Just light enough

What constitutes the perfect beach read? A book equal parts heavy and light—physically heavy enough to last you many hours on the beach but light enough content-wise to give your brain a break from a year of harder reading. Or maybe you want something light in both senses so it will fit in your carry-on.

Historically, the beach read leans into leisurely entertainment. Seaside reading took off in the mid-1800s when publishers caught on to people’s growing penchant for summer vacations. An editorial in The Book Buyer from those years encouraged readers to enjoy “the cakes and ale” of literature after digesting more difficult fare the rest of the year.

As a kid, I would read a page and pass the book to my mom, then I’d wait while she read. She, in fierce vacation mode, wearied of this system fast. “Just tear out the page when you finish it and pass it to me,” she said—and thus on a Floridian beach our copy of Great Expectations was both deeply enjoyed and utterly destroyed. On our beach honeymoon, I read George Eliot’s Middlemarch and my husband read Leo Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat. These books still mean the beach to us 11 years later, no matter where we reread them.

Maybe you’ve eaten your literary broccoli already this year: books that Served a Purpose. Our WORLD staff offers some recommendations of recent page-turners—or page-rippers, if you consume books like me and my mom. We’ve got mysteries and memoirs, historical fiction and histories. We hope you find something to delight you during these hottest months.

Marble Hall Murders

Anthony Horowitz
Harper, 592 pages

Anthony Horowitz is a prolific crime writer of novels and TV scripts—he’s probably best known as the creator of the British detective drama Foyle’s War. His latest book is Marble Hall Murders, the third novel about editor-turned-sleuth Susan Ryeland.

In Magpie Murders (Harper 2018) and Moonflower Murders (2020), Susan gets dragged into mysteries surrounding her work on the wildly popular Atticus Pünd novels, written by Alan Conway. Alan is brilliant, filling his books with intricate puzzles meant for his own amusement, but he’s also spiteful, populating his stories with unflattering depictions of people he knows. His mean-spiritedness gets him killed in the first book of the series.

In Marble Hall Murders, Alan’s publisher wants to resurrect Atticus Pünd by hiring a new writer to continue the series. Eliot Crace, grandson of world-famous children’s book author Miriam Crace, gets the job, and Susan is brought in to ensure the novel feels like a real Atticus Pünd book. Susan starts to suspect that Eliot has the same malicious tendencies Alan Conway had and that he’s using dark family secrets as inspiration for his book and using it to settle old scores.

Horowitz’s novels aren’t cozy mysteries, but compared with most contemporary crime fiction, they don’t contain much objectionable language—usually just one or two swear words per book. Much of his work contains a meta quality that plays with ideas about story. Like the other Susan Ryeland books, Marble Hall Murders gives readers two mysteries for the price of one. We read Eliot’s Atticus Pünd chapters in their entirety as he gives them to Susan, while trying to discover the Crace family’s secrets. Horowitz deftly blends the two narratives, making Marble Hall Murders the best of the series so far. Some of the plot hinges on events from the first book, Magpie Murders, but it’s easy to get up to speed by watching PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery adaptation. —Collin Garbarino

Big Dumb Eyes: Stories From a Simpler Mind

Nate Bargatze
Grand Central Publishing, 240 pages

Within the last five years, Nate Bargatze has developed an impressive résumé for a clean comic. He earned a Grammy nomination, appeared on Saturday Night Live twice, and will host the 2025 Emmy awards. Thanks to Big Dumb Eyes, he’s now a published author.

His book is part autobiography, part compilation of random ponderings—timeless questions about whether shopping without buying is really shopping or just browsing. He recalls when his parents once waited over three hours for the opening of a new Whataburger, the time he nearly wrecked his engagement by calling his fiancée an idiot, and protecting Wilson County water tanks from al-Qaeda. Fans of his standup routine will remember some of these stories, but here he expounds a bit more.

Readers can peruse just about any chapter and enjoy it as a stand-alone episode, so the book might be ideal for a beach day with frequent interruptions for sandcastle building. Bargatze even includes some blank pages to provide a much-needed breather for those who, like himself, find books to be “just the most words.”

Serious readers might find the book’s conversational style a tad frustrating. Bargatze admits to voice memoing at least one chapter, and I wonder if he didn’t just voice memo the whole thing. But Bargatze claims he isn’t gunning for a Pulitzer: “I’m not saying, I wrote it for cats and dogs, but I bet they could knock a couple chapters out if they put their minds to it.” —Bekah McCallum

Death in the Jungle: Murder, Betrayal, and the Lost Dream of Jonestown

Candace Fleming
Anne Schwartz Books, 368 pages

Late on Friday, Nov. 17, 1978, ­disturbing news came over the wire: A U.S. congressman had been assassinated on an airstrip in a country most Americans had never heard of. Rep. Leo Ryan of California had been in South America on a fact-­finding mission for some of his constituents, who feared that their loved ones were enslaved by a cult founded by the “Rev.” Jim Jones.

