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11 aboard!" Summer books are our ticket to escape. Khaled Hosseini's sprawling family saga, And the Mountaim Echoed (Riverhead), journeys from Kabul to San Francisco to the Greek island of Tinos. The lives of a divorced mom and her son intertwine with the mystery of a missing boy in Caroline Leavitt's riveting novel & This Tomorrow (Algonquin). Julie Kavanagh ships us into 19th-century Paris and into the boudoir of Parisian courtesan Marie Duplessis, The Girl Who Loved Camellias (Knopf). Philipp Meyer's far-flung novel The Son (Ecco) surveys the vast range of the American West. Jeannette Walls jumps off the memoir train and hitches a ride on the novel form with The Silver Star (Scribner). The hero of Abigail Tarttelin's novel Golden Boy (Atria) is anything but precious. Kevin Kwan's novel is populated with Crazy Rich Asians (Doubleday).

Also this month: Daniel James Brown rows crew with The Boys in the Boat (Viking) to the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Civil War scholars and historians band together in The New York Times: Disunion (Black Dog & Leventhal), under the command of editors Ted Widmer, Clay Risen, and George Kalogerakis. Mario Batali passes the wooden spoon (and Crocs) to his sons, Benno and Leo Batali, in the family-friendly Batali Brothers

ELISSA SCHAPPELL