I REMEMBER YOU by Brian Freeman

she clearly wasn’t his, as he showed when he took her virginity and then left her for beautiful Taylor Spells. Now karma has turned on Zack and Taylor, whose 6-year-old daughter, Skye, has disappeared. After leaving Everglades City for Miami specifically to get away from Zack, Noa is in no mood to go back. But her parents, who run the Bramble Rose B&B, wear her down, and soon she’s left South Beach for her hometown to help with the search for Skye. Zack’s so distracted that it’s hard to get close to him, and Taylor is still Taylor. That leaves Jamie Camden, Zack’s best friend in high school and more recently Skye’s godfather, and Noa finds herself warming to him once again. One big obstacle stands in the way of their renewed friendship, though: Noa’s announcement that she’s been cured of congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis even though no one ever is cured of CIPA. If it doesn’t sound so bad to be unable to weep or sweat or feel pain, rest assured that Finlay has pointed out dozens of ways Noa’s disorder will have consequences that range from inconvenient to life-threatening. Be warned: Some of her adventures may be even more trying to her readers, like the second time she gets knocked out and locked up.

A so-so mystery upstaged by the determined heroine it’s clearly designed to showcase.

THE MANY DAUGHTERS OF AFONG MOY

Ford, Jamie Atria (384 pp.) $28.00 | Aug. 2, 2022 978-1-9821-5821-7

Covering 250 years, Ford’s new novel traces the way states of consciousness involving extreme moments of pain or joy interconnect seven generations of Chinese women.

Embedded images—airplanes, ships, waves—and the occasional ghostly vision highlight how these women’s lives reverberate as the focus moves back and forth in time. In 1942 China, Faye Moy, a nurse in her 50s who’s working with American forces, feels an eerie connection to a dying young pilot in whose pocket she finds a newspaper photograph of herself as a teenager and a note in her own handwriting that says, “FIND ME.” Finding oneself and/or one’s soul mate becomes the throughline of the book. Faye’s great-grandmother Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman in America, dies in childbirth after a short career being exhibited as a curiosity in the 1830s. Faye’s mother, Lai King (Afong’s granddaughter), sails to Canton after her parents’ deaths in San Francisco’s Chinatown fire of 1892. Onboard ship she bonds with a young White boy, also an orphan, and nurses him when contagion strikes. When Faye is 14, she has an illegitimate daughter who is adopted and raised in England. Presumably that girl is Zoe Moy, who, in 1927, attends the famously progressive Summerhill School, where a disastrous social experiment in fascism destroys her relationship with a beloved poetry teacher. In 2014, Zoe’s emotionally fragile granddaughter, Greta, loses both her skyrocketing tech career and the love of her life at the hands of an evil capitalist. While several earlier Moys receive aid and guidance from Buddhist monks, Greta’s troubled poet daughter, Dorothy, turns to both Buddhism and radical scientific treatment to uncover and understand how past crises, emotional, physical, and spiritual, are destabilizing her current life in 2045. Expect long treatises on anamnesis, quantum biology, and reincarnation before traveling with Dorothy’s adult daughter in 2086.

Ford raises fascinating questions, but a rushed ending too neatly ties up the answers in an unconvincing, sentimental bow.

I REMEMBER YOU

Freeman, Brian Thomas & Mercer (348 pp.) $24.95 | Aug. 9, 2022 978-1-5420-3508-8

Fasten your seatbelts. Fiendish Freeman has engineered another peerlessly bumpy ride.

