Here are a few warm-weather book suggestions. But first, some seasonal reading tips: 1) For best comprehension, do not start drinking in earnest before 1 p.m. 2) Do not read large hardcovers while lying on your back—sudden dozing may cause you to drop the volume on your face or the face of a loved one nearby. 3) Do not read while piloting watercraft. 4) Do not use salad or uncooked meat of any kind as a bookmark. Enjoy, and be safe!

Demon Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks
(By Juliet Eilperin. Pantheon)
The Jaws movie franchise gave us sharks that were destructively obsessed with humans, but in reality the relationship is the other way round. As Washington Post environmental reporter Juliet Eilperin maps out in Demon Fish, people have always been fixated on these great predators, from ancient times when they were worshipped as gods, to the present day, when their allure makes them a prized (but rapidly dwindling) ingredient of expensive soup and high-end sportfishing trips. Eilperin explores shorelines around the world, from the Bahamas and South Africa to Hong Kong and West Papua, to portray the largely invisible “monsters of the sea” as “a source of revelations about a foreign world that abuts ours”, a world we are now blindly ravaging.

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead
(By Sara Gran. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Californian crime-and-thriller writer Sara Gran launches a new series of mysteries featuring a drug-loving and detached private investigator whose soul is as tortured as any in the hard-boiled genre’s long history, but whose methods are entirely her own. Moving through the battered streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Claire DeWitt hunts for a prominent district attorney who has gone missing. But it’s not all about piecing together mundane clues: DeWitt has become one of the world’s foremost detectives not by pounding the pavement but by using intuitive techniques laced with the paranormal, such as consulting the I Ching and interpreting prophetic dreams. She’s also a devotee of a long-dead French author, whose aphorisms on the art of detection create a unique foil for this tale.

The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism
(By Deborah Baker. Graywolf)
There’s turning over a new leaf in life, and then there’s dropping the book you’ve been given and picking up a radically different one. Seventy-seven-year-old Maryam Jameelah of Lahore, Pakistan, is the adopted daughter of seminal Islamist leader Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi and one of the world’s most renowned female proponents of conservative Islam. Until her 29th birthday, however, she was Margaret Marcus of Larchmont, New York, raised in a secular Jewish home and plagued by bouts of mental illness. The esteemed Brooklyn-based biographer Deborah Baker tracks this astonishing transformation, using a collection of Margaret/Maryam’s letters to her parents as a portal into the complex conflict between the Islamic and western worlds.

You Think That’s Bad
(By Jim Shepard. Knopf)
If fiction’s greatest trick is convincing you that you’ve entered other minds and seen worlds unlike your own with a kind of firsthand familiarity, then Jim Shepard is one of the art form’s master magicians. This collection of short stories—the fourth from the Massachusetts-based author—shows yet again that boundaries of time and place are no match for Shepard’s freakishly flexible, research-stoked imagination. In the first of the 11 pieces, operatives work on black-budget military projects in present-day Los Alamos. In another, a Dutch engineer living in the near future faces the disintegration of his country as ocean levels rise. Further on, a 15th-century French page recounts the bloodthirsty exploits of the aristocrat he worked for. At each turn, Shepard builds and inhabits whole vocabularies, maintaining his long-held standing as one of the most intelligent and empathetic writers going.

Young Readers

The Secret Keepers
(By Paul Yee. Tradewind)
The Vancouver-raised, Toronto-based author returns to the haunted terrain he explored in his 1996 Governor General’s Award–winning story, Ghost Train. Once again, Yee travels back in time to a Chinese community on North America’s West Coast, where the spirits of the dead are afoot. In the wake of the 1906 earthquake that has devastated San Francisco’s Chinatown, young Jackson Leong encounters not only the ghost of his brother, who was killed by the quake, but that of an unknown woman. It’s Jackson’s task to find out why these phantoms are restless. A journey into history and the shadows at its edges.

Blood Red Road
(By Moira Young. Doubleday Canada)
This first installment in a planned three-part epic by New Westminster native (and now U.K. resident) Moira Young sweeps across a postapocalyptic landscape starved of water and choked by dust clouds. Eighteen-year-old Saba and her family have built an isolated homestead on the edge of a vanishing lake, but it’s destroyed in a single stroke when a violent sandstorm brings four armed figures on horseback, the henchmen of a distant warlord, who kill Saba’s father and kidnap her beloved twin brother, Lugh. So begins Saba’s quest to rescue him, driven on by her deep streaks of anger and ferocity. Love, desperation, courage, the end of the world—all things that should make fans of Suzanne Collins’s hugely popular Hunger Games trilogy feel darkly happy here.