The Vacationers

Straub's second novel (after Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures) is perfect vacation reading, combining a warm-weather locale with complicated family drama. The Post family is leaving Manhattan for their long-planned trip to Mallorca, an intended celebration of both Franny and Jim's 35th wedding anniversary and daughter Sylvia's high school graduation. They've rented a house where they will be joined by family and friends: their son, Bobby; his girlfriend, Carmen; and Franny's best friend, Charles, and his husband, Lawrence. If their plans didn't involve other people, Franny and Jim might have called this vacation off, as family tensions have been growing over the hushed-up reason for Jim's recent forced retirement. As it is, corralling all these people into one house for a two-week stretch unleashes more emotional upheaval than could have been predicted. The arrival of a handsome local who is supposed to be tutoring Sylvia in Spanish only fuels the fire. Secrets and longings are revealed, and relationships shift into new configurations—with unexpected hopefulness in the story's conclusion.