Great summer books you’ll want to take to the beach

A comfy chair, sunglasses, an Arnold Palmer and these books are your ticket to a great season. “Endling” By Maria Reva Set in Ukraine in 2022, Reva’s magnificent “Endling” follows Yeva, a rogue conservationist trying to rescue endangered snails. She lives in her mobile lab, financing her work via the shady romance tour industry. Needing more funds, Yeva reluctantly agrees to help two sisters aiming to kidnap a group of Westerners on one such tour — and then Russia invades. The story is riveting, heartbreaking and darkly humorous, and Reva, who was born in Ukraine, pulls off the neat meta trick of inserting herself into the story without losing her compelling narrative thrust. Undoubtedly one of the best books of the year. “Midnight at the Cinema Palace” By Christopher Tradowsky Set in San Francisco in the early 1990s, this coming-of-age novel shines with a heady, nostalgic glow while never ignoring reality. Fresh out of a Midwestern college, movie-besotted Walter Simmering arrives in the city as the AIDS epidemic continues. He falls under the spell of Cary and Sasha, a stylish, charismatic couple who bend gender norms in ways he has never imagined. Cary and Walter want to write a noir screenplay that pays tribute to San Francisco’s past glamour, but sex, love and discovery are powerful distractions, and Walter begins to realize paradise can’t last forever. “Vera, or Faith” By Gary Shteyngart Narrated by a precocious part-Korean, part-Jewish, part-WASP 10-year-old, Shteyngart’s sharp, ironic novel takes place in a near-future in which liberties are vanishing and old loyalties are shifting. The endearing Vera is not old enough to understand the nuances, why her Russian publisher father is suddenly relevant (he thinks) in the new American world order or why he and her progressive stepmother seem unable to stay together. She also wants to solve the mystery of her missing birth mother. Through Vera’s eyes, Shteyngart creates a comic masterpiece that questions everything from politics to the way we adapt to change. “Etiquette for Lovers and Killers” By Anna Fitzgerald Healy Murder is an etiquette nightmare. Just ask Billie McCadie in this charming rom-com mystery. Raised to know the difference between a fruit fork and an oyster fork, Billie’s sure the knowledge has done nothing to bring excitement into her life. Billie wants excitement. And romance. She wants to be in a Jane Austen novel. But in the resort of Eastport, Maine, in the 1960s, the struggle for both is real. When Billie receives a love letter addressed to Gertrude and the next day discovers Gertrude murdered at a lavish ball, Billie asks, “What would Jane Austen do?” and follows the “trail of gossip.” “Fast Boys and Pretty Girls” By Lo Patrick Told in a sharp, self-deprecating, first-person point of view, this small town, Southern mystery packs a big wallop. The story shifts between narrator Danielle’s reckless young adulthood as a so-so model in New York, her youth in Pressville, Ga. (a place where “like Walt Whitman … it was us and the leaves of grass”), and her return to her family’s abandoned house to raise her own family. When her daughters find a body in the woods, the narrator knows it’s part of her past, one she’s buried — as if, for decades, a “heavy wire” has kept her “mouth clenched shut.” “Salt Bones” By Jennifer Givhan El Valle is a place near California’s Salton Sea where “daughters disappear.” Mal, a mother of two daughters and the sister of a disappeared woman, has held onto “her family’s pain like a birthright.” Her sister’s case was “never closed but it’d never really opened either” because Indigenous and Latina communities in El Valle are not a police priority. When more daughters go missing and the mythical “La Siguanaba,” a horse-headed woman, rides into Mal’s dreams, it’s an omen Mal can’t ignore — good or bad. Givhan’s prose is lush, lyrical, and deeply visceral. This is a piercing and perceptive psychological thriller. “She Didn’t See It Coming” By Shari Lapena .Reading Lapena’s terrific, twisty novel felt like taking apart a Russian doll. One character’s lie opens up to another character’s and so on — until each lie exposes a different motive for the disappearance of Bryden Frost. One afternoon, Bryden left her keys, her purse, her daughter, her husband and vanished. Her husband is distraught and the first suspect. Lizzie, her sister, is distraught and obsessed with true crime. Paige, her best friend, is distraught and steps up to help. Detective Jayne Slater is sympathetic, but really suspicious. Soon, everyone could have had something to do with Bryden’s disappearance. Tribune News Service