I do some of my best reading on vacation, when the days stretch out, and I can disappear into a book without watching the clock. The novels in this week's list are exactly what I want in a summer book: absorbing enough to make me forget where I am, but with enough substance that I want to talk about them when I'm done. Maggie O'Farrell's Land turns a family story in nineteenth-century Ireland into something sweeping and intimate. Ann Patchett's Whistler begins with a reunion at the Met and becomes a moving story about grief. Andrew Sean Greer's Villa Coco is a funny, tender story of reinvention on the French Riviera-while the other novels take us to 1933 Mississippi and coastal Massachusetts, where unlikely alliances and old family wounds change everything.

Love,
Gwyneth

I do some of my best reading on vacation, when the days stretch out, and I can disappear into a book without watching the clock. The novels in this week's list are exactly what I want in a summer book: absorbing enough to make me forget where I am, but with enough substance that I want to talk about them when I'm done. Maggie O'Farrell's Land turns a family story in nineteenth-century Ireland into something sweeping and intimate. Ann Patchett's Whistler begins with a reunion at the Met and becomes a moving story about grief. Andrew Sean Greer's Villa Coco is a funny, tender story of reinvention on the French Riviera-while the other novels take us to 1933 Mississippi and coastal Massachusetts, where unlikely alliances and old family wounds change everything.

Love,
Gwyneth

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