Summer Escape

This collection will whisk you away to a number of fresh and seasonally appropriate locales. Alberto Moravia’s Agostino follows a naïve teenager experiencing a sexual awakening against the idyllic backdrop of a Tuscan sea resort, while in Kurt Tucholsky’s lively Castle Gripsholm, a writer and his girlfriend vacation in the Swedish countryside between the World Wars—and eventually cross paths with an imperiled little girl.

Famed travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor’s lone novel, The Violins of Saint-Jacques, tells the story of a doomed Caribbean island at the turn of the twentieth century and the waning aristocracy that inhabits its shores. With an introduction by Colm Tóibín, L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between is an unforgettable portrait of love, adolescence, and luxury during a sweltering English summer in 1900. It begins with one of the most indelible opening lines in English literature: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

A classic of contemporary Greek literature, Margarita Liberaki’s Three Summers introduces readers to three charismatic young sisters as they grow into adulthood in pre–World War II Greece. And William McPherson’s Testing the Current captures the dissolution and bigotry of upper Midwestern WASPs through the eyes of a discerning child.