Summer may be in full swing, but there's still time for you to dive into a new book. To help you choose your next read, Jeffrey Brown spoke with two of our experts: Ann Patchett, acclaimed author and owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, and Maureen Corrigan, a professor at Georgetown University and book critic for NPR's Fresh Air.
WATCH: Film critics reveal their favorite and most anticipated summer movies
Find the full list of their book recommendations below.
"Epistolary novels usually don't work, but this one does. It's about a grouchy older woman who lives alone, who in the course of the book makes more and more connections to neighbors, to friends. It's a really beautiful, beautiful book."
– Ann Patchett
"It's a very quiet, funny, smart book in which you don't think a whole lot is going on and then more and more and more happens… Just beautifully written, quiet, simple and very, very smart, very entertaining."
– Ann Patchett
"It's about a young man, a successful financier, who returns to his hometown in Virginia, where his father has been the victim of a mysterious hit and run. This young man has to figure out how to save the family business… from the clutches of a mob that now controls the town."
– Maureen Corrigan
"This book is set in Detroit, which is Abbott's hometown. Early 2000s Detroit is down on its luck. A bunch of women get together and join a finance club and they spout all these slogans about female empowerment and yet this club also turns out to be a Ponzi scheme."
– Maureen Corrigan
"I think Karen Russell is one of our greatest living American writers. Nobody captures the old weird America like she does. This one is set in the Dust Bowl in Nebraska."
– Maureen Corrigan
"This is a collection of essays… each one about a specific person in a particular branch of government… and talks about the work that they are doing and the enormous impact it makes on all of our lives. We never knew that these people were doing these amazing things. This is absolutely the book for right now."
– Ann Patchett
"John Green… is obsessed with tuberculosis. Tuberculosis in history, but also tuberculosis here and now. Why is it that this completely curable disease is still killing so many people? And what will happen when we no longer are giving money to the World Health Organization to save those people's lives?"
– Ann Patchett
"A fantastic true story about a young couple in the 1970s in England… They want to build a boat, chuck everything and live at sea… Everything is terrific until about a year into the voyage, they're in the middle of the Pacific and they encounter a whale who breaches the boat."
– Maureen Corrigan
"Whybrow was an editor earlier in her life, worked in publishing, but for the last 20 years, she and her husband have been on a farm in Vermont, and she has been raising Icelandic sheep. This is not my fantasy. This is not my world. But boy, does she take me as a reader out there into the meadow with her and make me feel how everything is interconnected in that meadow."
– Maureen Corrigan
"It is a book about a young woman who goes to the pool every morning when she's in high school, swims and swims and swims, tries out for the Olympic team, practices, swims and swims… It's a book about showing up and practicing and doing the work."
– Ann Patchett
"It's about a dog named Crispin's Crispian, and he's named that because he owns himself. He belongs to himself. And it does what great children's books, what great books period, do. It takes you into a world you would never have imagined, and you just wanna stay there."
– Maureen Corrigan
"This is the sequel to her book, 'The Surprise.' In this one, the guinea pig's owner, Maude, is going camping. Guinea pig gets into the backpack the way they do and goes off into the wilderness. It is such a strange, terrific book."
– Ann Patchett
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