Jones was a charismatic leader who had begun as a Pentecostal preacher in Indiana but evolved into a Marxist radical by the time he moved his “Peoples Temple” to Northern California. In 1976 Jones had relocated once again to the rainforest of Guyana, and rumors about his excesses prompted Ryan’s visit. Before the congressman could return to his district, Jones’ henchmen gunned him down.

Worse was to come. On Sunday the Guyanese government reported the discovery of at least 400 bodies at Jonestown, apparent victims of a mass suicide. U.S. troops arriving on Tuesday faced the sickening task of packing bloated corpses into metal caskets: over 900 in all, many of them children.

The story of Jonestown has been investigated and analyzed in countless books, reports, and articles, but Death in the Jungle may be the first comprehensive account written for teens. The author includes little inappropriate language or gruesome detail but did not stint on research. Interviews with survivors such as Jones’ son Stephan contribute to a gripping story readers may not be able to put down, even though they know how it ends.

How could so many give up their lives for an obvious delusion? “[Cultic deception] really can happen to anyone,” observes Stephan Jones. Jeremiah noted a similar weakness in the human heart (Jeremiah 17:9). The Jonestown tragedy is a timely warning for teens and grown-ups alike: Planting our faith firmly on the Rock is the only sure ­preventative for fatal attractions. —Janie B. Cheaney

Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America

Will Bardenwerper
Doubleday, 320 pages

Author Will Bardenwerper says his latest book isn’t merely about baseball. Instead, it’s a story about our country, and “where we go from here.” For Bardenwerper, “here” is a landscape irrevocably changed by Major League Baseball’s 2020 decision to eliminate more than 40 minor league teams. The book chronicles what happens when baseball-lover Bardenwerper spends Summer 2022 in blue-collar Batavia, N.Y., a town seeking to rebound after MLB’s departure.

With a $99 season ticket in hand, Bardenwerper embeds himself into Batavia’s Dwyer Stadium, which now hosts a collegiate summer team rather than a minor league crew. The book skims the stories of the young Muckdogs players who pay $1,500 a season to display their skills in front of a crowd and the occasional scout.

Bardenwerper’s deeper dive is saved for the fans that fill the bleachers. His appealing descriptions make readers care about a widowed scorekeeper named Carol, lifelong friends Betsey and Ginny, and hockey-player-turned-team-owner Robbie, who suffers from a rare disorder. The relationships the author experiences cause him to consider “the hunger we all have for acceptance and friendship, a hunger made more acute in a lonelier and more fractious America.” Bardenwerper romantically indicates community baseball could be a fix, leaving Christian readers to lament no mention of the soul-satisfying community found only in the church.

Infrequent profanities distract from Bardenwerper’s fly-on-a-wall writing style. Demonizing MLB does, too. Homestand is Bardenwerper’s second nonfiction work. The Princeton graduate’s first book detailed his experience as a military officer in Iraq. In a way, the two memoirs are connected. Bardenwerper writes that in Dwyer Stadium, he was grateful to have discovered a place where—though endangered—the America he’d imagined he was defending in the military endured. —Kim Henderson

Heartwood

Amity Gaige
Simon & Schuster, 320 pages

Amity Gaige’s masterful lyrical style both sings and sobs in this rich and resonant novel in which she deftly weaves together letters, interviews, and narration into one gripping suspense story.

The author recounts the lives of three women: Valerie Gillis, an Appalachian Trail hiker lost in the wilds of Maine; Lt. Beverly Miller, the state warden determined to find her; and Lena Kucharski, an amateur naturalist tracking the case from the confines of a Connecticut assisted living facility.

The tale of aching homesickness uses the search-and-rescue mission as a backdrop while exploring three mother-­daughter relationships and the inner lostness created by broken family bonds. Gaige probes the depths of human experience to paint startlingly precise and intimate portraits of human nature. She doesn’t shy away from the blood and sweat of existence, and some readers may squirm at her frank descriptions of puberty and roughing it in the woods.

The author also employs the whole spectrum of language, including expletives, to distinguish characters, making the book unsuitable for children and younger teens. Nevertheless, Heartwood offers some powerful glimpses of redemption and holds out hope for wandering characters to find their way home again. —Grace Snell

Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive

Eliot Stein
St. Martin’s Press, 336 pages

Read Custodians of Wonder if you want to travel all over the world without leaving your house. In this thick-enough but not-too-thick volume, BBC journalist Eliot Stein lets the reader tag along as he seeks out cultural skills teetering on the brink of extinction.

He leads the reader to Mali to see an 800-year-old xylophone-like instrument, to Sweden to meet Scandinavia’s last night watchman, to Thailand to watch Asia’s final film poster painter at work, and more.

