cover story
beach reading
Far-flung locales inspire literary escapes
A
true beach read takes the reader somewhere new and fascinating, and tells a juicy story that keeps the pages turning. Whether you’re looking for something to take on vacation—or just a mental vacation!—these five books are guaranteed to transport you.
r e a d m o r e at b o o k pa g e . c o m
LETTERS FROM SKYE
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What could be more divine than spending a summer day devouring the elegantly written WWI-era correspondence between a plucky Scottish heroine and an American ambulance driver risking his life on the frontlines? Jessica Brockmole’s debut novel, Letters from Skye (Ballantine, $25, 304 pages, ISBN 9780345542601), is a charming vintage love story about Elspeth, a lonely poet living on the remote Isle of Skye, and her American pen pal, Davey, a student at the University of Illinois. Elspeth and Davey are the quintessential star-crossed lovers, facing formidable obstacles as their friendship blossoms into a love affair. While epistolary novels are a popular storytelling style of late, Brockmole’s use of this device is essential to her tale, allowing her to blend the voices of the enigmatic Elspeth and the irrepressible Davey. Avoiding a chronological narrative, the novel fast-forwards to World War II, when Elspeth’s daughter, Margaret, discovers a box of old letters addressed to “Sue”—Davey’s secret nickname for his Scottish lover. When Elspeth disappears, Margaret is compelled to unravel this riddle from her stoic mother’s past. While Letters from Skye is at its heart a love story, Brockmole’s graceful writing never succumbs to the sensational or the maudlin. Instead, she wisely lets the letters carry readers back to a time when war raged and life itself was writ large. — KAREN CULLOTTA
TO THE MOON AND TIMBUKTU A woman finds herself unhappy in marriage, crying in the supermarket; she decides to travel, to get
to know herself as an individual, not as a wife, daughter or mother. This is the set-up for the bestseller Eat, Pray, Love and also for Nina Sovich’s memoir To the Moon and Timbuktu (New Harvest, $25, 320 pages, ISBN 9780544025950). But the comparisons stop the minute Sovich lands in West Africa. Her travels are uncomfortable, often frightening, always illuminating and so beautifully conveyed that the reader feels present, as if she herself is watching a sunrise over the Nile. Sovich learns early in life that “the bitter sweetness of travel fills me up and makes me feel whole,” and she spends her 20s as a reporter in the West Bank and Pakistan, experiencing new cultures. After Sovich meets her French husband Florent, she finds herself living a bourgeois life in Paris and wondering why she is unhappy. Inspired by Victorian explorer Mary Kingsley, she decides to spend six months traveling in West Africa with the legendary city of Timbuktu as her goal. Sovich’s journeys are page-turning and suspenseful. In a cheap hotel in the Sahara, surrounded by drunken sailors, she blocks her door with a chair under the handle. Riding across the desert with four men who grow increasingly menacing, she distracts them by telling stories. Sovich finds that the best way to protect herself—and a good secret for all female travelers—is to seek out the company of other women. Sitting in the women’s section of a market in Mali with a baby in her lap, Sovich encounters a sense of perfect peace. By the time she reaches Timbuktu, she wears a traditional boubou and walks in bare feet. Traveling has transformed her heart and mind, turned her toward the beautiful,
glittering world and finally allows her to return home. — CATHERINE HOLLIS
CRAZY RICH ASIANS A shockingly hilarious debut, Crazy Rich Asians (Doubleday, $25.95, 416 pages, ISBN 9780385536974) will carry the reader to a civilization comparable to Lilliput, Wonderland or Narnia. Except that the inhabitants are faithful Methodists and the setting is only a plane ride away. The characters here aren’t just “crazy rich”; they’re grotesquely, monstrously rich. These offshore Chinese, the high society of Singapore, are so moneyed that clans live in a separate world replete with their own memes, dreams and extremes. Their expectations, their shopping habits—the most spectacular excess since 18th-century France—create a backdrop that boots this novel into must-read territory. Rachel Chu’s dating relationship with Nicholas Young takes a serious turn when he invites her to accompany him to Singapore, where he is to be best man in a friend’s wedding. Though he wants her to meet his family, Nick doesn’t think to enlighten Rachel about the extraordinary qualities of Singapore’s ultra-wealthy. She is thrown into a lions’ den of ingrown gossip and intrigue, which takes a vicious twist
when Nick’s mother Eleanor decides Rachel is unworthy of the family. A native of Singapore now living in New York, Kevin Kwan knows this relatively hidden culture inside and out, yet he is distant enough to appreciate its uniqueness and hubristic appeal to American readers. For we are all suckers for legendary troves of jewels and 70-carat earrings that brush majestically against our shoulders. — MAUDE M c DANIEL
PILGRIM’S WILDERNESS Rural Alaska seemed like the perfect place for a family of Christian homesteaders to escape the ways of the world. But when Papa Pilgrim moved his wife and 15 kids to McCarthy, they brought conflict and confrontation the likes of which the area had never seen. Initially embraced as exemplars of the libertarian ideal, the family turned out to be a dangerous sham, ruled by an evil patriarch. Pilgrim’s Wilderness (Crown, $25, 336 pages, ISBN 9780307587824) unravels this drama with journalistic precision and the wallop of a true-crime potboiler. Longtime Alaska journalist Tom Kizzia had a cabin near the first Pilgrim family settlement; when he covered their initial skirmish with the National Park Service, Papa called him “Neighbor Tom.” But Kizzia’s research into Pilgrim’s past revealed him to be a master of reinvention with much to conceal. The community split into proPilgrim and anti-Pilgrim camps, with many wondering about the powerful control Pilgrim exercised over his wife and children. When the older kids made a run for safety and the truth came out, it was far worse than anyone could have imagined. Kizzia is able to capture all this with the dispassionate voice of a reporter, which allows the chilling details to resonate powerfully. For all the horrors visited upon Pilgrim’s children, the story has a suitably twisted happy ending as the family