Fiction’s best bets

You could squander your summer plowing through a pile of trashy paperbacks. You could spill iced tea or margaritas on their pages and never mind the damage. No one would even question your choice of reading matter, because the weather is just too hot or rainy for you to get worked up much.

However, if summer brings you more than your usual quotient of time to relax, why not delve into books with a little more meat on their bones? Here are some of summer fiction’s best bets.

“The Family Man.” By Elinor Lipman. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 305 pages. $25. Out now.

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“Henry Archer did not attend his ex-wife’s husband’s funeral,” Lipman writes in the opening line of her witty, warm new novel, “but he did send a note of condolence.” Of course he did. Lipman’s characters are intelligent and urbane, and they do not behave with incivility, even if their ex-wives have dumped them for crass, wealthy businessmen. And Henry, who is gay and therefore fortunate to have been rejected, is nothing if not civil. But the fact that Denise, his pushy ex, has been pre-nupped out of her fortune changes his life, leading him to reconnect with Denise’s grown daughter Thalia, the stepchild with whom he had lost touch after the divorce.

Complications arise when protective Henry learns that Thalia, an aspiring actress, has been hired to boost the profile of a B-list sitcom star by posing as his love interest. Meanwhile, Denise tries her hand at matchmaking for Henry, an act that turns out a lot more happily than you’d expect, considering “even the most amicably divorced, scrupulous gay men can hold a surprising quantity of marital bitterness in their hearts.” But not forever, Lipman says. Hilarious, literate and unnervingly accurate in its observations of the quirks of human nature, “The Family Man” proclaims that whatever bizarre sort of family you have, you’re better off with it than without.

“The Secret Speech.” By Tom Rob Smith. Grand Central. 403 pages. $24.99. Out now.

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The sequel to last summer’s riveting “Child 44” has a lot to live up to: Smith’s debut novel, about an investigator who chases a serial killer through the bureaucracy and terror of Stalin’s oppressive government, was one of the best thrillers of the year. “The Secret Speech” does not quite match “Child 44’s” breathtaking audacity or relentless pacing, but Smith continues to provide fascinating history lessons, a strikingly original setting and quality storytelling.

Former state security officer Leo Demidov, eyes now wide open to Soviet excess, is struggling to forge a new life. His heroism in “Child 44” earned him a job in the newly formed Moscow homicide bureau, but his efforts to create a family with his wife Raisa and two orphaned girls are a struggle, mainly because the elder, Zoya, rightly blames Leo for her parents’ deaths. Other things have changed as well: Stalin is dead, and a widely distributed, once-secret letter denouncing his actions — from his successor Khrushchev — acts as a catalyst for those seeking revenge against Stalin’s oppressors. Like Leo.

Based on real events, “The Secret Speech” is jam-packed with action — the near-sinking of a prison ship, a violent takeover at a Kolyma gulag, and a rebellion in Hungary — and Smith explores pertinent questions of revenge, morality and responsibility.

“The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet.” By Reif Larsen. Penguin. 374 pages. $27.95. Out now.

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“There was never a map that got it all right, and truth and beauty were never married to one another for long,” laments the preternaturally gifted young narrator of Larsen’s astonishing debut novel. The same cannot be said of this gorgeous, wondrous book, which gets everything right, all the time: truth, beauty, joy, sorrow, redemption — the whole works.

Raised just north of the appropriately named Divide, Mont., by his rancher father and scientist mother, the precocious 12-year-old T.S. (for Tecumseh Sparrow) is a talented cartographer who dreams of mapping the natural world. He diagrams more personal subjects as well: his sister’s famous “Conniption of ‘04”; the way his father drinks whiskey (“with a Sensational Degree of Regularity”); the path of the shotgun bullet that killed his little brother Layton. Still, T.S. feels like an outsider, and when he wins a prestigious award from the Smithsonian in Washington, he decides to hop a train and head east toward what he is sure will be his intellectual home.

Larsen packs the page margins with footnotes that flesh out T.S.’ journey, making this painstakingly illustrated book as much a work of art as it is a warm, compelling story of family ties, science and the importance of understanding the world — and the human heart.

“The Way Home.” By George Pelecanos. Little, Brown. 336 pages. $24.99. Out now.

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Labeling Pelecanos a crime novelist is as much an understatement as describing “The Wire” — for which he was a writer and producer — as a TV show set in Baltimore. Just as that critically acclaimed HBO series encompassed the ills of our ravaged society, Pelecanos spreads his fictional net wide, exploring the effects on his flawed characters of corruption, violence, racial conflict and the struggle for redemption.

“The Way Home” also examines a generational battle between working-class Thomas Flynn, owner of a Washington, D.C., carpet business, and his son Chris, who is more concerned with the rules of the urban streets than with his future.

“It came to him one morning, lying in bed, after his mother had woken him up to go to school … His parents couldn’t force him to go. They couldn’t, in fact, force him to do anything.”

Acting on this knowledge eventually lands Chris in the Pine Ridge facility for juveniles, where punishment, not redemption, is the order of the day. Chris survives the system, but the jail-house code of standing tall, staring down authority and avenging wrongs dogs him as he tries to build a new, adult life in the face of temptation.

In a sense, “The Way Home” is a coming-of-age story, as Chris tries to find his place in the world. More fortunate than most of the boys who share his past, he can succeed, Pelecanos tells us — but not everybody is quite so lucky.

“Lime Tree Can’t Bear Orange.” Amanda Smyth. Shaye Areheart. 288 pages. $23. June.

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The Caribbean’s tropical sights and smells permeate Smyth’s moving debut novel, but all is not paradise for her young narrator, Celia. Growing up with her Aunt Tassi and two young cousins, Celia has never met her parents. But she knows their story by heart: A white Englishman passing through the islands meets a local girl who works at a Tobago barber shop. “I knew she probably didn’t cut hair like his too often. How could she, I told Aunt Tassi, if he was a white man.”

