20 Books to Get Lost in This Summer
Summer is when lovers of books feel freest to read without restraint—lying on a beach, swinging on a porch, or perching on a stoop at the end of a sweaty day. The Atlantic’s writers and editors want to help in this endeavor, and so we’ve selected books to match some warm-weather moods: Maybe you want to transport yourself to another place, or to take a deep dive into one topic. Perhaps you have a yen to feel wonder about the universe or rediscover an old gem. Some readers just want to devour something totally new. Here are 20 books you should grab this season.
Transport Yourself to Another Place
Heat Wave
by Penelope Lively
The pleasure of Heat Wave is its slow, mesmerizing drama. Set in the English countryside over a hot summer, Lively’s slender novel introduces us to Pauline, a divorced editor in her 50s who has opted for an existence “rich in carefully nurtured minor satisfactions.” Among those satisfactions is the freedom she feels in her summer cottage, unleashed from London, her partner, and her office job. Staying next door—and buzzing at a different frequency—are her daughter, Theresa; her son-in-law, Maurice, a smarmy, up-and-coming writer; and their toddler. With a gimlet eye, Pauline observes Theresa’s unhappiness and Maurice’s shifty egotism, the amalgam of repression and delusion that seems to hold their relationship together; as she fixates on them, she thinks back on her own marriage. Lively’s wry prose captures the mundane clarity of Pauline’s life among the wheat fields and the way that a maternal ache, when left to its own devices, can crescendo. Never has a mother-in-law’s judgment seemed so deliciously understated—and so devastating in its conclusion. — Jane Yong Kim
Toy Fights
by Don Paterson
The Scottish poet Don Paterson is kind of a genius. His poems are ferocious, his critical writings are chatty or witheringly technical or both, and he’s also produced—who does this?—several collections of aphorisms. (“Anyone whose students ‘teach him as much as he teaches them’ should lose half his salary.”) And now a memoir, : It covers God, guitar, origami, breakdown, and Dundee, Scotland, the poet’s hometown, “dementedly hospitable in the way poor towns are,” he
