WASHINGTON — Congress is out of town for the rest of August, which means it’s the perfect time to head to the beach, kick back on the sand and crack open a 640-page biography of a 19th-century senator.

If your idea of a “beach read” is a book so hefty you could use it as a doorstop (or an anchor for your sun umbrella), then you have some good options this summer.

Or try a fast-paced novel that takes you far from the halls of the Capitol — but not too far, since our list includes a politician-turned-spy and other congressional characters.

“Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation” by Zaakir Tameez (June 3, Henry Holt)

If the only thing you know about Charles Sumner is that he was caned on the Senate floor, you need this book. Once a household name, the abolitionist with a “wild mane of chestnut hair” helped define the early Republican Party. After delivering his blockbuster “Crime Against Kansas” speech and enduring a brutal revenge beating, the Bostonian traveled in search of recovery, crashed at Alexis de Tocqueville’s house, kept watch at Abraham Lincoln’s deathbed and sparred with President Andrew Johnson during Reconstruction.

“Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America” by Sam Tanenhaus (June 3, Random House)

Conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. gets a thousand-page treatment in this authorized biography. Best known for founding the National Review in 1955, Buckley was also a PBS talk show host, New York mayoral candidate, nemesis of Gore Vidal, supporter of marijuana decriminalization and defender of Joseph McCarthy. Since his death in 2008, admirers and detractors have wrestled with his legacy — and wondered how he might have viewed the current Trump era.

“The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb” by Garrett Graff (Aug. 5, Avid Reader Press)

As the world marks the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, this new account weaves together hundreds of voices, from American teens who helped enrich uranium to Japanese survivors. A former Politico Magazine editor, Graff relies on diaries, letters, news reports and documents, much like his previous books about D-Day and 9/11. And he’s not the only one revisiting atomic warfare and warning of present-day dangers. Another book out this summer is Iain MacGregor’s “The Hiroshima Men” (July 8, Scribner).

“The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda” by Nathalia Holt (July 1, Atria)

Two presidential sons with a taste for big-game hunting go to great lengths to vie for their father’s approval. This nonfiction account follows Ted and Kermit Roosevelt on their 1929 expedition through the Himalayas to bag a panda for Chicago’s natural history museum.

“The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America” by David Baron (Aug. 26, Liveright)

What is it like on the surface of Mars? For a period in the early 20th century, a man named Percival Lowell managed to convince some Americans that the red planet was crisscrossed with “canals” constructed by intelligent beings. But as this book shows, when “we look to Mars for answers, what we often find are mirrors of ourselves.” (After you’re done, maybe check out Christian Davenport’s “Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race,” set to publish in September.)

“Madame Queen: The Life and Crimes of Harlem’s Underground Racketeer, Stephanie St. Clair” by Mary Kay McBrayer (June 3, Park Row)

She was a powerful force behind the Harlem numbers game in the 1920s, but Stephanie St. Clair didn’t always get her due. This book blends research and creative nonfiction to bring her story to life, starting with her journey from the West Indies as a teen. As a “policy banker,” St. Clair took on Tammany Hall and built sprawling networks of her own.

“Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future” by Dan Wang (Aug. 26, W.W. Norton)

Wang offers a new look at what’s driving trade and tech wars between the U.S. and China. While one is a lawyerly society, he argues, the other is an engineering state, bringing “a sledgehammer to problems both physical and social” — and their rivalry can no longer be described with the political vocabulary of decades past.

“Pariah” by Dan Fesperman (July 22, Knopf)

A congressman who was once a comedian flames out in disgrace, before getting an unexpected offer from the CIA: Can he help them infiltrate an Eastern European country with a raunchy and authoritarian leader? The country (and everything else) is fictional, but this novel finds some timely targets for its satire.

“Coded Justice” by Stacey Abrams (July 15, Doubleday)

The voting rights activist and former Georgia politician is also a novelist, and this time around she’s sending her protagonist Avery Keene into the shadowy realm of artificial intelligence and medicine. Describing her creative process in an interview with NPR, Abrams said she started out with two questions in mind: “How does AI work in our world?” and “Why are we so bad at health care?”

“Sheepdogs” by Elliot Ackerman (Aug. 5, Knopf)

Skwerl and Cheese have seen some covert action in their time, but now they’re trying to repossess a private luxury jet, all while dealing with dubious handlers, personal demons and a politician who once sold used cars. What could go wrong? You may be streaming this one before long, since Apple Studios already won a bidding war to adapt the novel, as Deadline reported. The author is a Marine Corps veteran who also co-wrote “2034” and “2054.”

“Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home” by Stephen Starring Grant (July 8, Simon & Schuster)

A marketing consultant loses his job during the pandemic, becomes a rural mail carrier and learns all sorts of things about life, suffering, patriotism and the U.S. Postal Service. It’s not exactly “Hillbilly Elegy,” but for the author of this profane and funny memoir, delivering the mail in Appalachia was the “deepest trip into the heart of the American experience that I have ever had the grace to take.”

©2025 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.