A few samples of summer's book bounty

It may be on a beach, in a mountain cabin or in the backyard hammock — OK, maybe in an air-conditioned family room — but whatever the location, summer's the perfect time to relax and pick up a book.

Here are a few volumes, varying from a thoughtful exploration of family secrets to fluff, Hollywood-style, that may pique your interest.

"Annie's Ghost: A Journey into a Family Secret," by Steve Luxenberg, HyperionBooks, 401 pages, $24.99 (nf)

Secrets, begins Luxenberg's nonfiction book, "have a way of working themselves free of their keepers."

Luxenberg, a Washington Post senior editor who guided two Pultizer Prize-winning series, was confused by his sister's phone call in 1995. It ended up detonating some of the fundamental truths of his family history.

Beth, his elderly mother who was in failing health, had always claimed to be an only child. But she had hidden the existence of a sister, Annie, who was physically and mentally handicapped. Beth had been institutionalized as a child, she had told Luxenburg's sister.

But that turned out to be lie, too.

After Beth's death, Luxenberg employed his skills as an investigative journalistic to try to uncover the why behind his mother's denial of Annie. But Luxenberg unearths much more — more family secrets. Beth had raised her children to be honest, yet basic facts of her life, including her name, had been a lie.

And his aunt, Annie, hadn't been sent to an institution at 2; she was 21.

He followed the paper trail of his family, often running smack into the bureaucracy of privacy laws, and traveled to his childhood home and his family's origins in the Ukraine.

Luxenbergs' search for his family roots is intriguing and moving as he struggles to set the secrets free.

"Return to Sullivans Island," by Dorothea Benton Frank, William Morrow, 387 pp., $25.99 (f)

A beach novel at the beach, "Return to Sullivans Island" is the sequel to Frank's 1999 "Sullivans Island," a novel set in lowcountry South Carolina.

Drawing on the beauty of the South's enchanting coast, Frank uses her descriptive powers to place the reader in the landscape of shimmering blue water that seems to be "scattered with shards of crystal and diamonds" and the heavy air that causes beads of moisture to form on the upper lip.