15 books that you have to read this summer!

Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

Gyasi’s brilliantly conceived, artfully written first novel spans nearly three centuries of African and American history. She begins with two half-sisters born of the same mother in different villages on Africa’s Gold Coast. “Separated sisters,” Gyasi writes, “are like a woman and her reflection doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond.” Effia, who is born in 1744 in Fanteland, marries the British governor of Cape Coast Castle; her son Quey is educated in England. Her sister Esi, the daughter of an Asante leader, survives the horrors of the Castle’s slave dungeon and the Middle Passage. Esi’s daughter Ness ends up on an Alabama plantation. Gyasi creates an unforgettable cast of characters as she follows seven generations of this family through the dislocations and continuing repercussions of slavery on both continents. (Credit: Knopf)

Emma Cline, The Girls

Cline’s first novel was inspired by the girls in the Charles Manson cult, who killed eight people on a rampage in 1969. Her intimate focus on a young groupie makes the story fresh. Evie is a lonely 14-year-old living with her divorced mother in northern California when she encounters Suzanne, a self-assured older girl. Drawn by Suzanne’s feral allure, Evie ends up on the charismatic Russell’s ranch commune. Suzanne initiates Evie, teaching her about sex, drugs and shoplifting. She tips Evie off when she and the other girls play out Russell’s ultimate revenge. Cline’s acute portrait of an older Evie, an isolated woman living in a borrowed house, is surprising and apt. Evie remains haunted about what happened, and by what might have been, as she ends up “a bystander, a fugitive without a crime.” (Credit: Random House)

Arthur Lubow, Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer

Photographer Diane Arbus shocked and seduced her viewers with her focus on “the obscure over the celebrated, victims of power over its agents.” She was born into a wealthy Jewish family – a “chilly, gilded kingdom” shared with her brother, the poet Howard Nemerov. She married fashion photographer Allan Arbus at 18, and began collaborating with him. After 18 years and two daughters, she ended her marriage and pursued what became a spectacular solo career. Lubow explores how Arbus developed her gift for taking unnerving photographs of twins, circus performers, transvestites, and other marginalized people. Particularly valuable are his insights into her depressions, and the painful love affairs and money troubles that led to her suicide at age 48. His biography is an illuminating portrait of a profoundly original artist. (Credit: Ecco)

Bob Shacochis, Kingdoms in the Air

These 13 essays by the US National Book Award winning novelist remind us he’s one of the best writers around. Shacochis takes fishing trips to Argentina’s Iberá Marshland and Siberia’s Kamchatka peninsula, and travels to Kiritimati atoll off Christmas Island in the South Pacific to surf. In the lengthy title essay, he accompanies the photographer Thomas Laird, the first outsider to live in Nepal’s Kingdom of Mustang, on a visit in 2001, 10 years after the region was opened to outsiders. As they set out, he writes, they could only hope that the place would be free of the “anger, betrayal, and confusion that had infected fabled Nepal.” His account reads like finely wrought, elaborately textured fiction, combined with an investigative reporter’s analysis of geopolitical shifts. (Credit: Grove Press)

Ariel Leve, An Abbreviated Life

“Imagine someone lies to you and about you,” writes Leve in her raw and powerful memoir. “Imagine this person is your mother….” Leve lost her father to divorce and her sense of self to an unstable mother who demanded too much and created an unsafe world, a world without boundaries. Her struggle for equilibrium endures into her 40s. One long-time therapist tells her she has brain damage – the effects of “trauma, fear and anxiety.” Her brain was altered by being raised by an “erratic, unpredictable, aggressive” parent, explains a Harvard Medical School research director. Leve writes of learning to be constantly on guard, living “an abbreviated life”, and how she finally found her way out. Hers is an unsentimental tale, both cautionary and heartening. (Credit: Harper)

Anna Noyes, Goodnight, Beautiful Women

The 11 stories in Noyes’ first collection, winner of the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop’s Henfield Prize for Fiction,, are set in coastal Maine. In this harsh climate, winter brings “ice encrusted birches”, bitter winds and isolation, and summer people live in pristine compounds separate from the locals. Noyes’ brave and hardy women struggle with demanding mothers, precocious older sisters and incestuous fathers. One watches her troubled husband become deranged, toss their silverware and wedding china into the quarry, and then drown himself there. Another woman, who has moved back to rural Maine with her husband-to-be, spends a night stranded on a deserted island with a local woman still suffering dizzy spells and other damage from a mugging years before. Noyes’ tales shift abruptly with the turns of human emotions and the tides. (Credit: Grove Press)

Karl Jacoby, The Strange Career of William Ellis

A noted historian spends decades researching the unusual case of a once-famous man who slipped through the cracks of history into oblivion. The identity of the man who called himself Guillermo Enrique Eliseo, writes Jacoby, is a “century-old mystery… that conjured up a borderlands rife with mistaken identities, outrageous rumours, and unexpected migrations from North to South.” Eliseo, who claimed to be a “fabulously wealthy” Mexican or Cuban, was in fact born a slave with the name William Henry Ellis on a South Texas cotton plantation. Jacoby tracks the facts behind the masterful self-invention that allowed Ellis to cross the color line during Reconstruction, when the US was segregated, and become a millionaire businessman and diplomat. Jacoby’s chronicle of one man’s racial passing, set against the backdrop of evolving US-Mexico borderlands, is fascinating and timely. (Credit: WW Norton)

Ramona Ausubel, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Ausubel’s second novel explores how what we inherit – money, tradition, status – shapes our lives. Fern and Edgar, descended from wealthy Chicago families, marry in 1966 and have three children, a house in Cambridge and a summer place in Martha’s Vineyard. When family subsidies end suddenly in 1976, the marriage unravels overnight. Edgar sails toward Bermuda with a married woman he barely knows. Fern sets off cross-country with a giant bank guard, her groom in a simulated wedding intended to cheer up a group of Alzheimer’s patients. Ausubel writes with great empathy of all three generations, including nine-year-old Cricket, who ends up in charge of her twin brothers when each parent thinks the other is home with the kids. And she shows us the surprising ways love endures. (Credit: Riverhead)

Cara Black, Murder on the Quai

This vivid prequel to the 15 novels in Black’s popular series about Paris-based private investigator Aimée Leduc opens in November 1989 with the murder of a well-to-do provincial under the Pont des Invalides. Revenge is the motive. But for what? And how far back does this blood feud go? The victim’s daughter wants to hire Aimée’s father to investigate, but he’s headed to Berlin, where the Wall has fallen, to retrieve his ex-wife’s Stasi files. Without his knowledge Aimée takes on her first case. Black alternates between Aimée's investigation and violent events in November 1942 in a small village in Vichy France that may be at the root of several killings. As Aimée becomes a target and her father’s trip grows complicated, Black reveals why Aimee chooses to pursue the family business. (Credit: Soho Press)

Yasmine El Rashidi, Chronicle of a Last Summer

El Rashidi came to prominence when she wrote about the Arab Spring and what followed for the New York Review of Books. Her lyrical first novel chronicles three blistering summers in Cairo as the country is transformed. In 1984, when her narrator is six, she watches a documentary about Anwar Sadat’s assassination on TV with her mother. Power cuts are common, and her father has gone away for mysterious reasons. In 1998, she is in college, wondering how to reconcile political repression with her dreams of making documentary films. By 2014, nearly four years after the fall of Hosni Mubarak, her father is back (he tells her “he knew a revolution would change nothing”), and she and her mother prepare to leave their home. Chronicle of a Last Summer is a shimmering, nuanced personal and political coming of age story. (Credit: Tim Duggan Books/Crown)
 

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