Best Bets for Summer Reading

What are the best books of 2019 so far? Looking for a great book to read at the beach? #Books can enhance your vacation as well as your staycation this summer. We’ve rounded up five of the best-reviewed and buzz-heavy books of the last couple months, with links to our online catalog, provided.

Take these stories with you on your trip, or just take them into your backyard for a literary lounge in a hammock or lawn chair. We have a mix of Pulitzer finalists and debut novelists on this list, with a blend of genres and an undoubtedly interesting collection of characters.

Normal People
Sally Rooney
Sally Rooney’s narrative voice and realistic dialogue all but grabs you by the wrist and pulls you into the world, never letting go; it’s an eloquently written and achingly poignant page turner that readers will likely feel compelled to finish in the span of a weekend. This coming-of-age story is about a friendship between Connell and Marriane as they exit their teenage years and enter college; it’s a unique friendship that becomes a relationship, but evolves into a friendship…, until it becomes a restarted relationship…and a re-restarted friendship.

Orange World
Karen Russell
Karen Russell’s fiction has made an impression with readers for her balance of the outlandish and the profound, a mix of magical realism and slice-of-life. “Orange World” is one of several short stories in her latest, which blends Rumpelstiltskin with Rosemary’s Baby, along with another fairy-tale-esque story of star-crossed lovers, one a young man and the other a 2,000-year-old girl emerging from a bog. This isn’t your typical summer beach read, but it’ll will be a refreshing batch of tales to get lost in while on vacation.

The Farm
Joanne Ramos
‘The Farm’ has been compared to dystopic literary landmarks like Atwood’s ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ and Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go,’  mixing chilling yet realistic imaginings of a luxury retreat where guests sign on to be “hosts” in exchange for a substantial monetary reimbursement. The catch is that guests are forbidden from leaving the grounds, and are kept from contacting anyone on the outside over the nine-months of host service. For Jane, an immigrant from the Philippines, every moment of her stay is monitored by the administers of Golden Oaks, as she’s tasked with producing the perfect baby (for someone else). The Farm tells the story of Jane’s struggle to reconnect with her family on the outside.

Miracle Creek
Angie Kim
Angie Kim threads along a twisty/tense drama spliced with mystery and modern suburban intrigue, perfect for fans of Lianne Moriarty’s “Big Little Lies” or Celeste Ng’s “Little Fires Everywhere.” Secrets of misdeeds and rivalries come to the fore during a trial seeking the truth around the deadly explosion of an experimental medical device meant to treat autism and infertility.  The murder trial winds up upending a small community and weighs upon the married couple of Korean immigrants at the story’s center, who run this experimental pressurized oxygen chamber for their patients.

Home Remedies
Xuan Juliana Wang
The stories collected here explore the nuanced experiences of what it’s like to be a Chinese millennial in this day and age. Wang captures a composite of energies and emotions from a cast of characters representing an emerging generation facing an uncertain future. Wang’s literary montage creates a portrait of people feeling the pull between heritage and tradition against the advances of a brave new digital vanguard, introducing you to characters as varied as live-streaming stars, to quigong grandmasters, telling stories of parents raising a family in America and athletes competing at the Beijing Olympics.