Top Books to Read This Summer, According to Ann Patchett and Maureen Corrigan

Another year, another stack of great books to read. PBS News Hour’s Jeffrey Brown talked with Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, and author Ann Patchett about their top picks this year.

Fiction

“The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” by Kiran desai

“it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It is a sweeping epic about two young people who are both from the same small town in India. They are living in the States. And when they’re in the States,they feel too Indian. And when they go home to India, they feel too American. And this is the story of how they slowly wind their way to one another and maybe cure their loneliness. kiran Desai is a brilliant, all encompassing writer, and I love this book.”

– Ann Patchett

READ MORE: Novelist Rabih Alameddine and poet Patricia Smith win National Book Awards

“The Antidote: A Novel” by Karen Russell

“nobody does the old weird America better than Karen Russell. This novel is bookended by two real events, an epic dust bowl storm and an epic flood in 1935 in Nebraska. And in the middle is our main character, a prairie witch called The antidote, who holds people’s memories that they otherwise can’t contain.”

– Maureen Corrigan

“Heart the Lover” by Lily King

“It’s a follow-up to ‘Writers & Lovers,’ but Lily King is such a brilliant designer of narrative that you don’t have to have read the first novel to really fall in love with this one. It’s about a love triangle at a college campus in the nineteen eighties, and it follows our main character, a woman nicknamed Jordan, as she tries to pull her life together in the decades afterwards.”

– Maureen Corrigan

Non-fiction

“Mother Mary Comes to Me” by Arundhati Roy

“Arundhati Roy burst into the literary scene in 1996 with her international best-selling booker prize winning ‘The god of small Things,’ which sold over six million copies. This is the story about her relationship with her brilliant and difficult mother, Mary Roy, but that’s really only about 15% of the book. The rest of it is about Arundhati Roy’s life. She was an architect, she was an actress, she was a screenwriter, but more than anything, she was a political activist. This is an amazing book. And do yourself the biggest favor when you’ve finished reading it, go back and reread ‘The God of Small Things.’ And you can just see what stories you can tell in nonfiction and in fiction and how they ove

Books to Gift This Season

– Maureen Corrigan

Best Books to Give as a Gift

“Christmas on Jane Street: A True Story” by Billy Romp and Wanda Urbanska

I discovered this book at Three Lives, an self-reliant bookstore in Greenwich Village last year. It was prominently displayed.Originally published in the 1990s, it’s a memoir. Billy Romp details the nearly 20 years he and his family spent driving from Vermont the day after Thanksgiving to sell Christmas trees in Greenwich Village until Christmas Eve. It’s a lovely book about the communities within big cities that often go unnoticed.

“Young Woman and the Sea” by T.J. Klune

“This is a historical novel based on the true story of Gertrude Ederle, who in 1926 became the first woman to swim the english Channel. It’s a really compelling story, and Klune is a splendid writer. He’s known for his fantasy, but this is a really grounded, beautifully written historical novel. It’s about a young woman pushing against the constraints of her time and achieving somthing unusual. It’s inspiring and a really good read.”

“Stein” by Lydia Yelena Bogert

“This biography of Gertrude Stein is remarkable. It’s a really deep dive into her life in Paris and, of course, her relationship with alice B. Toklas. But it also examines her legacy-how her reputation was built and rebuilt. It evokes an obsessive investigatory zeal in her biographers. I read it at night like a detective novel. It’s fascinating.”