arts & entertainment
Our annual summer reading roundup.
Gail Zimmerman
Arts & Entertainment Editor
FICT IO N
When We Danced on Water (Harper),
a novel of memory, art and love by Evan
Fallenberg (Light Fell), spans 50 years in the
life of a famed ballet dancer and the haunt-
ed woman he befriends in a Tel Aviv cafe.
Here Comes Mrs. Kugelman (Metropolitan
Books) by Minka Pradelski, translated from
the German by Philip Boehm, is a novel
about Holocaust survivors and their chil-
dren and the unfolding of stories between
them. Here, a young woman tries to figure
out a mysterious inheritance — an incom-
plete set of dishes in an old suitcase.
Far to Go (Harper), liana Pick's novel about
an affluent Jewish family in the German
part of Czechoslovakia in 1938 trying to
escape, is inspired by the story of her own
grandparents and shifts between war-
time and afterward, exploring loyalty and
betrayal, courage and love.
Meg Wolitzer brings her signature brand
of humor and insight to the topic of the
changing nature of female sexual desire in
The Uncoupling (Riverhead Books), as a
new drama teacher mounts a production
of Lysistrata in a suburban New Jersey high
school and both the grown women and
teenage girls of the town find they have
been placed under a kind of spell to stop
having sex with their men.
Based on the true story of a group of
Holocaust survivors that sought revenge for
Nazi deeds, The Final Reckoning (Harper
Collins) by British author Sam Bourne is a
thriller about a hidden brotherhood and a
60-year-old secret.
Red Hook Road (Anchor Book paperback),
by Aleyet Waldman, is set on the coast of
Maine, where, over four summers, two
families' lives are unraveled and stitched
together by misfortune, by good inten-
tions and failure, and by love and calamity.
Waldman is married to Pulitzer Prize-
winning author Michael Chabon.
Jed Rubenfeld, a Yale University Law School
professor and constitutional law expert
who wrote his undergraduate thesis on
Sigmund Freud, sets his new thriller, The
Death Instinct (Riverhead Books), against
the backdrop of a real-life, still-unsolved
1920 Wall Street bombing, blending fact
and fiction, killing and passion, suspense
and adventure in a page-turner about the
hidden depths of our most savage instincts.
Rubenfeld is married to Battle Hymn of the
Tiger Mother author Amy Chua.
With a plot in which youthful "resent-
ment gangs" shoot up busloads of "olds','
filmmaker Albert Brooks' 2030: The Real
Story of What Happens to America (St.
Martins) brings to life a humorous, but not
funny, take on the future. The country's
47th president, Matthew Bernstein, fears his
legacy will be "the first divorced half-Jew
president who sold America's biggest city
to China."
In The Might Walzer (Bloomsbury paper-
back), Booker Prize-winning British author
Howard Jacobson (The Finkler Question)
writes a coming-of-age novel — replete
with savaging descriptions of adolescence
and sexual awakening — about a teenage
table tennis phenom growing up in 1960s
Manchester, England.
Former New York Times reporter Alex
Barenson, in his latest suspense novel,
The Secret Soldier (G.E Putnam's Sons),
brings back former CIA agent John Wells,
who goes undercover in Saudi Arabia and
Lebanon on a mission that could determine
the future of the Middle East.
Gideon's War (Touchstone), by veteran
Hollywood writer and producer Howard
Gordon (24, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire
Slayer), is an action-suspense novel about
American peacemaker Gideon Davis, who
must use his negotiating skills to bring his
ruthless rogue-agent brother Tillman Davis
to justice in just 24 hours.
Set against the backdrop of the troubled
'60s, Journal of a UFO Investigator
(Viking), a novel by David Halperin weav-
ing together psychological drama and vivid
outer space fantasy, tells the story of Danny
Shapiro, an awkward, lonely teen with a ter-
minally ill mother and a hostile father who
turns to an imaginative universe to escape
his crumbling home life.
Former Detroiter Rosalee Jaeger provides
a portrait of a middle-class Jewish family
living in the suburbs of L.A. in Finding Zoe
(CreateSpace paperback), about a gifted
Jewish child pianist (the child of former
Detroiters) who feels disconnected from
reality. Suffering from an undefined mental
illness, she struggles over decades to over-
come her affliction and find her truth.
In her new novel, Caleb's Crossing (Viking),
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine
Brooks (People of the Book) imagines the
life of Caleb Cheeshahteumauk, the first
Native American to graduate from Harvard
College, in 1665. The narrator is the
daughter of a Puritan minister on Martha's
Vineyard, who yearns for an education
denied to her by her sex.
In his scorching antiwar novel To the End
of the Land (Knopf), Israeli author David
Grossman details the reality and surreality
of daily life in Israel with a tale of a fam-
ily in love and crisis. Grossman's own son
was killed when a Hezbollah missile hit his
tank two days before the end of the 2006
Lebanon War.
The Second Son (Sarah Crichton Books),
Jonathan Rabb's final installment in his
Berlin trilogy, brings readers from the
world of Weimar Berlin to Barcelona at the
start of the Spanish Civil War as Nikolai
Hoffner, ousted from his position as chief
inspector of the Krininalpolizei for being
half-Jewish, grapples with the loss of one
son to the Nazi regime and becomes deter-
mined to save the one son he can.
In Friends Like These (Ballantine Books),
former women's magazine editor Sally
Koslow explores the complexities of female
friendship through the story of four New
York City women grappling with jobs, mar-
riage and motherhood across a span of 20
years.
With Foreign Bodies (Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt), Cynthia Ozick retells the story
of Henry James' The Ambassadors — the
work he considered his best — but as
a photographic negative: The plot is the
same; the meaning is reversed. At the core
of the story is 50ish, divorced schoolteacher
Bea Nightingale — the lives of her family
are irrevocably changed by the events of
just a few months.
Summer Reading on page 31
June 23 2011
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