BEACH BOOKS …
Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, which follows the lives of Calcutta’s Mitra brothers; Nine Inches, Tom Perrotta’s collection of suburbia-skewering stories; and The Asylum, Simon Doonan’s riotous essays about the idiosyncrasies of the fashion world. More sobering are Levels of Life, Julian Barnes’s elegy on grief, and Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped, a memoir of loss in rural Mississippi. Finish up with Samantha Shannon’s escapist read, The Bone Season, about a clairvoyant’s strange underworld.