Your Summer Destination: Big City

Ray Carney is a furniture salesman in Harlem, New York, trying to make a decent life for him and his family. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his facade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time. This propulsive and fun novel takes readers across New York as Carney tries to keep his life on track. Harlem, and particularly 125th Street is the emotional center of this novel, and Colson Whitehead’s prose transports readers from the first sentence.

Set in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, Sandra Cisneros’s novel follows a young girl growing up in the city as she learns to face the realities of life, in all its rich, beautiful, complex, and joyous glory. Filled with style and depth, it isn’t hard to see why this novel remains a classic.

Set in northwest London, Zadie Smith’s brilliant novel follows four locals–Leah, Natalie, Felix, and Nathan–as they try to make adult lives outside of Caldwell, the council estate of their childhood. In private houses and public parks, at work and at play, these Londoners inhabit a complicated place, as beautiful as it is brutal. Depicting the modern urban zone–familiar to city-dwellers everywhere–NW is a quietly devastating novel of encounters, mercurial and vital, like the city itself.

Set in the New York theater district during the 1940s, City of Girls is told from the perspective of an older woman as she looks back on her youth with both pleasure and regret. After being kicked out of Vassar college, Vivian Morris moves to the city to live with her Aunt Peg, who owns a crumbling theater called the Lily Playhouse. Here, Vivian’s world goes from black-and-white into rich color when she is introduced to the unconventional and charismatic characters that populate the theater. Elizabeth Gilbert takes readers on a wild ride!

Sitting at the exact center of Paris is the Shakespeare and Company bookstore. This historic place is more than a bookstore, and Kerri Maher brings the story of its opening to light in The Paris Bookseller. When expat Sylvia Beach opened up her shop in 1919, she had no idea that it would become a meeting place for the prominent writers of the Lost Generation, that some of the most important literary friendships would be forged there, or that she would change the course of literature itself. But she does exactly that when Sylvia decided to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses’, the controversial and influential book that almost cost Sylvia everything.

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in a hotel in the center of Moscow. Even though this novel takes place all within the grand Metropol hotel, there is no greater lens to see the entirety of Russia, its traditions, its customs, its people, and its changing history. Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.

Hannah Bailey has never known her father, the Nigerian entrepreneur who had a brief relationship with her white mother. When her father dies, she’s invited to Nigeria for the funeral. Searching for answers, Hannah boards a plane to Lagos, Nigeria. In Banana Island, one of Nigeria’s most affluent areas, Hannah meets the Jolades, her late father’s prestigious family. The days leading up to the funeral are chaotic, but Hannah is soon shaped by secrets that unfold, a culture she never thought she would understand or appreciate, and a man who steals her heart and helps her to see herself in a new light.

This cult classic of gonzo journalism is the best chronicle of a drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken, and is a fantastic look at the disillusionment of the “American Dream” in the city of greed.

Having grown up in America with her white parents, Hara Wilson has never been connected to her Korean heritage. But at twenty-five she begins to have an identity crisis that has her running off to Seoul in search of her roots. What Hara finds there has all the makings of a classic K-drama: a tall mysterious stranger who greets her at the airport, spontaneous adventures across the city, and a mess of familial ties, along with a red string of destiny that winds its way around her, heart and soul.

Edward Rutherfurd is a master of taking readers deep within a city, offering a rare chance to see the sweeping history spanning thousands of years and generations. London brings the vibrant city’s long and noble history alive through his saga of ever-shifting fortunes, fates, and intrigues of a half-dozen families, from the age of Julius Caesar to the twentieth century.

Born in Shanghai, but now a celebrated figure in London society, Banks still lives under the shadow of his parents’ alleged kidnappings when he was nine-years-old. Desperate to find answers, he returns to the city of his memory in order to solve the mystery. But what he finds is that the city is no longer recognizable and his memories are becoming less and less trustworthy. Suspenseful and psychologically acute, When We Were Orphans offers a profound meditation on the shifting quality of memory, and the possibility of avenging one’s past.

Nineteen-year-old Mari is waiting out the night in an anonymous Denny’s when she meets a young man who insists he knows her older sister, thus setting her on an odyssey through the sleeping city. In the space of a single night, the lives of a diverse cast of Tokyo residents—models, prostitutes, mobsters, and musicians—collide in a world suspended between fantasy and reality. Utterly enchanting and infused with surrealism, After Dark is a thrilling account of the magical hours separating midnight from dawn.

Linda, an anxious and restless American, has moved to São Paulo, with her husband, Dennis, who has accepted a yearlong professorship. Linda finds herself unmoored and adrift, feeling increasingly disassociated from her own body. Linda’s unwavering and skilled maid, Marta is exasperated by Linda’s instability. One day, Linda leaves home with a charismatic and beguiling artist, whom she joins on a fervent adventure that causes reverberations felt by everyone, and ultimately binds Marta and Linda in a profoundly human, and tender, way.

Time collapses as these lives collide and converge, linked by the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibious, ever-morphing capital itself. Bangkok Wakes to Rain is an elegy for what time erases and a love song to all that persists, yearning, into the unknowable future.