It’s not until after the worst Fourth of July imaginable—her boss fires her, her

WORDS WITH… Emily Henry

The Beach Read author is back with another summer treat for and about Book Lovers

BY MARION WINIK

Devyn Glista-St. Blanc Studios

Emily Henry was the successful author of four YA novels when she tried her wings in the adult market with 2020’s Beach Read. Things took off, to put it mildly, and she followed up the next year with another New York Times bestseller, People We Meet on Vacation. On the eve of the publication of Book Lovers (Berkley, May 3), which our reviewer deemed “a warm, sparkling romance brimming with laugh-outloud banter, lovable characters, and tons of sexual tension,” Henry, 31, sat down for a Zoom conversation about her road to the proverbial beach. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with your decision to cross into adult fiction. How did that come about? When I started writing Beach Read, I didn’t think I would be pursuing publication—I saw it as a fun escape from writer’s block I was having elsewhere. But as I got into the story, I realized that I was actually writing another coming-of-age novel, only the characters were in their late 20s and early 30s—as I was at the time—instead of their teens. They are finding their place in the world, solidifying their identities, shedding parts of their personalities that once seemed permanent—just as I was. Then I had the semihorrifying realization that this was just going to keep happening for my entire life. I think I’ll end up writing coming-of-age stories about 65-year-olds.

As a 64-year-old, I wouldn’t doubt it. So—why Beach Read? What did that shorthand mean to you? A “beach read” is all about compulsive readability, a hook that’s so powerful you just keep your nose in your book despite any and all stimuli around you— your job, your real life, and even your vacation just fade into the background. If it doesn’t have a beach, that’s no big deal. But if it doesn’t have an irresistible question that must be answered, then it’s probably not a beach read.

Who are some of your favorite beach read authors? Elin Hilderbrand is one go-to.

You remind me of her! You put similar types of fun decorations on the story—food, clothes, bars and restaurants, books and authors, even exercise, which you both seem to think is a gas.

Good thing, because Elin Hilderbrand makes me starving. Whenever I write food descriptions, I think of her as the gold standard. I also love Emma Straub; her new book, This Time Tomorrow, is amazing. Many of my beach reads are thrillers. I just read this [holds up The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas]—Mexican Gothic meets Rebecca, a truly sumptuous period novel. Such flair!

Tell us where the idea for Book Lovers came from. After People We Meet On Vacation, I was brainstorming day and night. I came up with a long list of three-word premises that added up to…nothing. Then I started watching made-for-TV Christmas movies and homed in on this one recurrent character, the hardened city woman who’s the foil to the real romantic lead. The one the guy needs to let go to find true love and purpose. I started wondering, what about this woman who storms off the elevator, throws her purse at her assistant, and starts barking orders? What would make a character like that? What would her happy ending be?

Your version of her is Nora, a literary agent, a classic shark whose secret dream is to be an editor. Are those professions you know firsthand? Oh, no. But I love books about the publishing industry, and fortunately, both my current and former agents, [the latter] who’s now a writer herself, were totally up for helping me. Both of them patiently read along throughout the whole process.

Nora’s love interest, Charlie, is an editor, too. My idea was to pair Nora with someone who was exactly like her. Instead of opposites attract, I wanted to see if I could create tension with two people who are basically the same. Could I make that as fun as two people who have nothing in common?

For some reason, I was picturing Luke from Gilmore Girls the whole time.

I love that comparison! I am part of a subgeneration that was basically raised by Nora Ephron and Amy Sherman-Palladino, and I think a lot of my writing sensibilities come from those two writers. As I got older, I also discovered the earlier roots of that work. I am obsessed with [the 1945 film] Christmas in Connecticut—I keep pitching my editor a modern take on it—and I think the Thin Man movies are a perfect early example of that sharp and quick banter I’m always going for.

I see those influences in the banter between Nora and Charlie—also between Nora and her sister, Libby. Your banter is top-notch. That means so much to me! I don’t read bad reviews, but my mom does, and she told me they claim my dialogue is unrealistic, no one talks like this in real life. She was fuming. “You and your friends, that’s exactly how you sound!” You know that magic feeling when you meet someone who has the same sense of humor as you, and the conversation just goes like a tennis match? It doesn’t happen every day, but it does happen.

