Think back to the summer of 2012. No matter where you went — the beach, the pool, the park — you saw the same book dotting beach towels and peeking out of bags and backpacks. Clad in a sleek black jacket, its title and author a slash of blood-red ink, Gillian Flynn's ‘‘Gone Girl'' was in the very ether, what everyone was reading and everyone was talking about: the ‘‘it'' book of summer.
What, exactly, is a summer ‘‘it'' book? It's usually written by someone you've never heard of before. It appears out of nowhere, often having been published quietly the previous winter or spring, and has spent months gathering steam — hand-sold at bookstores, passed from one friend to another, recommended by librarians. Then one day, all of a sudden, it's the book you see wherever you look.
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