Top 10 Beach Reads

Amazon.com editorial director Sara Nelson sifted through hundreds of books to bring you the season’s best.

Fiction


The Execution of Noa P. Singleton (Crown)	*The Son* (Ecco)	*The Silver Star* (Scribner)
Elizabeth L. Silver	Philipp Meyer	Jeannette Walls
A smart and sassy novel about a young and very angry woman who refuses to fight to have her murder conviction overturned.	A breathtaking, classic cowboys-and-Indians epic about the birth of Texas, is shockingly good.	Fans of Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle will love her new novel about two girls whose flaky mom inadvertently leads them to discover more and weirder relatives.

*Joyland* (Hard Case Crime)	*And the Mountains Echoed* (Riverhead)
Stephen King	Khaled Hosseini
Steven King’s Joyland is for the author’s Stand By Me fans, and anybody else who likes good, old fashioned coming of age stories, horror or no.	Khaled Hosseini does it again, with And the Mountains Echoed, an evocative novel that takes us from the Kite Runner author’s native Afghanistan to Europe and back again.


*The Joker* (Simon & Schuster)	*Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution*	*After Visiting Friends* (Scribner)
Andrew Hudgins	Nathaniel Philbrick	Michael Hainey
Hudgins’s latest is the life story of a guy whose upbringing was so harsh and joyless, he (and we) just had to learn to laugh.	Bunker Hill tells a familiar American history tale with fresh eyes and clear voice. This is not your father’s term paper.	After Visiting Friends Hainey’s investigation into the death of the father he lost years ago.

*The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville* (St Martin’s)	*The Boys in the Boat* (Viking)
Clare Mully	Daniel James Brown
A meticulous account of a real-life Polish-Jewish Mata Hari, during WWII.	Brown celebrates American can-do-ism through the story of the champion rowing team who took on the Germans at the 1936 Olympics.