12 books to accompany you until the end of summer

British spy Emma Makepeace stars in Glasss Spy novel inspired by James Bond. Makepeace is not his real name, of course gets his first big mission: find an innocent man wanted by the Russian government and bring him safely to MI6. It’s not a simple task, and readers are better off for it. Her target doesn’t want her protection and there are spies all over London trying to stop Emma in her tracks. Glass, aka Christi DaughertyYA Cimmeria Academy author mystery series, wrote a fast-paced thriller in the spirit of Ian Fleming, with a very modern twist. (dwarf rooster)

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Amy & Lan, by Sadie Jones

Amy and Lachlan, the child narrators of Joness sixth novel, live in a bucolic town in England with their parents, refugees from city life. Children come of age playing unsupervised, feeling like the king and queen of an untouched utopia. But the real world encroaches on their idyll when long-buried faultlines rock the community, and Amy and Lan try to make sense of some very adult issues in their childish ways. (Harper, August 16)

Birds and us: a 12,000 year history, from rock art to conservation, by Tim Birkhead

Dogs may be man’s (or mankind’s) best friend, but birds hold another beloved place in our hearts and minds. In The birds and us, Birkhead, British bird behaviorist and science historian, explores the special relationship between birds and humans over 12,000 years. Birkhead, whose previous books include the delightful sense of birds, which offered answers to the age-old question, What’s it like to be a bird?, has an approachable style, even when it comes to explaining complex scientific concepts. (Princeton)

The Book Eaters, by Sunyi Dean

Dean takes the idea of ​​devouring a book to a whole new level in his fantastic new Roman: The Title Book Eaters are a cult group who literally eat books. When these partial humans consume, say, a dictionary, they not only get a hearty meal, but also the knowledge contained in the reference material. It seems like a great way to satisfy many needs. But in this clever dystopian tale, a book eater named Devon, who grew up on a fairy tale diet, discovers that life is all but when she tries to save her son from the machinations of book eaters who want him for them. . (Tor)

21 books to read this summer

The Boys, by Katie Hafner

Hafner, journalist and non-fiction writer (mother daughter me, A romance on three legs), makes a splash with her first novel thanks to an amazing twist. No spoilers here, but this story about bubbly Barb, her wallflower husband, Ethan, and the 8-year-old twins they decide to foster is a funny and poignant meditation on a hot topic: loneliness. It’s also nearly impossible to put down. (Spiegel & Grau)

Bronze drum, by Phong Nguyen

In 40 AD, two sisters from present-day Vietnam defended their homeland against the Han Chinese. One, Trung Tac, would become Vietnam’s first female monarch although her reign would not last long. Ngyuens Historical novel vividly explores the lives of the sisters as well as how their authoritarian society of women went against the patriarchal norms of a Chinese culture that constantly threatened their freedom. (Large central)

Koshersoul: The Religious and Food Journey of an African-American Jew, by Michael W. Twitty

Historian Twitty explores the crossroads of black and Jewish culinary traditions in this follow to his award-winning book in 2018 The kitchen gene. As Twitty explains, his new book is about some of the black food that’s also Jewish food a book about Jewish food that’s also black food because it’s a book about black people who are Jews and Jews who are black. Twitty is Jewish and black himself. In this fascinating book that includes recipes, Twitty explores, as he puts it, the intersections between food and identity. (Amistad)

Love in the Brain, by Ali Hazelwood

A year after TikTok helped send Hazelwoods debut, The love hypothesisblasting the bestseller list, the romance novel writer returns with an even funnier and raunchier novel STEM love story. In this episode, neuroscientist and Marie Curie fangirl Bee Knigswasser gets her dream job at NASA. The only problem? Shell has to be kind to her nemesis, who just happens to be tall, brooding, and dreamy in the nerdest way. (Sphere, August 23)

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A map for the missing, by Belinda Huijuan Tang

In this sweep novel, Tang Yitian, a Chinese-American math teacher, is called home to find his father, who has disappeared from the family home in rural China. The search takes Yitian on a journey into a sometimes painful past. As he searches for his father, he reconnects with old friends, reopens old wounds, and seeks not only to find his father, but also to better understand his place in the family he left for America. (PenguinPress)

On Java Road, by Lawrence Osborne

Osbornes last novel takes place in Hong Kong, where tensions are high as protesters clash with government forces. When a protester goes missing, a veteran British journalist named Adrian Gyle sets out to find out what happened and, ideally, find her. The woman happens to be the mistress of one of his friends. The tangles become more tangled as this atmospheric mystery unfolds. Osborne, author of The Forgiven (2012), Beautiful Animals (2017) and The realm of glass (2020), again shows he is a master at capturing foreign locations and tricky moral puzzles. (Hogart)

In Lawrence Osborne’s novels, tourists cannot escape their true nature

A place in the world, by Frances Mayes

In his memoirs Under the Tuscan sun, Mayes took us, of course, to Italy. On her last outing, she stays much closer to home. A place in the world is a sort of homage to the South, where Mayes grew up in Fitzgerald, Georgia. She also writes about Chatwood, a house in Hillsborough, North Carolina where she now lives after an extensive renovation. The experience is both a return to basics and a consideration of the past. I returned to the South after a long dispute with the place, she writes. Racism, sexist zeitgeist, anti-intellectualism, self-satisfaction. These still hover, but this city, intolerant of such stupidity, is ambitious. (Crown, August 23)

Thanks for listening, by Julia Whelan

Whelan is best known for her voice: she’s the go-to audiobook narrator for countless best-selling authors. But she also has a distinctive voice in the sense of writing. In his well-being second novel, a rising actress suffers a horrific accident that derails her career. For her second act, she becomes a successful but ambivalent audiobook narrator. But she finds a kindred spirit when she strikes up a flirtatious correspondence with an enigmatic man who tells romance novels. (Avon)