New books to inspire your summer reading

Daniel Mason’s North Woods won the love of so many readers a few years ago. I kept meaning to read it. I didn’t even connect at the time that he was the author of The Winter Soldier, a novel I prized about a medical student expecting to be stationed at a field hospital during World War I. Instead, he’s sent to a remote location in the Carpathian Mountains from which other doctors have fled. I’m wondering now if I should read North Woods and even Mason’s The Piano Tuner before picking up his new novel, Country People. To catch up and not miss out on the good stories. This situation is a frequent dilemma for me.

Those who’ve kept up with Mr. Mason must certainly be eager for this new story. It’s described as “a rollicking work of lyricism and humor, about one family’s tumble into the unknown.” The protagonist is a father and husband who’s lost his sense of purpose, long behind in completing his PhD in Russian folktales. The family moves to Vermont for his wife’s new opportunity as a visiting professor at a prestigious college, and her husband sees it as a new start for himself. The plot sounds fun and interesting. From the novel’s description:

And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, a Shakespearean temptress and a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world’s delusions in an Inventory of Wrong Ideas.

Publishing house McNally Editions brings forgotten gems back into print. My favorites so far are Rattlebone and The Oppermanns. Coming in July, Élisabeth by Éric Rohmer is about the upper middle class Roby family and its eponymous matriarch. The year is 1939 in the French countryside. Here the family spends what’s described as easy-going summer days where teenaged cousins flirt and engage in dramatic alliances. Haunting the ease, however, is awareness of potential trouble concerning the advancing Germans.

With a cool, kaleidoscopic eye, Rohmer lays out his protagonists and their precarious peace—their restlessness, their desperate boredom, their petty romantic agonies—with the unsettling chilliness and the sinister exactitude of details on a tactical map.

Publishers Weekly offers a thumbs up with a cautionary FYI: “Rohmer’s dialogue-driven narrative often omits proper names, forcing the reader to infer who’s speaking, which can be demanding but adds to the novel’s immersive quality, as do subtle hints at the war’s looming destruction.” Even so, I’m eager to read it.

When Emily Ruskovich published her first novel in 2017, praise rolled in with tsunami force. I remember wondering if it was too much, not that the praise wasn’t deserved. I loved Ruskovich’s Idaho, but I also felt the heaping praise a bit over the top, and then, why wasn’t I hearing from her anymore? Was all the promise true? Some of the best writers (Donna Tartt, Kathryn Stockett) have taken their time, ten years before their sophomore efforts appeared, as is true now for Ruskovich (nine years, to be exact). Her new fiction is Nightjar, a collection of five stories. Again, she’s getting much praise. Publishers Weekly in their forecast writes:

Throughout, Ruskovich blends urgent pacing with lush wooded scenery and intimate psychological details. It’s a marvel.

Short stories can be just what’s needed for summer afternoons spent at the pool, or quiet nights at home, brief immersions that begin and end within one sitting. Imagine that for these stories, described as haunting. This collection sounds like a good one.