What to read on vacation?

GENTLE COMEDY The stories of Xenia Dragunskaya are love at first sight. You enter into them like into water, in one fell swoop, gulping air, and, emerging, dive into another. Characters, as if random – Moscow neighbors, acquaintances and colleagues – can mix with Chicago ones, like coins in a traveler’s purse; the time of the 2010s can rush to the 80s and back within one paragraph; Humor that is embracing and tender can be black humor, or not humor at all. The heroes of a small comedy about Russian Camembert suffer for no reason from an inexplicable Russian longing, but the author (unlike Chekhov) does not get angry – he is touched and teased. Perfect to read with an apple and a blanket on a rainy summer day.

Edited by Elena Shubina, 352 p., 2015

Elixir of Love by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt

EROTIC Is it possible to be friends after a stormy romance, to return a departed passion and restore a relationship that has exhausted itself? Louise and Adam broke up, but refuse to accept it, out of habit or out of love? How to make a choice if, like Alexander, you don’t know who to choose? Women are an inexhaustible storehouse of deceit and stubbornness; is it good or bad? French writer and playwright Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt offers two responses in the novel and play, which are included in the new book – both answers are witty and mischievous.

Translation from French by Anna Efremova, Alexander Brailovsky. Azbuka, 192 p., 2015

“The Mystery of the Pigeon Pie” by Julie Stuart

DETECTIVE A purely English detective story, made with purely English humor, where arrows of irony fly in the tradition of purely English detective stories, and at the same time in other traditions of Victorian England. Briton Julia Stewart longs for Her Highness Alexandrine, daughter of the late Maharajah and heiress to his unpayable debts, to divert suspicion from her maid and solve the murder of General Bangshot at Hampton Court (the former residence of the English monarchs). In addition to arsenic poisoning, there will be funerals on elephants and castle ghosts, soot with milk as an ideal hangover cure and a bunch of sentimental love stories, a happy ending and two elegant jokes per line. Books of such subtle charm are addressed to the reader with good taste and a sense of humor, but this one has become a bestseller: surprising and gratifying.

Translation from English by Mikhail Abushik. Azbuka, 416 p., 2015

NOSTALGIA Narine Abgaryan, laureate of the “Manuscript of the Year” award and the children’s “NOS”, writes prose for children and adults, serious for children, for adults – fabulous, magical, poignant, based on the stories of her childhood. Her new novel – about a mountain village in Armenia, a quiet life and strange, funny, touching and beautiful inhabitants – is full of bright, almost Pushkinian sadness, where there is much more light.

AST, 319 p., 2015

“Reader” by Paul Fournel

IRONY Goncourt laureate Paul Fournel wrote a short, very funny and light novel about the bison of the publishing business Robert Dubois and his complex relationship with a fashionable innovation – a smooth silent reader that does not wrinkle, does not get dirty, does not rustle and does not smell of anything. But Robert Dubois is used to living in a completely, completely different way … Start with this novel, read it in two hours, say, on an airplane – and then everything that was postponed to read in the summer, on vacation, when your hands reach and the strength and time appear, will be read in a week.

Translated from French by Tatiana Istochnikova. Sinbad, 224 p., 2015

“France to your heart’s content. In Search of Lost Tastes” J. Baxter

This is not a recipe book or a travel book. This is real French art de vivre. John Baxter is an Australian who has been living in Paris for 20 years and writing about its streets, customs, people and how he, John Baxter, walks these streets and lives in this city. The story is told in the tone of your good friend, who has long been tired of the delicacy of soups decorated with violets, and yearns for a simple French menu of a hundred years ago: crayfish, snails, consomme, lamb and ox roasted whole on a spit. The genre is defined as culinary prose. Of course, this is prose: appreciate the soft humor at least the titles of the chapters “First find the broth” and “First get the king.” The reading was extremely relaxing.

Corpus, 320 p., 2015