Even though the weather has not been co-operating, it is time for beach reads.  So, let me recommend some of the big books this summer that are going to be on everyone’s lists.

           

Blake Crouch’s “Recursion” is getting a lot of publicity with its thriller plotline in which people are experiencing intense memories of alternate lives.  Called False Memory Syndrome, it soon becomes apparent that solving this disease becomes more and more important.  BookPage says this “may be the smartest, most surprising thriller of the summer.”

           

Jennifer Chiaverini takes the World War II novel to new heights with the story of a brilliant graduate student from Wisconsin who marries a promising German economist.  Settling in 1930s Berlin, Mildred soon realizes what a threat Hitler and the rise of Nazism is and creates a resistance cell to collect information on the regime.  “Resistance Women” is first-rate historical fiction.

            

“The Scent Keeper” by Erica Bauermeister follows a young woman who lives on a remote island with her father.  Taught about the natural world, he never explains the machine that creates the beautiful scents he keeps in drawers.  When events catapult her out into the real world, it will be these hidden truths that lead her home.  “The Scent Keeper” is described as “lyrical, transformative, richly rewards all your senses” by author Jamie Ford.

           

“The Paris Diversion” by Chris Pavone is a fast-paced thriller that involves a terrorist planning a suicide attack on an important museum, the people caught up in his plot, and the secret team of operatives designed to prevent this sort of act.  C. J. Box calls Chris Pavone “one of the elite must-read, can’t-miss thriller writers working today.”

           

“The Bride Test” by Helen Hoang will delight romance readers with this frothy novel about a Vietnamese girl sent to marry an American by his mother.  Khai is autistic and believes that he is defective, and romance is not for him, but his mother does not agree, and she imports Esme Tran whose attempts at seduction just don’t follow plans. Taylor Jenkins Reid calls this novel “smart, honest, and achingly romantic, just as sexy as it is sweet.”