Why do book publicists automatically assume that anyone who goes to the shore to sit in the sun and smell the sea - and read - is a helium-brain?

Indeed, Google "beach read of the summer" and not too many hits for Thomas Pynchon. I personally take affront because, last August, reclining in the sand with a cooler of Abita Restoration Ales, I chortled and breezed through Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit," a ludicrously detailed history of professional wrestling's Von Erich family.

Either way, are you ready for one of 2013's Big Beach Reads? Please welcome author Beatriz Williams and her "A Hundred Summers," a tale of vanished love and twisted secrets in a fictional version of Westerly - all against the backdrop of the Hurricane of 1938.

Pick up a copy - and meet Williams when she signs copies of "A Hundred Summers" Friday at the Other Tiger Bookstore in Westerly. Then head for the beach!

- RICK KOSTER

Meet Beatriz Williams, 5-7 p.m. Friday, The Other Tiger Bookstore, 90 High St., Westerly; free, copies of the book available for sale; (401) 596-2200, othertiger.com.