Her mother had died in childbirth, but Celia dreams of meeting her long-lost father in England, of maybe even going to university there. But fate has a different set of plans. After Aunt Tassi’s husband commits a terrible act, Celia flees to Trinidad, where she proceeds to fulfill the dire predictions of a local seer: “Men will want you like they want a glass of rum … One man will love you. But you won’t love him … The one you love will break your heart in two.”

Smyth paints a vivid portrait of a naive young girl who learns some hard truths about herself and her family, but though Celia’s story is not always happy, it’s arresting and powerful, a shining testament to human resilience.

“The Little Stranger.” By Sarah Waters. Riverhead. 466 pages. $26.95. Out now.

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The drafty corridors and ruined rooms of Hundreds Hall in dreary Warwickshire, England, are the perfect breeding ground for a good-old-fashioned haunting, and that’s precisely what Waters provides in her atmospheric fifth novel. “The Little Stranger” is a satisfyingly retro ghost story with an extraordinarily sharp dose of psychological terror.

In the days after World War II, as the gentry finds itself on uncertain ground, Dr. Faraday, son of a maid from Hundreds Hall, is called to the once-great house to care for an ill servant. The girl is faking her sickness, but Faraday doesn’t mind, because he meets the family he has admired from afar for so long: gracious matriarch Mrs. Ayres; war-hero son Roderick, weighed down by the family’s crushing debt, and strong, outdoorsy daughter Carolyn, her friendly, elderly Labrador Gyp always by her side.

At first they seem a hale threesome, but strange and terrible events begin, and the Ayreses start to crumble — just like their house and, Carolyn notes, their class. “Oh, we’ll be all right, here at Hundreds,” Roderick assures the good doctor. But how wrong he is.

“The Little Stranger” is the sort of period piece in which a character might refer to someone else as a “sly boots” or lament the dearth of quality servants. Rich with historic detail and a slow, deliberate building toward the revelation of its secrets, it delights even as it leaves you unnerved.

“The Signal.” By Ron Carlson. Viking. 184 pages. $25.95. June.

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Carlson’s slim but powerful novel is a bittersweet love story and a rousing adventure set in the remote stretches of the Wind River range of Wyoming, where a couple has planned their 10th annual backpacking trip. This year, though, the outing is laced with melancholy: Mack and Vonnie have split up, and this vacation is a farewell, the last time they’ll ever hike these mountains together.

Mack, just out of jail for a variety of illegal activities and dumb stunts that culminated in an assault on the vehicle of Vonnie’s new boyfriend, knows better than to hope for reconciliation. He’s hanging on through repetition and keeping busy. “He had been uneasy and worried and scared and empty and sort of ruined, and he knew this, but now he had his ways of doing one thing and then the next and it kept the ruin off him.” But he has a secret assignment in these mountains, one that might save him or bring him down for good.

Carlson (“Five Skies”) evokes the rugged solace of nature with grace and simplicity, his unadorned prose reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s. He’s as adept at describing the stark beauty of the wild as he is at reflecting the contradictory nature of human interaction. And on the treacherous ground between passion and sentimentality, he never loses his footing.

“Good Things I Wish You.” By A. Manette Ansay. Harper. 272 pages. $25.99. July.

Ansay, an instructor in the University of Miami’s creative writing program, successfully tries her hand at metafiction in her latest novel, a poignant and arresting duet of the historic and the contemporary. The narrator, freshly divorced Jeanette Hochmann, is juggling her teaching job at a Miami university, raising her 4-year-old daughter and writing a book on the relationship between 19th century German pianist Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, the protege of Clara’s husband, Robert.

As she struggles with her manuscript, Jeanette resists the idea that the two were lovers, despite the passionate letters they exchanged. (“I think I can no longer love an unmarried girl — at least, I have quite forgotten about them,” Brahms wrote to a friend. “They but promise heaven while Clara shows it revealed to us.”) But Jeanette’s fresh romantic involvement alters her thinking on the subject of men, women and the tortures and pleasures of romantic attachment.

Ansay sprinkles bits of letters, photographs and drawings throughout the novel, a deft touch that adds to the book’s evocative moods of past and present. Clara writes, “I wish I could find longing as sweet as you do. It only gives me pain and fills my heart with unspeakable woe.” The remarkable thing about “Good Things I Wish You” is its ability to mine those feelings and emerge shining with life’s possibilities.

“Where the Money Went: Stories.” By Kevin Canty. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. 208 pages. $24.95. July.

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“I don’t think I’m any worse than anybody else, I’m sure of it, in fact,” says the narrator of one of Canty’s incisive, bracingly insightful stories, someone who has been sleeping with his wife’s best friend. But doesn’t everybody fall prey to selfish behavior sometimes?

Canty has great compassion for his sometimes-deluded, always-confused men: the college boy still reeling from having almost killed his brother; the married drinker who realizes that his new sobriety demands a big change in his life; the father who realizes he can’t protect his 4-year-old son, “a biter,” from the disapproval of the world. Like us, they squander their good fortune foolishly, on boats and houses and affairs and more booze than is good for them, on lovers who will leave and others who will be abandoned.

Canty’s uncanny ability to elevate the everyday sets these storie apart. He deftly re-evaluates dreams of success, makes drama and sense of modern emotional calamity. As he cooks for his married friends whose lives are on the verge of collapsing, Andrew in “Sleeping Beauty” has “made right choices and wrong ones but they have worked out and if his life is not at all as he had imagined it, if his life is short of what he had hoped for, it is at least all right and better than most.” Canty generously allows us to see that there is beauty in contentment.