This month, PW and AARP bring you a handful of hot summer reads, including hefty novels, notable nonfiction and helpful how-to's to keep you company at the beach or wherever you'll be relaxing. Enjoy, and keep cool!

Fiction

Sun Going Down
by Jack Todd
Touchstone
$26
ISBN 9781416550488
This sprawling, multigenerational epic set in the American West (think: Lonesome Dove) and spanning the Civil War to the Depression of the ’30s is the first novel by 61-year-old Todd, a boomer who deserted the Army during the Vietnam era and later renounced his citizenship to live in Canada.

Shadow Country
by Peter Matthiessen
Modern Library
$40
ISBN 9780679640196
Paris Review cofounder Matthiessen, whose books epitomize his generation with their coverage of far-flung lands and spiritual journeys, has retrenched his Watson trilogy based on the 1910 murder of a south Florida farmer. The new version shed 400 pages, and though it still weighs in at nearly 900 pages, this doorstop is well worth the lifting.

Attachment
by Isabel Fonseca
Knopf
$23.95
ISBN 9780307266910
The author of Bury Me Standing (and wife of Martin Amis) delivers her first novel, about a marriage of 23 years thrown into upheaval after a wife discovers a salacious e-mail sent to her husband by a mysterious woman. It’s pleasantly uncomfortable—and very funny.

Roux Morgue
by Claire M. Johnson
Poisoned Pen
$24.95
ISBN 9781590584873
Middle-aged “dinosaurs” battle it out with the “young brats” on the teaching staff of an elite San Francisco cooking school in this highly amusing culinary mystery.

Enlightenment
by Maureen Freely
Overlook
$24.95
ISBN 9781590200742
Set in present-day and 1960s Turkey, this literate thriller by the English translator of Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow will appeal to the “duck and cover” generation who wax nostalgic about the Cold War.

Nonfiction

Shakespeare’s Wife
by Germaine Greer
HarperCollins
$26
ISBN 9780061537158
Both celebrated and notorious for The Female Eunuch, her 1971 book that linked sexual liberation to the women’s movement, feminist scholar Greer now examines what we know about Ann Hathaway, dispelling myths and vividly portraying the lives of ordinary women in Elizabethan England.

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
by Rick Perlstein
Scribner
$37.50
ISBN 9780743243025
Award-winning author Perlstein explains how President Nixon became the architect of America’s divided political house with a rhetoric of law and order and traditional values that still echoes today.

The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up
by Liao Yiwu, Foreword by Philip Gourevitch.
Pantheon
$25
ISBN 9780375425424
In this harrowing, deeply empathetic oral-history collection, Chinese writer Liao interviews a host of wildly colorful characters from the margins of today’s Chinese society: a professional mourner, a leper, a delusional peasant, and a human trafficker.

The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music
by Steve Lopez
Putnam
$25.95
ISBN 9780399155062
With self-effacing humor, fast-paced yet elegant prose, and unsparing honesty, journalist Lopez tells an inspiring story of heartbreak and hope as he tries to help an accomplished but homeless violinist find his way off the streets.

Reflections of a Wine Merchant
by Neal Rosenthal
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
$24
ISBN 9780374248567
Rosenthal turned his life around in 1977 when he gave up his law career. Here he leads us through his three decades as a wine merchant, starting with the opening of his Manhattan shop in 1978. Early misadventures and small-scale successes follow, as he makes significant discoveries far off the paths habitually beaten through wine-producing countries such as France and Italy.

How-To

Can’t Remember What I Forgot: The Good News from the Front Lines of Memory Research
by Sue Halpern
Harmony
$24
ISBN 9780307406743
Armed with both hope and healthy skepticism, science writer Halpern sorts out the facts from the myths, about memory, forgetting, and the future of Alzheimer’s treatment.

Death Benefits: How Losing a Parent Can Change an Adult’s Life—For the Better
by Jeanne Safer
Basic
$25
ISBN: 9780465072118
Psychotherapist Safer brings a dirty secret out of the closet: some people are liberated by the death of a parent who was hurtful or controlling. She also advises on how to make sense of this difficult emotional legacy.

Gracefully: Looking and Being Your Best at Any Age
by Valerie Ramsey with Heather Hummel, Foreword by Susan Lucci
McGraw-Hill
$24.95
ISBN 9780071546232
A stay-at-home mother who became a runway model in her 60s, Ramsey offers frank advice on everything from nutrition to exercise, beauty regimens, and sexuality.

Perfumes: The Guide
by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez
Viking
$27.95
ISBN 9780670018659
Less a manual to choosing the perfect fragrance than a wide-ranging, critical review of some 1,200 perfumes, both famous and obscure, this comprehensive book is unfailingly entertaining. Or, in the words of Jimmy Durante, “the nose knows.”