Arturo Perez-Reverte has earned loyal fans the world over with his intellectual thrillers, such as Queen of the South and The Club Dumas. CAPTAIN ALATRISTE will expand his audience to lovers of historical adventure, while still maintaining the trademark wit and melancholy his readers have come to love. This is the perfect summer read for anyone who wants to keep their mind as active as their body.

Today's corporations, news media, education departments—and, perhaps most troubling, politicians—speak to us and to each other in cliché, impenetrable, lifeless babble. In Death Sentences, Don Watson takes up the fight against it: the pestilence of bullet points, the dearth of verbs, the buzzwords, the weasel words and cant, the Newspeak of a kind Orwell could not have imagined.

When Simon Doonan remembers growing up he finds no Hallmark moments—most of his memories are notably nasty. His mother’s dentures flying from her mouth as she sneezes, then skittering across the floor? An image that still brings a smile. In his subversive memoir, NASTY: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints, he revisits his defiantly eccentric family, showing us how nasty memories can good ones.

“In hazed heat, mid-September, walking north from Chicago’s Loop, telling myself I was exploring the new life, I dogged as much for tonic, gin. A sign swung beside a basement door, in, out, mirage: RECORD PALACE: J ZZ. Inside I found Acie.” This first novel by poet Susan Wheeler has the heat and the music of Chicago’s recent past in its words and in its soul.

Kids, are you looking for the perfect summer job? Something that will earn you some money, but still let you spend plenty of time at the beach with your friends? Have you considered becoming a pirate? Read the adventures of Hiccup, his dragon Toothless, and his crew as they search for his reknowned ancestor’s hidden treasure to pick up helpful hints on HOW TO BE A PIRATE.