It’s July and everyone on Nantucket will be searching for their favorite beach read of the

summer, and a worthy contender this season is The Shampoo Effect by Jenny Jackson. From the author of Pineapple Street, this book should be packed in everyone’s beach bag and atop every reader’s beach towel. If you are missing an Elin Hilderbrand summer novel this year, The Shampoo Effect is the book for you. It introduces a group of friends with underlying and simmering tensions that build and build and build (aka the shampoo effect) as the summer and plot progress. Every chapter is told from a different perspective in the friend group, and each dramatic event and plot twist keep the pages turning. You’ll see yourself and your own relationships in this story, but ultimately be thankful that the drama isn’t yours to deal with, just yours to soak up and binge on your favorite beach this summer.

The Bidens spend every Thanksgiving on Nantucket, and for that, I feel a connection. How fascinating it was to get into the mind of former First Lady Dr. Jill Biden and see through her own eyes her View from the East Wing and her time in the White House. She became first lady at a complicated time in American history, at the height of COVID-19 and right after the January 6 insurrection, inheriting a country perhaps as divided as it ever has been. She made history as the first ever first lady to hold an outside job while her husband was in office, continuing to work as a professor at a nearby community college.

I will be in conversation with former First Lady Dr. Jill Biden discussing View from the East Wing at the Nantucket Dreamland on Saturday, July 18, at 11 a.m. nantucketdreamland.org

In 1997, Alex and Ana vanished for 36 hours. When they returned, the two six-year-olds described what sounded like an alien abduction. From there came instant fame, interviews, TV appearances and a friendship formed by their shared experience, but what really happened? Now it’s the present day and a mysterious transmission being coined “The Signal” is alarming the world at large and reopening old wounds for Alex and Ana. Voyagers is Meg Charlton’s debut novel, and it may sound like a story too far out in outer space for you, but it’s grounded in themes of memory, friendship, identity and forgiveness. It puts the terrestrial in extraterrestrial. For a book that talks of aliens, it’s a very human novel with a lot of heart. Reminiscent of one of my favorite novels, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin, this coming-of-age tale is one I will look at fondly years from now on my bookshelf. Reading experiences like these are why I love writing this column, introducing you to a great book by a new voice you can’t stop talking about.

Who would have guessed that a true story about a game of chess could be so thrilling, tension- filled, twisty and page-turning. Ben Mezrich, bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and The Antisocial Network, sets the scene with vigor. It’s September 2022 and 19-year-old American chess prodigy Hans Niemann has defeated world champion Magnus Carlsen. A scandal ignites when Carlsen accuses Niemann of cheating. With classic Mezrich magic, we get a dramatic, well-researched narrative account based on hundreds of interviews, first-person sources and documents. While reading this cinematic story, you feel like you’re already watching the film that is currently in production. But this story dives into much more than just this singular chess game. We learn of this centuries-old game’s evolution into a high-stakes, billion-dollar industry and join in Mezrich’s fascination with brilliant minds who play in the gray area between right and wrong. It’s pure genius.

Take a trip to Italy this summer in Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer. The author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Less is back on shelves with a novel about a young man who answers an ad to be an assistant and archivist to the Baronessa. Known as Coco, the Baronessa is an eccentric woman of 92 whom you won’t soon forget. And so begins this charming tale, set in the Italian countryside, where our main character meets a milieu of princesses, handymen, boar hunters, nuns and local wildlife, and does his best to catalog Coco’s possessions, figure out her personality and understand her past. The book is funny and the perfect story to get lost in this summer.

For readers of Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea and David Grann’s The Wager , make sure to check out The Wreck of the Mentor by Eric Jay Dolin. This is the true story of the American whaleship Mentor, which wrecked in 1832 on a remote reef in the western Pacific. It’s a saga of cultural collision as the 11 surviving seamen encounter the Indigenous people of the Micronesian archipelago of Palau. It’s brilliantly researched by Dolin, who is hailed as the “master of the maritime narrative” (Booklist) and an “expert literary steersmen” (The Washington Post). I appreciate Dolin’s approach to history and the passion for his subject matter. You sail away to another time and place to try to understand what really happened, to get the full story from all its real-life characters of this notable shipwreck. It’s the perfect summer read for Nantucket’s sailing and history enthusiasts, of which there are boatloads.