THE GOLDEN HOUR
by Margaret Wurtele

In the summer of 1944 in Tuscany, Giovanna Bellini, the daughter of a wealthy aristocrat and vineyard owner, has just turned seventeen and is on the cusp of adulthood. War bears down on her peaceful little village after the Italians sign a separate peace with the Allies—transforming the Germans into an occupying army. But when her brother joins the Resistance, he asks Giovanna to hide a badly wounded fighter who is Jewish. As she nurses him back to health, she falls helplessly in love with the brave and humble Marco. They pledge their love, and then must fight a real battle against the Nazis.

THE NIGHT SWIMMER
by Matt Bondurant

In a small town on the southern coast of Ireland, Fred and Elly Bulkington, newly arrived from Vermont, encounter a wild, strange land shaped by the storms of the North Atlantic, as well as the native resistance to strangers. Elly takes the ferry out to a nearby island where anyone not born there is called a “blow-in.” To the disbelief of the locals, Elly devotes herself to open-water swimming, crossing unseen boundaries that drive her into the heart of the island’s troubles—the mysterious tragedy that shrouds its inhabitants and the feud between an enigmatic farmer and a powerful clan that has no use for outsiders.

SPRING
by David Szalay

James is a man with a checkered past—sporadic entrepreneur, one-time film producer, almost a dot-com millionaire—now alone in a flat in Bloomsbury, running a shady horse-racing-tips operation. Katherine is a manager at a luxury hotel, a job she’d intended to leave years ago, and is separated from her husband. The novel unfolds in 2006, at the end of the money-for-nothing years, as a chance meeting leads to an awkward tryst and James tries to make sense of a relationship where “no” means “maybe” and a “yes” can never be taken for granted.