Six sun-lounger reads for a smarter summer

Whether you’re enjoying a coffee in a just-discovered café or plan on being entirely beach-adjacent, author and book critic Helen Whitaker suggests six newly released summer reads to suit your travel style

The End of Summer

By Charlotte Philby
This thriller, spanning the south of France, Cape Cod, New York and London, has ‘beach read’ written all over it. Judy was happily married to Rory for 40 years. Now widowed and retired in Languedoc, she receives a call from her daughter in London: reporters are on her doorstep saying Judy has committed a terrible crime. At that moment, Judy realises the jig is up and we discover how as a young con-woman she targeted Rory and his wealthy friends before circumstances unravelled beyond her control.

Long Island Compromise

By Taffy Brodesser-Akner
The author of the smash hit novel (and then Disney+ TV show) Fleishman is in Trouble is back with a portrait of affluent New York life that is equally compulsive. Wealthy businessman Carl Fletcher is kidnapped in 1983, before a ransom is paid and he’s returned to his family, seemingly unscathed. But forty years later, Carl, his wife Ruth, and their three now grown-up children are still reckoning with the fallout from those fateful five days.

The Ministry of Time

By Kaliane Bradley
Fans of bestseller Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow will adore this time-bending tale that’s part love story, part speculative fiction. A new government department (The Ministry of Time) has plucked five people from history and brought them to present day London, and each is allocated ‘a bridge’ – a civil servant who acts as the intermediary between the time-travellers and the modern world. Our unnamed female narrator’s charge is Commander Graham Gore, who was on Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic in 1847 when he was brought to the future. As he and his bridge become ever-closer, he must learn about concepts like dating and Spotify, while working out why the government is conducting this experiment to begin with.

Costanza

By Rachel Blackmore
To Rome in 1636, where Costanza is married to Matteo, an artist assisting the hot-shot sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who at that time was a favourite of the Pope himself. The true story is that Bernini and Costanza fell in love and started an affair, scandalising 17th-century Catholic society. Bernini’s great works and life are well documented, but what happened to the ‘scarlet woman’ at the centre of it all? In this hugely evocative portrayal of the Eternal City, Blackmore tells Costanza’s side of the story.
Out 1 August

The Second Coming

By Garth Risk Hallberg
Risk Hallberg was deemed a ‘literary wunderkind’ for 2015’s City on Fire and his follow up is no less ambitious, flashing forward and backwards from New York in 2011, to 1990s Maryland, to the Costa Brava in 2021. When 13-year-old Jolie drops her phone onto the subway track, she climbs down to pick it up, sparking a chain of events that cause her estranged father to return from California. Just note: showing off the cover poolside may garner kudos but, at 600 pages, it’s one for your e-reader.

This Motherless Land

By Nikki May
When her mother dies, Funke is sent from Lagos to live with estranged relatives in Somerset, where she is treated like a burden by everyone except for her beloved cousin Liv. The family renames her ‘Kate’, and she’s told to assimilate into British life, so she does everything she can to fit in. Years later, she’s on track for a place at Oxbridge when another tragedy befalls the family and Funke is sent back to Nigeria, where, after years away, she doesn’t fit in either. This is a smart, modern reimagining of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park set across three decades and two continents.