A title wave of beach paperbacks Whether you’re contemplating a trip to an exotic beach, or planning to spend the warm weather months in the back yard, you’ll want to bring along that most necessary of seasonal accouterments. No, not sunscreen. We’re talking summer reading. Especially the easy-to-tote paperback variety. A hardcover sensation, John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story, literally spent years on bestseller lists. This month the 1994 title at last debuts in soft cover (Vintage, $12, 0679751521). Never mind that Clint Eastwood’s movie version has come and gone. If you haven’t read this account of life and death and murder Savannah-style, replete with its parade of beguiling eccentrics, you’re in for a mint-julep-flavored treat. Southern accents and sensibilities also abound in Rebecca Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Flashing back and forth from the 1990s to the 1960s, the book explores Siddalee’s efforts to understand her seemingly incomprehensible mother, the Louisiana magnolia Viviane, and her three chums. Booted out of a Shirley Temple lookalike contest when they were just six, the girls spent their college years blazing a bourbon-splattered trail, buffered by the motto (from a Billie Holiday tune), smoke, drink, don’t think. As much a paean to sisterhood as it is a mother-daughter tale, Ya-Ya is a kind of follow-up to Wells’s much darker first novel, Little Altars Everywhere, (HarperCollins, $13, 0060976845), and is being developed for a movie by Bette Midler’s production company. Yet another girly story is recounted in Bridget Jones’s Diary (Penguin, $12.95, 014028009X). Helen Fielding’s book which originated as a column in a London newspaper is the first-person odyssey of the thirtysomething Bridget, who is obsessed with such ’90s issues as learning to program her VCR, finding Mr. Right, and, of course, weight loss (in one year she manages to lose 72 pounds . . . and to gain 74). The producers of the quirky Four Weddings and a Funeral plan a movie version of the quirky Bridget.

Memoirs of a Geisha: A Novel, by first-time novelist Arthur S. Golden, may also be headed for the screen with Steven Spielberg’s involvement. For now, enjoy it in print (Vintage, $14, 0679781587), as the geisha Sayuri details her metamorphosis from peasant child she was nine when her widowed father sold her to a geisha house to her prewar rise as a leading geisha and on to her role as mistress to a power-broker. Golden spent nine years researching and writing this intricately detailed saga, which takes us on a memorable, eye-opening journey.

And last but not least, we mustn’t forget Margaret Mitchell’s monumental (and perennially best-selling) classic, Gone with the Wind (Warner Books, $7.99, 0446365386).

Hollywood journalist Pat H. Broeske is also a biographer who has chronicled the lives of Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley.

Frank O’Connell had been struggling with his lot in life since he married Moira. As a young lawyer with a bright future, beautiful wife and son, and a partnership in his wealthy and powerful father-in-law’s practice, Frank seemed to have everything. Then something changes. He begins searching for that one thing that defines a person’s powerful sense of self-worth. He could no longer find it at home or at the office. So he gives up his perfect life to become a court-appointed attorney at the beck-and-call of drug-users and petty criminals. After experiencing life at the opposite end of the spectrum, however, Frank isn’t so sure he has made the right decision.

Welcome to Stephen Horn’s debut legal thriller, In Her Defense. As a former prosecutor for the Justice Department, Horn has lived the stuff of which the very best legal thrillers are made. He’s quick to point out there are many things he can’t reveal about his career. But what he can glean from his experience, he does in this incredible story of one man’s struggle to bring justice into the world, and maybe even find himself along the way.

Horn’s lead character is pondering his life-changing decision one day as he enters the cellblock that houses one of his clients another defendant in a drug case. That’s where Frank meets Ashley Bronson, a gorgeous socialite in prison for the murder of former Agriculture Secretary and long-time family friend, Raymond Garvey. Ashley decides she wants Frank to plead her case. She is convinced that Garvey’s actions drove her father to commit suicide. Before the trial ends, Frank will reveal to Ashley the truth about her father, his invention, and a life-long friend, and some shocking history about the United States government.

Horn’s main characters are at odds, at times, with issues of right and wrong. Some are naive to the ways of the justice system; others, long since jaded. But they all blend to make this story riveting. We want Frank to save Ashley and we want him to save himself, too. After all, if he can, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us. Sonya Beasley, a native Mississippian, is hopelessly devoted to her husband Scott, and her hamster Penelope.

Lily’s Crossing (3.5 hours), performed by Mia Dillon, is a Newbery Honor Book for children ages 8-12, but it’s the kind of audio that even parents will enjoy. It’s set in the summer of 1944, at Rockaway Beach, where Lily watches troop ships begin their trek across the Atlantic — one, perhaps, carrying her beloved father — and where she meets a boy her own age, a refugee from Hungary, whose parents were killed by the Nazis and whose sister is somewhere in France. They become constant companions, sharing their fears about loss and separation, the war and the future, discovering that love and friendship make a world of difference in a very troubling world. Author Patricia Reilly Giff tells this story with simplicity, honesty, and a refreshingly clear understanding of childhood.