Photo by Kristen McDonnell

Looking for a good read this summer? Here are some suggestions from the editors of the New York Times:

New York Times' Editor's Choice
June, 2008

WHILE THEY SLEPT: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family, by Kathryn Harrison.
Harrison's account brings moral clarity to the dark fate of the family of Jody Gilley, who was 16 when she survived a rampage by her brother in 1984.

PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE: Profiles in Backroom Power, by John Harwood and Gerald F. Seib.
Sharp vignettes and portraits of "fixers" show how business really gets done in Washington.

THE DRUNKARD'S WALK: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow.
This breezy crash course intersperses probabilistic mind-benders with profiles of theorists.

DRAWING THE LINE AT THE BIG DITCH: The Panama Canal Treaties and the Rise of the Right, by Adam Clymer.
A case study of how one issue played out during the scorched-earth political campaigns of 1976-80.

A WRITER'S PEOPLE. Ways of Looking and Feeling: An Essay in Five Parts, by V. S. Naipaul.
Naipaul looks at some of the writers who have influenced him in his bracing new memoir.

THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE, by Salman Rushdie.
In Rushdie's novel of marvels, a traveler from the city of the Medicis claims a blood relationship with the Mughal ruler Akbar.

MORALITY TALE, by Sylvia Brownrigg.
The protagonist of this deadpan novel, a put-upon second wife in an undernourished marriage, conducts a love affair of the unconsummated kind.

THE BOAT, by Nam Le.
In the opening story of Le's first collection, a blocked writer succumbs to the easy temptations of "ethnic lit."

BREATH, by Tim Winton.
Surfing offers this darkly exhilarating novel's protagonist an escape from a drab Australian town.