrick has penned another thrilling, sensual, unforgettable story of love gone horribly wrong in a place and time where such things could and did happen, this time in 1948 in the little town of Brownsburg, Virginia.
Just think – June is only the start of beach reading season. I’ll have many more suggestions for summer reading based on books due to be published in July and August.