Stein did the hard part for us by locating these last guardians of tradition, traveling around the globe to meet them, then summoning the guts to experience their dying arts. Maybe that last bit wasn’t much of a trial in the case of the world’s rarest pasta, which Stein finds in Sardinia, but crossing a freshly woven Inca grass bridge seems supremely scary. “Truth be told,” Stein writes of the crossing, “I found the whole thing terrifying. Not only does the bridge rock back and forth in the breeze, but the weight of each step causes the walkway to dip down and then swell back up like a wave. It felt like trying to tightrope atop a waterbed.”

Of course, in his world travels Stein encounters superstition, animism, divination, and other unsavory cultural practices. But there’s plenty of room for a Christian to marvel at Stein’s findings and the history underpinning them. “There’s something truly singular about witnessing someone do something that nearly nobody else in the world knows how to do,” Stein writes. “It’s like watching a secret.” —Chelsea Boes

Daikon

Samuel Hawley
Avid Reader Press, 352 pages

Historian Samuel Hawley’s fascinating debut novel turns on a fascinating premise: What might have happened had the world’s first atomic bomb, “Little Boy,” fallen into the hands of the Japanese just as the empire faced humiliating defeat?

In Daikon, real-life Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets falls ill on the eve of the August 1945 Hiroshima mission. So, a fictional B-29 takes off from Tinian carrying Little Boy instead. But when the bomber comes under Japanese attack, it crashes on Honshu, killing the crew but leaving Little Boy intact. Lt. Col. Shingen Sagara, a War Ministry official, recruits physicist Keizo Kan and Petty Officer Ryohei Yagi, a war-grizzled navy mechanic, to inspect the device. When Sagara learns what he has, he goes rogue, defying superiors to pursue what he believes is a divine mission: prevent Emperor Hirohito’s imminent surrender, strike the Americans with their own apocalyptic weapon, and turn the tide of war.

Hawley focuses on a compact cast and draws his characters deftly: Sagara’s demanding arrogance is the perfect foil for Dr. Kan, who is introspective and soft-spoken. But Kan’s daughter is dead and his wife is missing, so he has a demand of his own—one that might cost his life.

Though Daikon contains a handful of F-bombs, it’s surprisingly light on profanity for a military novel. The book is a war story that drives to a thrilling climax. But at its heart, Daikon is also a tale of fierce love and an unlikely friendship forged and tested in the crucible of war. —Lynn Vincent

One Good Thing

Georgia Hunter
Pamela Dorman Books, 432 pages

Readers will spend most of One Good Thing breathless, as the protagonist Lili Passigli, posing as mother to her best friend’s son, crisscrosses Italy in a mad dash to survive—and resist—the fascist persecution of Italy’s Jews.

Georgia Hunter’s meticulously researched first novel, We Were the Lucky Ones, traced her great-grandparents’ struggle to survive the Nazi invasion of Poland and the ensuing extermination of the country’s Jews. While the characters of her second work are largely fictional, readers receive a thorough introduction to Italian fascism and the nation’s cooperation with the Nazi death machine.

A few prominent themes guide Lili’s journey. Friendship, hope, resilience, and motherhood are among them. But it’s Lili’s growing courage Hunter repeatedly spotlights: her decision to take responsibility for little Theo and set out on her own, her involvement in resistance efforts despite her fear, and her willingness to embrace new beginnings in the face of lingering grief.

Lili identifies her love for Theo as the one good thing fueling her purpose even as normal life crumbles around her. As the story unfolds it’s clear Theo is just one of many “one good things” dotting her path. A network of people risk their lives to shelter the pair along the way. But it isn’t clear what drives them to do so. Hunter only briefly touches on the role Christianity played in both resisting and condoning fascism.

The book’s almost picture-perfect ending perhaps diminishes the war’s chaotic aftermath. But Hunter does temper her tidy finish: When we leave Lili, she, and so many others, is still grappling with unanswered questions and unspoken goodbyes. —Addie Offereins

The Brightwood Code

Monica Hesse
Little, Brown and Company, 336 pages

“It is astonishing to think how much a few months can change a person. Or one month. One minute. One word.” That’s the heart of this young adult novel set during World War I.

Although targeted to teens, it grapples with very adult questions about guilt and regret and the ways they shape our lives. The protagonist, Edda St. James, decides shortly after her high school graduation to volunteer for the Hello Girls, a group of all-female telephone operators who work switchboards on or very near the front lines in Europe. The calls they connect can quite literally make a life-or-death difference for the soldiers placing them.

It’s a heavy load for the young girls to carry. The story unfolds through a series of flashbacks. At the start of the book, Edda is back in Washington working for Bell System and harboring a painful secret from her time in France. It’s what brought her home from the front before the war’s end. And it’s slowly tearing her apart.

Edda believes she’s to blame for the deaths of an entire platoon of men, but her guilt masks another, deeper trauma. Astute readers will guess about halfway through what’s at the heart of Edda’s pain.

It twists her view of reality and obscures truth that should have been obvious. She spends the whole book trying to make atonement for her actions but in the end concludes life is more than the mistakes of a moment. —Leigh Jones