Top 10 Summer Reads for 2017

Every month, Amazon staffers sift through hundreds of new books searching for gems. Here’s what they chose especially for Post readers this summer.

Fiction

The Late Show book
Little, Brown, and Co.

The Late Show

by Michael Connelly

It’s not often that you have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a new series by a proven author. Connelly’s latest novel introduces Renée Ballard an LAPD cop who works the tough night shift known as “the late show.”

Little, Brown, and Co.

The Lying Game book
Gallery/Scout Press

The Lying Game

by Ruth Ware

Ware has proven her caliber as a writer of eerie, compelling thrillers with The Woman in Cabin 10 and In a Dark, Dark Wood. In her new novel, four women are brought together on coastal England following a grisly discovery.

Gallery/Scout Press

See What I Have Done book
Atlantic Monthly Press

See What I Have Done

by Sarah Schmidt

Axe-murderer Lizzie Borden gets the literary treatment in a novel that shifts perspectives between four characters, including Lizzie, and slowly reveals the events leading up to one brutal act.

Atlantic Monthly Press

The Hidden Light of Northern Fires book cover
Thomas Dunne Books)

The Hidden Light of Northern Fires

by Daren Wang

During the Civil War, escaped slave Joe Bell collapses in a secessionist town north of the Mason-Dixon Line in a barn owned by Mary Willis’ father. The event connects Mary an Joe as the country tears itself apart around them.

Thomas Dunne Books

Nonfiction

Woolly book cover
Altria

Woolly

by Ben Mezrich

Can we create our own version of Jurassic Park? That’s the real-life question that Mezrich explores as he follows a team of American geneticists, a genius Russian scientist, and a famous conservationist who are trying to bring herds of mammoths back to the planet.

Altria

Jane Austin at Home book cover
St. Martin’s Press

Jane Austen at Home

by Lucy Worsley

On the eve of the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, historian Worsley revisits the many homes and schools that Austen inhabited during her life, describing how they helped shape her as a person and a novelist.

St. Martin’s Press

Everything All at Once book cover
Rodale

Everything All at Once

by Bill Nye

Nye has been driven his entire life by a relentless curiosity. In his new book, he explains how he has harnessed his inquisitiveness to change his own life, and how you can do the same for your life and for the world around you.

Rodale

Reading with Patrick book cover
Random House

Reading with Patrick

by Michelle Kuo

After two years in rural Arkansas as a Teach for America volunteer, Kuo left, but she returned when a former student was jailed for murder. The result is a beautiful story of race, love, and education.

Random House

The Man from the Train book cover
(Scribner)

The Man from the Train

by Bill James

A statistician and baseball writer studies a series of unsolved murders and, using his analytical skills, uncovers the connection that eventually reveal the identity of one of America’s deadliest serial killers.

Scribner

This article is featured in the July/August 2017 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.