Since the days of the ancients, the dog days of summer have promised heatwaves, bug bites and quantities of sweat no antiperspirant can contain. For once, why not spare yourself its indignities? There are more than enough new book releases in August to keep readers contentedly antisocial and entertained until the humidity breaks. This month brings riveting novels about dogs, stars (the Hollywood kind), small towns and characters with bigger woes than just sweat stains.
Scribner
Etna by Paul Yoon Like a certain hero of Greek myth and big-screen blockbuster, the Etna of Yoon's title is the veteran of a catastrophic war, scarred in body and mind, dogged in pursuit of an improbable homecoming. Only, unlike Odysseus, Yoon's hero and narrator is, quite literally, a dog. And the book bearing his name is no ancient tome but a slim, spare novel set in an unsettlingly familiar landscape. Don't let the book's length mislead you, though: Etna's odyssey also deserves the epithet "epic," and the characters who populate it have lived on in my mind long past the book's final line.
Random House
Sunrise by Téa Obreht Obreht's fourth novel finds her again treading new ground. After setting her wildly popular debut The Tiger's Wife in a Balkans suffused with myth and magic, the author turned in subsequent books to the Old West and a city redolent of New York. This time, she weaves a characteristically ambitious plot from three narratives revolving on the same mysterious spot in the Great Plains – albeit in different eras, ranging from today(ish) to the early 20th century, when charismatic traveler-cum-local hero Anton Vargas sets the whole mystery in motion.