Though much of Book Lovers is set in a small town—a kind of Stars Hollow if we’re talking Gilmore Girls—it’s really more of a love letter to New York City. Yes! In those same made-for-TV movies, the city is often a symbol of materialism and capitalism and everything bad. But Nora loves it. It’s where she grew up, and it’s her home. She explains, for people who have never had that emotional connection to a city, why it means so much to her. I’m from Cincinnati, but at the end of undergrad I did a residency in New York and fell in love with the place.

I wrote this book during the pandemic; like everyone else, I was in seclusion. So I just stuffed the book with candy, filled it to the brim with everything that I missed. Like being in a crowded, exciting city. Coffee shops. Neighborhood places where everyone knows you.

And hot men! Both Charlie and his cousin, Shepherd, are smokin’. You must have had fun making up this story. I did! So much of the book is about how we tend to view the world in dichotomies, and I really enjoyed creating two potential romantic leads who are so different, then discovering the surprising ways they’re similar.

What is your journey from here? Is it beach reads all the way? You know, the books that made me want to be a writer were A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle and The Giver by Lois Lowry. As a child, this was the first time I understood that a book could change the way that you see the world. Even if what I’ve been up to lately looks very different, that’s still the goal. But right now, I think I need beach reads as a writer the way a lot of us need them as readers.

Marion Winik is the author of The Big Book of the Dead. Book Lovers received a starred review in the March 1, 2022, issue.

boyfriend texts to dump her for her roommate, and she’s pronounced dead after drinking and fighting too much at a reception—that Las Vegas copywriter Hallie Evers’ real problems kick in. When she wakes up some time after Dr. Reed Smith, another guest at the reception, miraculously restarts her heart, she starts being plagued by vivid, disturbing dreams that feel “more like memories…someone else’s memories.” She has vivid, detailed recollections of Boston, a city she’s never visited. The name of Tyler Reyes, the founding CEO of Boston-based medical device developer Hyppolex, seems as familiar as if they’d met, despite the fact that they clearly haven’t. Her dreams about the death of a young woman named Savannah make her feel as if this is her sister, though she’s an only child. A pair of assailants nearly kidnap her before they’re run off, and Todd Kivel, the private eye who appears out of nowhere to rescue her, gets killed for his trouble. Clearly Hallie’s being tracked by unknown parties plotting some deeper game, and many readers will figure out what that game is before Freeman confirms their suspicions. But this big reveal isn’t the climax; it’s only the pivot to a new set of mysteries Hallie steps into when she leaves Las Vegas for Boston and begins to sense what an extravagant set of crimes, past and present, underlie the dreams that don’t feel like dreams at all.

Wheels within wheels within wheels, cunningly intermeshed by a master who sweats every nightmarish detail.

ROBERT LUDLUM’S THE BOURNE SACRIFICE

Freeman, Brian Putnam (384 pp.) $28.00 | July 26, 2022 978-0-593-41985-4

Jason Bourne confronts a strange and frightening enemy in the latest entry in the series created by Ludlum and written by Freeman. Let’s face it, Bourne is never going to learn the secrets of his past. In this latest episode, he reunites with Canadian journalist Abbey Laurent, who plays a key part in this fast-moving thriller. He had left her behind two years earlier because “when you’re with me, you’re in danger….I’m a killer.” For her part, she is known in her profession as “one of the few people who calls out the bullshit on both sides.” A woman is stabbed to death near the Potomac, and Abbey wants to know why. The killing is the work of the Pyramid, a secretive organization that ostensibly fights lies and misinformation around the world but does so with lies of its own. She asks too many questions about the murder and runs afoul of the organization, which ruins her career by planting false stories about her on social media. But worse, the Pyramid wants her dead. “It doesn’t matter what’s true and what’s a lie,” she’s told. In Iceland, Bourne silently awaits his prey, an evil dude named Lennon who enjoys sharing a surname with the late Beatle, so much so that he even has an evil girlfriend named Yoko. Hero and villain meet several times, each missing or simply passing up