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Summer, and the reading is breezy.

First, Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets (2009). I was a  fan of his 2013 Beautiful Ruins, so I picked up one of his earlier novels. I’m glad I did. Walter is a deft storyteller; I fall easily into the worlds he creates.

Key on that 2009 publication date, because in “…Poets” that’s the place Walter puts us, post-crash and well into the Internet age.

Matthew Prior is a business reporter who quits his job to create a Web site for financial news told in blank verse. At the same time, his hot wife — bored, taking care of their children — maxes out their credit cards, bing-buying on-line. When we meet them, Prior is broke and unemployed and his wife, stripped of credit, is e-flirting with her high school boyfriend. They’re about to lose their home and their marriage.

A late night trip to 7-Eleven for milk puts Prior in the company of young drug dealers, who turn him on to extremely potent weed. Could they get him more? To save his home, Prior becomes first a pot dealer and then a government informant. Nutty? Yes, deliciously so. Also: Sad, funny, spot on.

I can’t recall who pointed me to Claire Fuller’s Our Endless Numbered Days, a beautifully written, deeply unsettling tale of a father and daughter who flee London for a hut in the German woods. How they survive is fascinating. How it all ends is disturbing, haunting. It took me days to get these people out of my system.

Kent Haruf’s Plainsong (1999) is a favorite of mine. He died last year and left a novella, Our Souls at Night. What a lovely read.

Widowed and lonely, Addie Moore proposes to neighbor Louis Waters, also widowed, that they spend their nights together. They do, and set tongues wagging in their small Colorado town. Their grown children object, but the two carry on. Their nighttime talks reveal their lives: the death of Addie’s daughter, Louis’s affair with a fellow teacher.

When Addie’s young grandson comes to live with her, the three become a family, playing baseball, going camping, adopting a dog. Nothing happens, everything happens. Perfectly told.

I discovered Sadie Jones with her latest, Fallout, set in 1970’s London theater. Her Small Wars (2009) is the story — with twists and turns — of a military officer, his wife and children, his colleagues, their friends and families, and the battle for Cyprus during World War 11.

The toll of war is fully, smartly, surprisingly realized. Bravo, Sadie Jones.