Summer Substance; Headed for the beach? These may not be light reads, but they definitely are riveting. And don't forget the sunscreen.(The Delivery Room; Theft: A Love Story; District and Circle; The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox)(Book review)

Byline: Tara Pepper

Summer reading doesn't have to be all smut and fluff. It can make you mourn, yearn, empathize and even think. When fall comes around, you'll not only be rested, but wiser. Some choice vacation picks:

The Delivery Room

By Sylvia Brownrigg

The stream of patients who traipse in to see psychoanalyst Mira Braverman transform her London consulting room into a vivid theater for dramas about birth, death and war. As Brownrigg's lucid novel opens in the mid-1990s, Mira's patients use her as a blank canvas on which to explore their finely wrought inner worlds.

Speaking to her much-loved husband, Peter, a translator of Russian literature, Mira gives her patients nicknames to protect their confidentiality. Their preoccupation with birth gives the book its title--"the Mourning Madonna" suffered a miscarriage late in her pregnancy; "the Aristocrat" struggles with IVF and her philandering husband. While Mira devotes hours to pondering the intricacies of her patients' lives, noises from the other side of the consulting-room wall--where Mira lives with Peter--begin to impinge on her thoughts. Peter falls ill with cancer, and the sound of his coughing disturbs her patients, who begin to wonder about Mira's personal life. Disturbing reports of war from her native Serbia penetrate her mind.

Slowly, the cornerstones of Mira's life begin to crumble. Brownrigg does not flinch--in passages both difficult and beautiful to read--from charting the unraveling of her life with Peter as his disease progresses. When he returns from the hospital, Mira relishes what intimacy is left, rather than shrink from it as a painful reminder of what she is losing: "Now that Peter was home Mira could feed him, and that was a small, good deed."