Snag a place in the sand, plant your chair, and escape for the day into the pages of one of 2014 most recent hard cover releases. With the help of our friends at Cape Atlantic Book Company of Cape May’s Washington Street Mall, we’ve compiled a list of the latest “must-read” titles. Best of all, their hard covers can withstand the wear of the sand and sea spray making them trusty beach reads for years to come.
A Replacement Life
Boris Fishman
Publisher’s Synopsis: Determined to make his name as a writer, Slava Gelman, an immigrant living in Brooklyn, New York, forges Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews until he, intoxicated by his inventions, risks exposure and commits an irrevocable act that finally grants him a sense of home in America.
The Sea House
Elisabeth Gifford
Publisher’s Synopsis: In 1860, Alexander Ferguson, a newly ordained vicar and amateur evolutionary scientist, takes up his new parish, a poor, isolated patch on the remote Scottish island of Harris. He hopes to uncover the truth behind the legend of the Selkies—mermaids or seal people who have been sighted off the north of Scotland for centuries.
He has a more personal motive, too; family legend states that Alexander is descended from seal men. As he struggles to be the good pastor he was called to be, his maid Moira faces the terrible eviction of her family by Lord Marstone, whose family owns the island. Their time on the island will irrevocably change the course of both their lives, but the white house on the edge of the dunes keeps its silence long after they are gone. It will be more than a century before the Sea House reluctantly gives up its secrets.
The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt
Publisher’s Synopsis: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Goldfinch tells the story of a young boy in New York City, Theo Decker, who miraculously survives an accident that takes the life of his mother. Alone and abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by a friend’s family and struggles to make sense of his new life. In the years that follow, he becomes entranced by one of the few things that reminds him of his mother: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the art underworld. Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America, and a drama of almost unbearable acuity and power. It is a story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the enormous power of art.
All the Light We Cannot See
Anthony Doerr
Publisher’s Synopsis: From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant “New York Times” bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.
Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.
In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.
Mr. Mercedes
Stephen King
Publisher’s Synopsis: In a mega-stakes, high-suspense race against time, three of the most unlikely and winning heroes Stephen King has ever created try to stop a lone killer from blowing up thousands.
In the frigid pre-dawn hours, in a distressed Midwestern city, hundreds of desperate unemployed folks are lined up for a spot at a job fair. Without warning, a lone driver plows through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes, running over the innocent, backing up, and charging again. Eight people are killed; fifteen are wounded. The killer escapes.
In another part of town, months later, a retired cop named Bill Hodges is still haunted by the unsolved crime. When he gets a crazed letter from someone who self-identifies as the “perp” and threatens an even more diabolical attack, Hodges wakes up from his depressed and vacant retirement, hell-bent on preventing another tragedy.
Brady Hartsfield lives with his alcoholic mother in the house where he was born. He loved the feel of death under the wheels of the Mercedes, and he wants that rush again. Only Bill Hodges, with a couple of highly unlikely allies, can apprehend the killer before he strikes again. And they have no time to lose, because Brady’s next mission, if it succeeds, will kill or maim thousands.
For these and even more excellent beach reads, look no further than Cape Atlantic Book Co. This helpful staff is full of recommendations and ready and willing to point you in the direction of the book to make your beach day complete.