Adult Summer Reading 2024: Books that have food or drinks on the cover

Meet the picture-perfect Bird family: pragmatic Meg, dreamy Beth, and towheaded twins Rory and Rhys, one an adventurous troublemaker, the other his slighter, more sensitive counterpart. Their father is a sweet, gangly man, but it's their beautiful, free-spirited mother Lorelei who spins at the center. In those early years, Lorelei tries to freeze time by filling their simple brick house with precious mementos. Easter egg foils are her favorite. Craft...

"The acclaimed, bestselling author--winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize--tells the enthralling story of how an unexpected romantic encounter irrevocably changes two families' lives. One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly--thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining...

"Aisling and Maya's connection is unexpected. Maya has recently returned to the University of Edinburgh for her second year, confident in her place there and in her first proper relationship with her childhood best friend, Ethan. Finally, she is one of them, those happy couples, self-satisfied in the knowledge that they are one half of something solid. Aisling is a first-year student from Ireland, ready to leave her controlling family behind. But...

"What if you could take a vacation from your marriage? A married couple decides to give it a shot in this fun, adventurous novel by Lian Dolan, the popular author of The Sweeney Sisters and Lost and Found in Paris"--

She still has all the time in the world to be who she wants to be.... Doesn't she? Olivia Strauss is turning thirty-nine. No major milestone. She still considers herself young. At least young enough to assume she has decades (emphasis on the plural) to check the unchecked boxes of her life's to-do list. Ballerina? Too late. But not too late for poet. Or for reigniting the romantic spark in her marriage, spending more quality time with her son, switching...

Returning home to Pennywhistle, Tennessee, for her beloved daddy's funeral, PJ Spoon, abandoning her PhD program at Vanderbilt, impulsively takes a job as a fry cook at the Chickie Shak, where she meets and falls for Boof, a talented singer-songwriter searching for her birth mother.

"Part memoir and part social critique, Drinking Games is about how one woman drank and lived--and how, for her, the last drink was just the beginning. On paper, Sarah Levy's life was on track. She was 28, living in New York City, working a great job, and socializing every weekend. But Sarah had a secret: her relationship with alcohol was becoming toxic. And only she could save herself. Drinking Games explores the role alcohol has in our formative...

"When her estranged mother dies, Stella is left with an unusual inheritance: a one-way plane ticket and a note reading "Go to Paris." But Stella is hardly cut out for adventure; a childhood trauma, and her mother's negligent parenting style, have kept her strictly confined to her comfort zone, even in adulthood. When her boss encourages her to time off, Stella resigns herself to honor her mother's wishes, even if a spontaneous trip to Paris is the...

"From Wharton professor and author of the popular One Useful Thing Substack newsletter Ethan Mollick comes the definitive playbook for working, learning, and living in the new age of AI. The release of generative AI--from LLMs like ChatGPT to image generators like DALL-E-marks a new era. We have invented technologies that boost our physical capabilities and others that automate complex tasks, but never, until now, have we created a technology that...