4 Great Beach Reads
The best of summer reading
What do you need for an idyllic day at the pool or shore besides sunblock and a towel? A book, of course! Here are four recommended summer page-turners:
Princeton grad Jennifer Weiner’s newest novel, The Next Best Thing, features the character of Ruthie, a budding screenwriter with a facial scar who is struggling with finding love and achieving success in Hollywood. The dedicated Weiner fan may remember the protagonist from the short story “Swim” in Weiner’s The Guy Not Taken. Atria Books, $27 (an editors’ pick)
Robin Gaby Fisher, a two-time Pulitzer finalist and journalism professor at Rutgers University in Newark, teamed with filmmaker Angelo J. Guglielmo Jr. to tell the disturbing story of Tania Head, who falsely presented herself as a 9/11 survivor. The Woman Who Wasn’t There follows Head through her success in becoming president of the World Trade Center Survivors’ network and the eventual unraveling of her tale, revealing that she hadn’t entered the United States until 2003. Touchstone, $26 (an editors’ pick)
Travel back to the ’20s in Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife, which tells the love story of Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Richardson, whose lively social life inspired the writer’s novel The Sun Also Rises. Ballantine books, $25
Ridgewood, NJ resident Harlan Coben’s newest mystery, Stay Close, is set in gritty Atlantic City, where a crippled photographer, a housewife and a determined detective are haunted by an event that occurred almost two decades prior. a missing- person case forces the characters to confront their past in order to solve the mystery. Dutton, $28
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