The Tribune | Weekend | 17
Friday, July 17, 2020
books
This week’s new page-turners • The All-Night Sun by Diana Zinna (literary fiction) Lauren Cress teaches writing at a small college outside of Washington, DC. In the classroom, she is poised, smart, and kind, well-liked by her students and colleagues. But in her personal life, Lauren is troubled and isolated, still grappling with the sudden death of her parents ten years earlier. She seems to exist at a remove from everyone around her until a new student joins her class: charming, magnetic Siri, who appears to be everything Lauren wishes she could be. They fall headlong into an all-consuming friendship that feels to Lauren like she is reclaiming her lost adolescence. When Siri invites her along on a trip home to Sweden for the summer, Lauren impulsively accepts, intrigued by how Siri describes it: “Everything will be green, fresh, new, just thawing out.” But once there, Lauren finds herself drawn to Siri’s enigmatic, brooding brother Magnus. Siri is resentful, and Lauren starts to see a new side of her friend: selfish, reckless, self-destructive, even cruel. On the last night of her trip, Lauren accompanies Siri and her friends on a seaside camping trip to celebrate Midsommar’s Eve, a night when no one sleeps, boundaries blur, and under the light of the unsetting sun, things take a dark turn. • This Love Hurts by W Winters (romance) Some love stories are a slow burn. Others are quick to ignite, scorching and branding your very soul before you’ve taken that first breath. You’re never given a chance to run from it. That’s how I’d describe what happened to us. Everything around me blurred and all that existed were his lips, his touch… The chase and the heat between us became addictive. Our nights together were a distraction; one we craved to the point of letting the world crumble around us. We should have paid attention; we should have known that it would come to this. We both knew it couldn’t last, but that didn’t change what we desired most. All we wanted was each other. • The Safe Place by Anna Downes (thriller/ mystery) Emily is a mess. Emily Proudman just lost her acting agent, her job, and her apartment in one miserable day. Emily is desperate. Scott Denny, a successful and charismatic CEO, has a problem that neither his business acumen nor vast wealth can fix. Until he meets Emily. Emily is perfect.
Scott offers Emily a summer job as a housekeeper on his remote, beautiful French estate. Enchanted by his lovely wife Nina, and his eccentric young daughter, Aurelia, Emily falls headlong into this oasis of wine-soaked days by the pool. But soon Emily realizes that Scott and Nina are hiding dangerous secrets, and if she doesn’t play along, the consequences could be deadly. • All Up by J W Rinzler (historical fiction) The fantastic story of rocketeers, visionaries, and madmen, from Capitalists and Nazis in the West to Communists in the East, it’s the tale of Faustian anti-hero Wernher von Braun, solitary genius Robert Goddard, magical loner Jack Parsons, titanic Sergei Korolev, and the legendary trio of Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, and Neil Armstrong. A behind-the-scenes story of the first Space Age. Ranging from the murderous V-2 to the miraculous Saturn V, from cloak-and-dagger espionage and the blitzkrieg battles of World War II to the atomic deserts of Fort Bliss and the nail-biting missions launched at Cape Canaveral, All Up is an epic telling of the thrilling and true legends.
