heat wave; The summer's best books sizzle with glamorous women, intrepid adventurers, and family secrets.

Byline: Megan O'grady

When you're heading off to a friend's beach house, you need a gift book as stylish as she is. A gorgeous choice would be Lempicka: The Artist, the Woman, the Legend (Flammarion), by Emmanuel Breon, on the Polish-born painter who became the Greta Garbo of Art Deco. Then there's Heidi Ardizzone's An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene's Journey from Prejudice to Privilege (W. W. Norton), about J.P. Morgan's singularly chic librarian, and Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist (Columbia University Press), by Lois Gordon, a worthy biography of the Jazz Age beauty who mesmerized Pound and Eliot. Helen O'Neill's Florence Broadhurst: Her Secret & Extraordinary Lives (Chronicle Books) fetes the Australian decorating diva whose iconic patterns are collected by the likes of Marc Jacobs. And Jeweled Garden: A Colorful History of Gems, Jewels, and Nature (Vendome), by Suzanne Tennenbaum and Janet Zapata, offers a splendiferous array of botanical-inspired sparklers, from Catherine the Great's cherry-shaped diamond earrings to a gilded hazelnut comb by Lalique.

For your own bedside table, three travel-minded memoirs are guaranteed to transport you. Rosemary Mahoney thrillingly rows her way across Egypt in Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff (Little, Brown), while book editor turned amateur sailor Mary South comically pilots a 30-ton trawler from Florida to Sag Harbor in The Cure for Anything Is Salt Water: How I Threw My Life Overboard and Found Happiness at Sea (HarperCollins). Back on dry land, Anthony Doerr tours the Eternal City with two newborns in tow in Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World (Scribner).

Equally tantalizing are some of this season's food books. Marco Pierre White's The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef (Bloomsbury) is a score-_settling memoir by Britain's original ...