Working toward the bottom of your summer reading list? Top it up with one or more of these titles, out this month.
In “All In: An Autobiography” (Knopf), Billie Jean King (assisted by Johnette Howard and Maryanne Vollers) details her life’s journey to find her true self.
She recounts her groundbreaking tennis career and poignantly recalls the cultural backdrop of those years and the profound impact on her worldview from the women’s movement, assassinations and anti-war protests of the 1960s, the civil rights movement, and, eventually, the LGBTQ+ rights movement.
King describes the myriad challenges she’s overcome – entrenched sexism, an eating disorder, near financial peril after being outed – on her path to publicly acknowledging her sexual identity at the age of 51. She offers insights and advice on leadership, business, activism, sports, politics, marriage equality, parenting, sexuality, and love. And she shows how living honestly and openly has had a transformative effect on her relationships and happiness.
Next, from legendary storyteller and #1 bestseller Stephen King comes “Billy Summers” (Scribner), a thrilling new novel about a good guy in a bad job.
Billy Summers is a killer for hire and the best in the business. But he’ll do the job only if the target is a truly bad guy. Now Billy wants out. But first there’s one last hit. Billy is among the best snipers in the world, a decorated Iraq war vet, and a Houdini when it comes to vanishing after the job is done. So what could possibly go wrong?
This spectacular can’t-put-it-down novel is part war story, part love letter to small town America and the people who live there. It’s a tale of love, luck, fate, and a complex hero with one last shot at redemption.
Finally, award winning author Leila Slimani draws on her own family’s inspiring story for “In the Country of Others” (Penguin Books) the first volume in a trilogy of novels about race, resilience, and women’s empowerment. Mathilde, a spirited young Frenchwoman, falls in love with Amine, a handsome Moroccan soldier in the French army during World War II. After the war, while Amine tries to cultivate his family farm’s rocky Moroccan terrain, Mathilde feels her vitality sapped by the isolation, harsh climate, lack of money, and the mistrust she engenders as a foreigner.
Left increasingly alone to raise her two children in a world whose rules she does not understand, and with her daughter taunted at school by rich French girls for her secondhand clothes and unruly hair, Mathilde morphs from her role as a farmer’s wife to defying the country’s chauvinism and repressive social codes by offering medical services to the rural population.
Meanwhile, as tensions mount between the Moroccans and the French colonists, Amine finds himself caught between solidarity with his Moroccan workers and being a landowner, being despised by the French yet married to a Frenchwoman, and being proud of his wife’s resolve but ashamed of her refusal to be subjugated. All of them live in the country of others, especially the women, forced to live in a land dominated by men, and Slimani’s novel fires the opening salvo in their emancipation.
Special thanks to the Doylestown Bookshop (doylestownbookshop.com) in Doylestown for its assistance in preparing this edition of Book Talk!
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