SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
You know, summer's a fine time for exercise - taking long walks, biking along trails, seeing family all out in the sunshine. So don't you sometimes just want to curl up with a book? Maybe even something a little darker? NPR's Books We Love has some great recommendations, and we asked a few of our colleagues to share their favorite novels and fiction so far this year. And we begin with a recommendation from one of my absolutely favorite coworkers. No, she didn't write this, but she did edit it.
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MELISSA GRAY, BYLINE: This is Melissa Gray, WEEKEND EDITION senior producer, and I'm here to tell you about the latest Southern Gothic crime novel from S. A. Cosby. It's called "King Of Ashes." And in it, everything burns.
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GRAY: Successful financial adviser Roman Carruthers returns to his hometown after his elderly father is put into intensive care by a local drug gang. He thinks he can set things right and protect his hapless younger brother and his overburdened sister. She needs help keeping the family crematorium business going. Know what's good for getting rid of a body you don't want hanging around? A crematorium. Roman gets humbled quickly and painfully - I mean, this is a drug gang - and is pulled in deeper and deeper as he tries to manipulate the gang's leader, just as his sister thinks she's figured out what really happened to their long-missing mother. This story spins and spins and spins some more to a violent, dark and ultimately satisfying conclusion. And props to Cosby for namedropping some rural Virginia place names throughout the novel, including his and my home counties of Mathews and Gloucester. Loved it.
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BARRIE HARDYMON, BYLINE: My name is Barrie Hardymon. I'm a senior editor at Investigations, and the book that I love is called "Darkenbloom" by Eva Menasse, who's an Austrian writer. The book is a novel about a village called Darkenbloom, which is an Austrian village on the border of Hungary. It begins in 1989, when there are a group of East German refugees amassing on the border, and it's bringing back some rather unpleasant memories for the villagers of Darkenbloom. They don't want to remember the Nazis. They don't want to remember the role they might have played. And they certainly don't want to talk about where all of the Jews in their town went.
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HARDYMON: The book is great because it succeeds on a number of levels. It's a very gossipy small-town satire, with nosy neighbors peeping through curtains and the like. It's also a sobering book that serves as a warning. The villagers are defensive. They say about the war, we couldn't know. We couldn't pay attention to all that - while the novel itself whispers to the reader, pay attention.
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ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: Hey. It's Andrew Limbong. I cover books and publishing for NPR's culture desk, and I'm host of NPR's Book of the Day podcast. And one of my favorite books of the year so far is Katie Kitamura's "Audition." It starts off with a young guy who goes out to lunch with an older woman. He thinks she's his mom - and she isn't - but then the woman's husband walks into the restaurant and spots them together. And what happens from there is actually - it's kind of hard to explain because it's at once a psychological thriller, but it's also an inventive exercise in storytelling. There's a big shift in the narrative about halfway through that has you looking at all these characters differently. And what I love about the book is how it asks all these big questions about, you know, family and art without getting too navel-gazey about it.
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SARAH HANDEL, BYLINE: The book I love is "Animal Instinct" by Amy Shearn. My name is Sarah Handel, and I'm an editor at All Things Considered. This is a story about Rachel. She's stuck inside her Brooklyn apartment at the start of the COVID-19 shutdowns. And she craves everything from flirting to full-on sex after her divorce. And as she cruises through the dating apps, she starts to think, what if I could create the perfect AI partner who would always say just the right thing? She's got the tech-savvy to do it. And as I was reading it, I texted a friend, divorce is so hot right now. Not only does the book take place in the summer, and you can just feel that stifling Brooklyn apartment. But also, Rachel's adventures are pretty spicy. And just overall, I feel like we're getting a lot of books right now about what divorce can look like. It's one of those novels I tore through faster than I wanted to, and maybe you will, too.
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SIMON: Those recommendations again were "Animal Instinct," "Audition, "Darkenbloom" and "King of Ashes." For the full list of books that we've loved so far this year, you can visit npr.org/summerbooks.
(SOUNDBITE OF AARON GOLDBERG, ALI JACKSON & OMER AVITAL'S "MANIC DEPRESSIVE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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