SUMMER MUST READS – THREE BOOKS FOR THE BEACH :: There’s nothing quite like a blanket, sand, surf, sun and a good book. This season seems ripe with choice. Here are three of our favourite books so far this summer: the final instalment of an internationally beloved LGBT classic series, another pot-boiler from a Toronto Star columnist turned suspense king, and a graphic novel with illustrations and moments and wording of such beauty you’ll still be on the beach savouring it after the sun sets.
NO SAFE HOUSE – Former Toronto Star columnist Linwood Barclay is back. And the #1 international bestselling suspense the tour-de-force returns with a bang. Picking up seven years after his 2007 hit No Time For Goodbye (which we recommend you read first), Barclay returns us to the Bigge family: Cynthia, who woke up at 14 to find her entire family had vanished; her now-teenage daughter Grace, and Terry, Cynthia’s husband who found himself once already caught up in the maze of his wife’s past. Now, Grace has followed a no-good boyfriend into a strange house and in the doing draws the Bigges back into shadows of the past dovetailing with a money and meth mess that threatens to claim them all. Guaranteed to make the beach hotter, it’s another page-turner from a Canadian writing rock star and a really good, really fun, really fast-twisting story. $22.95 Doubleday Canada / RandomHouse.ca (Hear Barclay at the end of this month in conversation with GGN publisher Shaun Proulx, on Proulx’s SiriusXM talk show.)
THIS ONE SUMMER– Cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki have joined forces to create a thing of beauty that is a hot day must-read, particularly if you’ve grown up and summered in Canada. The co-authors of Skim (Mariko writes, Jillian illustrates) have returned to the graphic novel genre with a story about a summer that’s different. As Rose and her parents return to Awago Beach, where she has been vacationing since a little girl, Rose eagerly seeks out (gaydar alert!) her friend Windy to complete her summer family. But Rose’s parents fight, and a tragedy is in the making in the small town setting. Secrets, heartbreak, unspoken desires all combine to redefine the teen graphic novel. Yes, we said teen. That’s the market, but we can’t think of one adult who wouldn’t marinate in the wonderful presentation the Tamakis offer about growing up, girlhood, and summers that you never forget. You will read this book and feel you’ve been there. $18.95 / Groundwood Books
THE DAYS OF ANNA MADRIGAL– What is it about the writings of Armistead Maupin that make us so emotionally attached? Maybe The Moon, The Night Listener, but especially his (still!) ongoing Tales Of The City serial that takes place in San Francisco and serves at this point as an (albeit fictional) history lesson every LGBT person should take. We always want to live in these books and so were delighted to find Maupin has now taken the pivotal character of Anna Madrigal, the joint smoking, hip landlady (who made such an impact in the first books that none other than Olympia Dukakis played her in the TV versions) and made her suitably significant; this is the ninth and final novel of the epic saga. Anna journeys to a lonely stretch of road in Nevada – as others in her family head to legendary Burning Man – where the sixteen year old boy she once was ran away from the whorehouse she called home. An instant classic, and profound conclusion to a story that has transfixed LGBT people since 1976. $30.00 Harper Collins.
