Notable new releases
compiled by Sally Brewster
My Friends by Fredrik Backman
Most people don’t even notice them — three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days on an abandoned pier, telling silly jokes, sharing secrets and committing small acts of rebellion. These lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream, a reason to love. Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be placed into 18-year-old Louisa’s care. She embarks on a surprise-filled, cross-country journey to learn how the painting came to be. Louisa is proof that happy endings don’t always take the form we expect in this stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of friendship and art.
Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry
Alice Scott is an eternal optimist still dreaming of her big writing break. Hayden Anderson is a Pulitzer-prize winning human thundercloud. And they’re both on balmy Little Crescent Island to write the biography of a reclusive octogenarian, Margaret Ives, a former tabloid princess and daughter of one of the most storied (and scandalous) families of the 20th century. Margaret invites them both for a one-month trial period, after which she’ll choose the person who’ll tell her story. But the problem is, Margaret is only giving each of them pieces of her story. Pieces they can’t swap to put together because of an ironclad NDA and an inconvenient yearning pulsing between them every time they’re in the same room. And it’s becoming abundantly clear that their story — just like the tale Margaret’s spinning — could be a mystery, tragedy or love ballad … depending on who’s telling it.
Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson
Ever since her dad left them 20 years ago, it’s been just Madeline Hill and her mom on their farm in Coalfield, Tennessee. While it’s a bit lonely, she sometimes admits, and a less exciting life than what she imagined for herself, it’s mostly OK. Then one day, Reuben Hill pulls up in a PT Cruiser and informs Madeline that he believes she’s his half sister. Reuben, left behind by their dad 30 years ago, hired a detective to track down their father and a string of other half siblings. And he wants Mad to leave her home and join him for the craziest kind of road trip imaginable to find them all.
Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen
“The afternoon of September first, dishwater-gray and rainy, a man named Dale Figgo picked up a hitchhiker on Gus Grissom Boulevard in Tangelo Shores, Florida. The hitchhiker, who reminded Figgo of Danny DeVito, asked for a lift to the interstate. Figgo said he’d take him there after finishing an errand.” Figgo, it turns out, is the only hate-monger ever to be kicked out of the Proud Boys for being too dumb and incompetent. Figgo’s already messy life is about to get more complicated, thanks to two formidable adversaries. Viva Morales is a newly transplanted Floridian, a clever woman recently taken to the cleaners by her ex-husband and now working at the Mink Foundation, a supposedly philanthropic organization, and renting a room in Figgo’s apartment. Twilly Spree has an anger-management problem and way too many inherited millions of dollars. Viva and Twilly are plunged into a mystery — involving dark money and darker motives — they are determined to solve, and become entangled in a world populated by some of Hiaasen’s most outrageous characters.
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, 19-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. The unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning and heartbreak, with the power to transform Hai’s relationship to himself, his family and a community on the brink. Following the cycles of history, memory and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. SP
Sally Brewster is the proprietor of Park Road Books, 4139 Park Rd.
