If you're lucky enough to have a quiet place to retreat from the heat this summer, we've got a symphony of suggestions for novels and nonfiction to keep you entertained.
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Ann Patchett, acclaimed writer and owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, and Gilbert Cruz, editor of The New York Times Book Review, recently joined PBS News Hour's Jeffrey Brown to share their picks for summer reading.
"If you want a book that has you from 'hello,' this is the one. Family goes to the Cape every summer for two weeks. They have kids in their 20s, they have elderly parents and they eat sandwiches, they are very near Sandwich and they are the sandwich generation."
– Ann Patchett
"This is an elderly woman who's very isolated. She meets a mouse, and the mouse brings all of these wonderful people into her life. It sounds hokey. It's not."
– Ann Patchett
"Two young sisters working so hard in a very tough existence on an island off the coast of Washington. It all changes when a bear comes to their neighborhood and it drives the sisters apart."
– Ann Patchett
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"If you want some mystery, some cops and robbers, some corruption, some great writing."
– Ann Patchett
"I've only been to Nantucket for two hours on, like, the coldest day that I can recall, so I have no idea what it's like to be there in the summer. But I sort of do, because I've read a dozen Elin Hilderbrand books."
– Gilbert Cruz
"This is about, essentially, an independent horror movie that was made years and years ago. A bunch of tragedies happened. It's become a cult film. And the only person left from the production has started to encounter some weird things."
– Gilbert Cruz
"There have been many retellings of the King Arthur legend – books, movies, musicals. This one is sort of a sequel."
– Gilbert Cruz
"This is a collection of essays about family and love and grief and fathers. But most importantly, it's all woven together through the lens of basketball."
– Ann Patchett
"Alice is a fiction writer and a scholar, but she is also the only Black woman to have written a No. 1 country song. This is a story of all the people who have been erased in country music's past, and she is restoring them into the landscape."
– Ann Patchett
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"Jill Ciment was 16 years old when she first kissed her art teacher, who was 46. They got married and they stayed together until he died at 86. And it is her looking back on her life and thinking, 'It was a happy marriage, but knowing what I know now, maybe there was something a little wrong about that?'"
And a bonus…
"…a great book that just came out in paperback that could be read as a companion piece."
– Ann Patchett
"The summer of 1982 – if you care about science fiction, fantasy, stuff like that – was one of the biggest summers of all time. So it had "E.T.", "Poltergeist," "Blade Runner," "Tron," a "Mad Max" sequel, a "Star Trek" sequel. And this is essentially a history of that summer, a history of those movies."
– Gilbert Cruz
"Emily Nussbaum does an amazing job of sort of sketching that whole history and what they're billing as sort of the first comprehensive history of this very important genre."
– Gilbert Cruz
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