Your summer forecast is sunny with a chance of brain drain. Avoid meltdown with these smart, new books.

Sweltering Dramas
In David Klein’s Stash (out July 27), a suburban mom buys pot on a lark, sticks it in her car, and gets into an awful crash. The plot thickens once the fuzz is on her tail and her husband gets embroiled in a shady workplace scheme.

You can feel the pressure mounting in Lily King’s Father of the Rain, which follows an 11-year-old girl forced to choose allegiance in her parents’ messy divorce. On one side: a conservative alcoholic dad. On the other: a Waspy liberal mom. Melancholy truth unfolds.

Comic Downpours
A rascally redhead is sent to boarding school when she sparks a romance with a strange neighbor boy in debut novelist Justin Kramon’s Finny. What starts off like a funny episode of Freaks and Geeks spins into a full-blown coming-of-age adventure as we follow her through college and adulthood.

The humor in Belgian author Helen Grant’s The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (out August 10) slyly emerges from the twisting-turning story of a girl who goes missing in a remote German village and the awkward preteen who seeks her. It’s Brothers Grimm on hallucinogens.

Love Advisories
The New Yorker editor Ben Greenman’s collection of interwoven short stories, What He’s Poised to Do, revolves around the lost art of letter writing. Each tale, including that of an aging man’s memory of a law office love affair, takes just a few minutes to read but stays with you long after.

Pure escapist fun hatches in Stiltsville (out August 3). Susanna Daniel’s novel covers 25 years in the lives of a couple living in a South Florida housing community built on wood pilings. Turns out, the characters’ relationships are as volatile as the hurricane-prone weather.

For more sizzling page-turners, check out our summer reading list.

Photos: Courtesy of The Crown Publishing Group; Courtesy of Random House; Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers