MORE's Summer Reading List 2012

With their summer rentals, designer strollers and organic produce, hipster parents are prime parody material—so it’s all the more fun when their lives intersect in a summer soap opera that ranges from Cape Cod to Brooklyn to L.A. “The crowd,” as the tight-knit group of strivers in Sohn’s new novel calls itself, is obsessed with the children (“ ‘Sippies, floaties, onesies’—the parents spoke as though they were babies themselves’’). They have big grownup problems, though: Witness Rebecca, who opens the novel wondering how to hide the celebrity paternity of her red-haired son from her brown-haired architect husband. Fans of Sohn’s Prospect Park Westwill recognize Rebecca’s story—and despite some outlandish plot turns may also get a glimpse of their own.

—Katherine Lanpher

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If you would never imagine that an orchard full of peach trees could be the lodestar of a man’s life, or that a young woman would pass up a perfect marriage to preserve her ancestral home, or that a shy and solitary boy could find the courage to fight the forces of prejudice and fear, then you haven’t read this gorgeous new novel, set on a peach farm in post–Civil War Maryland. Tilghman has an uncanny ability to lay bare the hearts of his characters, whether they’re male or female, landed gentry or former slaves. “Love is about overcoming,” muses a young white man named Thomas about his forbidden romance with a black woman. “Love is not a state of mind or spirit, it is a reward.”

—Cathleen Medwick

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Set mostly in the Philippines at the dawn of Corazon Aquino’s presidency, Torregrosa’s memoir looks back on her heady days as foreign editor at a major newspaper and her headlong rush into love with a married woman, a reporter. “How little we know about passion,” she muses. “How wretched it is.” The book drifts from Manila to New York, from Phuket to Hong Kong, cloaked in a moody atmosphere reminiscent of Casablancaand the novels of Graham Greene. The explosive, doomed affair haunts the writer, who observes, “I have learned to live without her. I have learned to be alone. That is different from learning to live alone.”

—Susanna Sonnenberg

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At first glance, Carmen Garrett may seem an unlikely heroine, a beautiful middle-aged woman who is greatly (if guiltily) relieved by the death of her dorky, nice-guy husband and the “whole false happy life” she has endured for two decades. But just as she gets a whiff of freedom, she’s diagnosed with breast cancer, leading her to re-examine not only her marriage but also her ongoing affair with a married man and other thorny relationships. Funny, surprising and gratifyingly honest, this novel poses unsparing questions about love and betrayal and the reasons we make the choices we do.

—Lori Gottlieb

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Nick is a young husband with a wry sense of humor and a chip on his shoulder (“I have a face you want to punch,” he says). He’s a bit odd and self-involved, but did he kill his wife, Amy, who has inexplicably disappeared? “I was not good with angry women,” he confides. “They brought something out in me that was unsavory.” Interspersed with Nick’s narration are snippets from the diary of the missing Amy, an ex–New Yorker who is irritated and bored enough in small-town Missouri to have done . . . what? Flynn keeps us guessing with equal parts charm and menace. An addictive read.

—Alice LaPlante

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This deliciously inventive spy thriller riffs on a wild what-if. The FBI has uncovered a Nazi plot to keep the U.S. out of the coming war by rigging the next election, but President Roo-sevelt doesn’t trust that weasel J. Edgar Hoover to foil the scheme. So he taps an unlikely undercover man to do the job: smooth but scrappy Harvard junior John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Dad Joe, ambassador to England (and perhaps in cahoots with the Germans), considers his sickly second son a wuss—but he doesn’t know Jack. As charming and complex as its hero, the novel offers a hot love affair, a young man’s brave struggles with physical and moral peril and a Gestapo goon with a grudge. A beachside scene involving five of the eight Kennedy kids—Jack; chubby eight-year-old Teddy; the favorite, Joe Jr.; intense Bobby; and bouncy Kathleen, known as Kick—can’t help but evoke the real futures awaiting the doomed dynasts.

—Judith Stone

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She revered Rilke, pondered Freud, endorsed Castro’s revolution and honed her craft with the most vaunted directors of theater and film. “I want to be an actress, not an erotic freak,” insisted Marilyn Monroe, struggling against a hypermasculine industry that responded to her hungry intellect and unfettered sensuality by sentencing her to a life of playing the dumb blonde. Was she a “ ‘slave’ of the Hollywood system” or a heroic “precursor of 1960s feminism?” asks historian Banner, who proceeds to probe Monroe’s fraught relationship to her sexuality with an uncommonly insightful eye. But fans of Hollywood Babylon, take heart: Studious as she is, Banner also rakes the muck like a pedigreed newshound.
—Jan Stuart

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Not your usual girl group: New York debutante turned first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, intellectual powerhouse Susan Sontag and radical activist Angela Davis. Yet all three women spent their formative years in Paris—albeit in different decades—drinking in the city’s romance and fashioning the personas they would later reveal to the world. Sontag, for one, left behind her husband and son and found in the City of Light “a zone of intense sexual freedom and discovery,” which allowed her to shed her “scholar’s cocoon” and become a cultural renegade. Kaplan follows these women’s singular trajectories in lively and brilliantly lucid prose.

—Jeanne Mcculloch

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Imagine a family vacation in a drafty rent-a-manor on the Welsh border. Imagine Richard, the vacation’s sponsor; his new wife, Louisa; and her dangerously alluring daughter. Imagine Angela, Richard’s less wealthy sister, invited on holiday after years of estrangement; her three complex and agreeable children, two of them teenagers; and her husband, who has not been able to find work since his breakdown. This is the setting of Haddon’s latest novel, which scrolls through its characters’ thoughts, fears and desires, their best intentions and darkest fantasies, with the stunning deftness and alacrity of a news feed—switching point of view, at times, from paragraph to paragraph (even the ghost of Angela’s stillborn daughter gets her say). With humor, intelligence and compassion, and a deep bow to James Joyce’s Ulysses, Haddon creates a symphony of voices that defines, critiques and embraces the contemporary family.

—Pam Houston

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