Summer should be easy, funny, and, completely relaxing. Is the time for beach, carefree attitudes, travels and books.   It’s our reward for a busy and productive school year – 3  months of freedom and bliss. This is our only time where we can truly slow down and take a break.  Discover for you perfect  books to read this summer.

‘Watch Me Disappear’ by Janelle Brown

It’s been a year since Billie Flanagan—a beautiful, charismatic Berkeley mom with an enviable life—went on a solo hike and vanished from the trail. No body, only a hiking boot, was ever found. Her husband and teenage daughter have been coping with Billie’s death the best they can: Jonathan by drinking, Olive by growing remote.

But then Olive starts having waking dreams—or are they hallucinations?—that her mother is still alive. Jonathan is worried about Olive’s emotional stability, until he starts unearthing secrets from Billie’s past that bring into question everything he ever knew about his wife. Is it possible that Olive is right—that Billie   isn’tdead after all?  

Together, Olive and Jonathan embark on a quest for the truth—about Billie, their family, and the stories we tell ourselves about the people we love.

‘WONDER WOMAN PSYCHOLOGY : Lassoing the Truth’ by Travis Langley and Mara  Wood

In the world of comics, arguably only four characters can claim the title of mythic, thus true, heroes (Superman, Batman, and the original Captain Marvel being the other three), and the Amazon Princess is the only woman among them. Sadly, Wonder Woman is only a fictional character owned by DC Comics.

As such, since Marston’s death she has been a slave to whoever writes and draws her. Many of those have not really liked her, have perhaps felt threatened by the strongest woman in comics.

‘Into the Water’ by Paula Hawkins

A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged.

Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother’s sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she’d never return.

With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present.

Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath.

‘Tangerine’ by Christine Mangan

The last person Alice Shipley expected to see since arriving in Tangier with her new husband was Lucy Mason. After the accident at Bennington, the two friends—once inseparable roommates—haven’t spoken in over a year. But there Lucy was, trying to make things right and return to their old rhythms. Perhaps Alice should be happy. She has not adjusted to life in Morocco, too afraid to venture out into the bustling medinas and oppressive heat. Lucy—always fearless and independent—helps Alice emerge from her flat and explore the country.

But soon a familiar feeling starts to overtake Alice—she feels controlled and stifled by Lucy at every turn. Then Alice’s husband, John, goes missing, and Alice starts to question everything around her: her relationship with her enigmatic friend, her decision to ever come to Tangier, and her very own state of mind.

“As if Donna Tartt, Gillian Flynn, and Patricia Highsmith had collaborated on a screenplay to be filmed by Hitchcock—suspenseful and atmospheric.”

 

—Joyce Carol Oates, author of The Book of American Martyrs

Anna Fox lives alone—a recluse in her New York City home, unable to venture outside. She spends her day drinking wine (maybe too much), watching old movies, recalling happier times . . . and spying on her neighbors.

Then the Russells move into the house across the way: a father, a mother, their teenage son. The perfect family. But when Anna, gazing out her window one night, sees something she shouldn’t, her world begins to crumble—and its shocking secrets are laid bare.

What is real? What is imagined? Who is in danger? Who is in control? In this diabolically gripping thriller, no one—and nothing—is what it seems.

‘A Long Way From Home’ by Peter  Carey

Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in rural south eastern Australia. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the ancient continent, over roads no car will ever quite survive.

With them is their lanky fair-haired navigator, Willie Bachhuber, a quiz show champion and failed school teacher whose job it is to call out the turns, the grids,  the creek crossings on a map that will finally remove them, without warning, from the lily white Australia they all know so well.

This is a thrilling high speed story that starts in one way, and then takes you some place else. It often funny, more so as the world gets stranger, and always a page-turner, even as you learn a history these characters never knew themselves.

Set in the 1950’s, amongst the consequences of the age of Empires — of Kings and Queens, and subject races, of black, white and in between — this brilliantly vivid and lively novel reminds us how Europeans took possession of an ancient culture, the high purpose they invented, the crimes they committed along the way.

Peter Carey has twice won the Booker Prize for his explorations of Australian history.

A Long Way from Home  is his late style masterpiece.