All the books I read on vacation

One of my essential summer ingredients is good books. Here are all the ones I read on vacation.

A poet, his war correspondent wife, their daughter, and a pair of their friends arrive at a villa in the south of France for what’s meant to be a restorative summer. But when Kitty Finch, a fragile young woman with a penchant for walking around naked, emerges from the villa’s pool on day one, the trip threatens to undo them all.

Adina is born in Philadelphia, sure, but she’s not from here. She’s an alien, sent to Earth as an observer to transmit regular reports back to her home planet about human behavior. As her human life proceeds, she catalogs Earth’s oddities with the bemusement of an outsider. Over decades, her transmissions grow more personal, and her human attachments harder to separate from her mission, until she has to decide where, and with whom, she truly belongs.

A young civil servant is offered a strange job: serve as “bridge” to a time refugee—a man pulled from a doomed Arctic expedition in the 1800s and resettled in present-day London. Her task is part social work, part cultural tutoring, part something she can’t quite name. As she guides him through supermarkets, smartphones, and the Tube, an attraction grows that threatens her job and maybe the fabric of time itself.

It’s 1519, and Hernán Cortés has arrived in the city of Tenochtitlan, the bustling capital of the Mexica empire. Over the course of one tense day, Montezuma and his court navigate the presence of these strange, armored visitors playing a game of cat and mouse. Told in shifting perspectives, the novel produces an alternate version of history, showing how a few different moves might have changed the course of the world.