New Book Roundups

Women Abroad
In timelessly romantic Venice, the parallel stories of two troubled wives play out a century apart in the novel The World Before Her, by Deborah Weisgall. One woman is Marian Evans (aka the British novelist George Eliot), in Venice on her 1880 honeymoon with a husband 20 years her junior; the other is a sculptor in town accompanying her much-older husband on a 1980 trip. A love letter of another sort, Cassie Knight's memoir, Brazzaville Charms, paints a portrait of a little-known country, the Republic of Congo, where she spent years working in humanitarian aid.

Summer Islands
Beach-set beach reads include In the Hamptons, Dan Rattiner's celebrity-filled memoir of 50 years living in Montauk and editing the popular and quirky local newspaper Dan's Papers, and Moon Shell Beach, Nancy Thayer's Nantucket-set novel about two girlhood friends trying to repair their damaged relationship years later.

Viva Italia
Fuel your summer vacation fantasies with the images of cypress-lined terraces, antiques-graced sitting rooms, and creamy marble bathtubs in Italian Hideaways, a large-format, photo-filled guide to 30 private villas and smaller hotels, by Meg Nolan (with photography by David Cicconi). Passion on the Vine, Sergio Esposito's memoir of "food, wine, and family," also celebrates Italy. Esposito is the owner of Italian Wine Merchants in New York City, but grew up in Naples and returns often to his native country.

Behind the Headlines
>China is squarely in the Western spotlight these days, but it was dismissed and ridiculed in the mid-20th century until a Cambridge University professor named Joseph Needham began to publish his revelatory multi-volume series Science and Civilisation of China. The eccentric academic and his infatuated adventures in China are recreated in Simon Winchester's enthralling biography, The Man Who Loved China. In the debut novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes, author Mohammed Hanif provides his own darkly comic take on the 1988 plane crash that killed Pakistan's president, General Zia. In the compelling Jerusalem: City of Longing, Cambridge University professor Simon Goldhill tackles the archaeological and architectural history of this long-revered and -embattled city.