It’s too hot. Too hot, baby. Gotta run for book covers. Gotta run for shade.

With the mercury nudging 100 degrees day after day here in North Carolina, we are looking for the cold comfort of a good book. And by “cold comfort,” we mean COLD. As in ice cold. Chilly. Freezing. Negative temperatures, take us away…

The Remedy for Love by Bill Roorbach: When the “Storm of the Century” threatens western Maine, Eric closes his office early and heads to the grocery store. In line ahead of him, an unkempt and seemingly unstable young woman comes up short on cash, so Eric offers her twenty bucks and a ride home. Trouble is, Danielle doesn’t really have a home. She’s squatting in a cabin deep in the woods: no electricity, no plumbing, no heat. Eric, with problems of his own, tries to walk away, but finds he can’t. Fending off her mistrust of him, he gets her set up with food, water, and firewood, and departs with relief. But when he climbs back to the road, his car is gone, and in desperation he returns to the cabin. As the storm intensifies, these two lost souls are forced to wait it out together.

Deeply moving, frequently funny, The Remedy for Love is a story about the secrets revealed when there is no time or space for anything but the truth.

The Coldest Night by Robert Olmstead: Henry Childs is just seventeen when he falls into a love affair so intense it nearly destroys him. To escape the wrath of the young girl’s father, Henry joins the Marines, arriving in Korea on the eve of the brutal battle of the Chosin Reservoir—the defining moment of the Korean War. There he confronts an enemy force far beyond the scope of his imagining, but the challenges he meets upon his return home, scarred and haunted, are greater by far. From the steamy streets of New Orleans to the bone-chilling Korean landscape, award-winning author Robert Olmstead takes us into one of the most physically challenging battles in history and, with just as much intensity, into an electrifying, all-consuming love affair.

A Cold Spring by Edra Ziesk: Deep in the Vermont mountains is a small town, rustic and isolated, with cold, clear streams and dense, green forests. It’s a place that Nell Maye remembers fondly, where her grandparents lived and where she spent summer vacations as a child. A place where not much happens.

But when Nell and her husband Billy decide to leave the mess of their lives in New York City for this peaceful New England town, they realize that it’s not exactly as they imagined. Under the placid surface is a place simmering with tension.

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick: Rural Wisconsin, 1909. In the bitter cold, Ralph Truitt, a successful businessman, stands alone on a train platform waiting for the woman who answered his newspaper advertisement for “a reliable wife.”

But when Catherine Land steps off the train from Chicago, she’s not the “simple, honest woman” that Ralph is expecting. She is both complex and devious, haunted by a terrible past and motivated by greed. Her plan is simple: she will win this man’s devotion, and then, ever so slowly, she will poison him and leave Wisconsin a wealthy widow. What she has not counted on, though, is that Truitt — a passionate man with his own dark secrets —has plans of his own for his new wife. Isolated on a remote estate and imprisoned by relentless snow, the story of Ralph and Catherine unfolds in unimaginable ways.

The Cage by Audrey Schulman: This ALA Notable Book is the story of a nature photographer on an otherwise all-male documentary expedition to the Canadian tundra. From within a small iron cage, this small, often fearful woman is challenging herself to face the planet’s largest land carnivores in the bone-aching cold of an unforgiving terrain. Before long, disaster strikes, and she must draw on her every strength in order to survive. “This riveting, assured first novel is part survival story, part coming-of-age tale. Some of Schulman’s scenes are truly terrifying. People will talk about this book.”–Publishers Weekly.