Whether heading for the beach or the back yard, these books will enhance the sultry summer days. Some are hot off the presses, others newly out in paperback or paperback originals. All are undeniably memorable reads.
What is summer without some sharks? The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall (Canongate / 448 pages / $24) is an elliptical tale of lost memory and concomitant mystery. Eric Sanderson awakes disoriented to find he's lost three years of memory and the love of his life to a scuba diving accident. Suffering from dissociative disorder brought on by the horrific event, Sanderson discovers that there are metaphoric sharks that devour the consciousness and memory in addition to the literal creatures of the deep. Amazingly complex, The Raw Shark Texts is part Mary Shelley, part Sigmund Freud, part thriller, part Hegelian dialectic and totally engaging.
Beaches are forever a locus of romanticism and desire as well as lurking doom. In Ian McEwan's brilliant On Chesil Beach (Doubleday / 203 pages / $22) Florence and Edward spend the first night of their honeymoon on a beach, at the brink of consummation, each feeling acutely alone. They discover, over the long night that is the entirety of the novel, that passion is not inevitable, that it is tantalizingly intangible and often inaccessible. One of the most gifted British writers, McEwan's keen, uncompromising ear for the lamentation of loneliness within everyone rings pitch-perfect in this exceptionally sad novel.
