Books to Keep on the Bedside Table

Summer is quickly approaching, and with the season comes summer reading time!

Fill your bedside table with these new books for adults, recommended by your Diane Bondi, a librarian at the Merrick Library.

The Ruins of Us by Keiga Parssinen

Saudi-born author Keija Parssinen’s stunning debut offers the intricate, emotionally resonant story of an American expatriate who discovers that her husband, a Saudi billionaire, has taken a second bride, which becomes an emotionally turbulent revelation that blinds them both to their teenaged son’s ominous first steps down the road of radicalization. The Ruins of Us tells a powerful story that is refreshing and entertaining.

Before I Go To Sleep by S. J. Watson

In this suspenseful, psychological thriller, Christine, whose memory is damaged by a long-ago accident, wakes each morning with absolutely no memory of what happened then or since. The stranger in bed must explain to her daily that he is her husband and the backstory of her life. Christine begins treatment by a neurologist who helps her to remember her former self through journal entries until inconsistencies begin to emerge, raising disturbing questions. Are her memories true or false? Whom can she trust? Is she in danger?

By Blood by Ellen Ullman

In this dark and brilliant novel, a professor takes an office downtown, the walls are thin and he's distracted by voices from next door — his neighbor is a psychologist. He begins to hear about the patient's troubles. The professor is not just absorbed but enraptured. And the further he is pulled into the patient's recounting of her dramas, the more he needs the story to move forward. The patient's questions about her birth family have led her to a Catholic charity that trafficked freshly baptized orphans out of Germany after World War II.

Armed with the few details he's gleaned, the professor takes up the quest and quickly finds the patient's mother in records from a German displaced-persons camp. But he can't let on that he's been eavesdropping, so he mocks up a reply from an adoption agency the patient has contacted and drops it in the mail. Through the wall, he hears how his dear patient is energized by the news and so is he. He unearths more clues and invests more and more in this secret. His research leads them deep into the history of displaced-persons camps, of postwar Zionism, and—most troubling of all—of the Nazi Lebensborn program.