ARRIVALS: SARAH MURDOCH

All these new novels are recommended for the first long weekend of summer, perfect escapes for the dock, hammock or beach.

The Change Room, Karen Connelly

Sexy CanLit sounds oxymoronic, but Karen Connelly’s new novel is exactly that — and as steamy as the shower scene that gets things going. Eliza can’t quite recall the last time she had sex with her husband, which may be why she is turned on by the long-bodied woman (“the Amazon”) whom she races laps with at the pool, then encounters naked in the shower. Soon, sex ensues — and complications.

Inside V, Paul Priamos

Ava (her husband, Grant, calls her V) believes she has a solid marriage — a trusting, loving union with earth-shifting sex. Then her husband is convicted of raping a 17-year-old Latina girl and sentenced to a year in the slammer. V’s life is undone, then undone again when he disappears at a desert retreat a couple of days before he’s due to start serving his time. Compulsively readable.

If We Were Villains, M.L. Rio

This first novel occupies a similar intellectual and emotional landscape as Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, but instead of a clutch of precocious classics students, it concerns a sevenmember troupe of Shakespeare actors, each typecast onstage and off — hero, villain, femme fatale, etc. Author Rio has an MA in Shakespeare studies. This is her first novel and it’s receiving strong reviews.

Standard Deviation, Katherine Heiny

Audra, Graham Cavanaugh’s wife of 12 years, is a fizzy New Yorker who talks a mile a minute. Elspeth, Graham’s first wife is quite the opposite, a quiet perfectionist. Heiny’s first novel turns on what happens when Elspeth and her partner become involved with Graham and Audra. Amusing, effervescent, with oddball characters inhabiting a slender plot.