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Lesser-Known Lit: Seeking Summer's Hidden Gems

Illustration: A lighthouse casts its beam on a book in the water.
Harriet Russell

I know, I know. You've already started tearing through Bring Up the Bodies, pre-ordered Canada and — since you pretend to have read the first few massive volumes of his LBJ bio — uploaded Robert Caro's latest history lesson to your Kindle. Spoiler: The pres dies in the end.

There, now you can have some fun with gems that haven't headlined The New York Review of Books. While it's certainly gratifying to lock eyes with a fellow reader enjoying one of the season's biggies, I love to pass along books that no one has heard of — it's like telling a secret. Good for the book, better for your reader's ego.

Of course, it's hard to say what gets a book to the top of everyone's reading list and what keeps another hidden on a back table in your bookstore (though I've been known to annoy the folks at Barnes & Noble by rearranging things). Halfway through making this list of hidden gems, I realized that Jess Walter's fantastic Beautiful Ruins is a gem that no longer qualifies as hidden. Nothing would gratify me more than for this entire list to be outdated by August — so get reading.

Among the treasures here are an Edwardian mystery-drama, an acidly funny evisceration of the newspaper biz, a hot Southern thriller and a slightly ridiculous though entirely gratifying romance to get you through your long, hot commute. Oh, and one extra gem hiding in plain sight.

Copyright 2024 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Barrie Hardymon
Barrie Hardymon is the senior editor for NPR's Investigations team. In 2020 she was the editorial lead for election coverage and ran NPR's pop-up talk show during the early days of the coronavirus called The National Conversation from All Things Considered. Before that she was senior editor at NPR's Weekend Edition, and the lead editor for books. You can hear Hardymon on the radio talking about everything from Middlemarch to middle-grade novels, and she's also a frequent panelist on NPR's podcasts It's Been A Minute and Pop Culture Happy Hour. She went to Juilliard to study viola, ended up a cashier at the Strand and finally got a degree from Johns Hopkins' Writing Seminars, which qualified her solely for work in public radio. She lives and reads in Washington, D.C.

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