Need a summer book? Three new titles set in Georgia are perfect vacation reads

July is here and with it comes peak vacation reading season. If your flight and hotel are set but you’re still on the hunt for the right book for your leisure time, look no further. This month sees the release of three new books set in Georgia, each perfect for a different flavor of vacation.

The Sins of Summer Daughters by Lo Patrick (Sourcebooks, July 14)

Sixty-four-year-old Meg Gregory ran away from her backwater hometown of Tuskin, Georgia, as a teenager in 1973 after her friend Tyler’s mysterious death. She returned in middle age to find Tuskin improved enough to raise her daughter, Nina, there. But decades later, when Meg’s teenage granddaughter, Lucy, is charged with her boyfriend’s murder, Meg is thrown back into the trauma she repressed after Tyler’s death, terrified her murky past has somehow come back to haunt her family.

As Meg works to clear her granddaughter’s name, she finds that Lucy’s ordeal seems to echo her own in disturbing ways. But the more she learns, the more she falls apart, lashing out, misjudging situations and seeing faces from her past around corners until she wonders how much she remembers, how much she imagined and whether Tuskin has really changed at all. Observant and wryly funny, Meg’s pithy observations and cutting takedowns are a counterweight to the heavy subject material.

The Sins of Summer Daughters takes a hard look at what it means to be a poor, single woman in a small, conservative town. Additionally, the book explores the repercussions of community apathy and unresolved trauma on young people and the adults they grow up to be.

Read it: Over a long weekend in Helen.  

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Destination Funeral by Paige Harbison (St. Martin’s Press, July 21)

High-profile chef Didion Bennett is burned out and friendless when she arrives for her mother Babe’s funeral at Birdsong, their home on Mercy Island, Georgia, where, as a teenager, Didion spent endless, idyllic summers with her sister, best friend and boyfriend. Though she has been estranged from all of them for years, she agrees to spend one last weekend at Birdsong per Babe’s final request. But on the second morning, the group find themselves in a time loop, repeating their Saturday over and over again with no idea how to escape it. 

Birdsong is charming, and Mercy Island is idyllic, and so are Didion’s recollections, but they are also tinged with sadness. Waking every morning surrounded by people who were once her closest friends reminds Didion why she loves both Birdsong and her companions — and why she resents them so bitterly. The wounds among the old friends are as clear as the love they once shared. Saturday after Saturday, Didion and her friends eat, fight, drink and dance their way through years of hurt and isolation. 

Destination Funeral is a salve for post-pandemic isolation, exploring how to bridge the distance with loved ones as well as why we need them. 

Read it: On the beach at Jekyll Island.

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The Talking Bone by Rene Denfeld (Harper, July 26)

Ruby Spencer’s work freeing wrongly-convicted prisoners from death row has earned her the nickname “The Exonerator.” Her newest case involves Mitchell Brown, a young Black man from her hometown of Chinook, Oregon, who was accused of murdering a local woman shortly after arriving in Pickleweed, Georgia. Ruby’s already difficult job is all the harder because Mitchell is set to be executed in two weeks. 

Racing against the clock, Ruby’s search brings her back and forth across the country — from the grounds of an abandoned Oregon poorhouse to a Georgia salt mine housing police archives. But the more she digs, the more she wonders if Mitchell’s case could be the key to solving a more personal and much bigger mystery.

This book carries an earnest anti-death-penalty sensibility and an empathy for people in prison unusual among thrillers, and Denfeld spends lots of time orienting readers to the legal and political norms, as well as to the reality of death penalty exoneration cases. At times, the amount of information, along with Ruby’s almost Christlike level of self-sacrifice and empathy, reduces dramatic tension in a genre that depends on it for momentum.

Despite the weaknesses resulting from its overt messaging, The Talking Bone makes good use of the natural tensions and stakes of its subject matter. The case is compelling, with the hard time limit of Mitchell’s fast-approaching execution effectively ratcheting up the pressure right to the end.

Read it: By firelight in a Blue Ridge cabin.

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Rachel Wright has a Ph.D. from Georgia State University and an MA from the University College Dublin, both in creative writing. Her work has appeared in The Stinging Fly and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel.