The local author of “The Girls from Corona del Mar,” Rufi Thorpe is back with a new novel, “Dear Fang, With Love.” On a trip to Lithuania, a father longs to reconnect with his estranged daughter in the wake of her bipolar diagnosis. In the process both characters unearth more than they anticipated … In a summer filled with highly anticipated debuts, Natashia Deón’s Civil War era novel, “Grace,” is among the most visceral and wrenching. A multi-generational story of black mothers and daughters surviving unspeakable violence and degradation during the darkest period of our nation’s history … “Listening to Prozac” author Peter D. Kramer throws his hat back into the ongoing debate about the effectiveness of antidepressants in “Ordinarily Well: The Case for Antidepressants.” This time he questions the entire enterprise of meta-analysis and the credibility of clinical trials. A practical takeaway: Doctors treat people, not trial participants … Don’t be fooled by the cheery rainbow-colored cover, “Here Comes The Sun” has been dubbed the anti-beach novel of the summer by The New York Times. Nicole Dennis-Benn uses a provocative cast of female characters to present the shadow side of resort life in Jamaica … Antonio García Martínez will probably be banned from Silicon Valley for life thanks to his exposé “Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley,” but in the meantime he’s delivered an unprecedented look at the tech industry’s inner workings, with a keen eye for its self-delusion and contradictions … Speculative fiction meets suspense in Blake Crouch’s “Dark Matter,” a nonstop narrative about an abducted physicist who wakes up in an alternate reality. Delicious scientific quandaries abound, and the very nature of identity and free will are brought into question.
