 To-do lists, bucket lists, grocery lists: They all carry a whiff of judgment, the burden of expectation. Only the summer reading list shrugs its shoulders and says, “Maybe you’ll complete me, maybe you won’t. Who cares?” So, go ahead, use our picks to pile your list past the point of reason. When that perfectly lazy August afternoon rolls around and you still have endless possibilities to choose from, you’ll be glad you did. —David Adams, adult reviews director |
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Buff Soul
Moa Romanova, trans. from the Swedish by Melissa Bowers (Fantagraphics)
Swedish cartoonist Romanova tags along with a musician friend—they’re both supercool, gorgeous neurotics with substance abuse issues—on a road trip misadventure across the U.S. in this graphic memoir drenched in neon Memphis Milano aesthetic. Days of binge-drinking, drugs, and sex ultimately lead to a confrontation with the past. The Eisner winner’s pop art narrative makes for an addictive sweet-and-sour treat.
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32 Days in May
Betty Corrello (Avon)
Reeling from a lupus diagnosis, Nadia Fabiola returns to her Jersey Shore hometown to regroup. Also in town laying low after a PR crisis is television star Marco Antoniou. As the pair embark on what they agree will be a no-strings-attached summer fling, Corrello captures both the struggle of adjusting to major life changes and the joy of new love. The result is a sizzling and deeply emotional contemporary.
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Among Friends
Hal Ebbott (Riverhead)
One of the best ways to kick off a relaxing weekend in the country is by reading a novel about a nightmarish weekend in the country. Ebbott’s tale of two New York families and their fraying friendship begins with minor injuries, physical and psychological, during their October getaway and builds to an explosive reckoning.
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Blood in the Water
Tiffany D. Jackson (Scholastic Press)
Though Brooklynite Kaylani initially feels out of place at her family friends’ large Martha’s Vineyard home, sweet treats, scenic beaches, and new friends raise her spirits—until the mysterious death of a local teen sets the community on edge. In her exhilarating middle grade debut, Jackson utilizes chilling prose to deliver an accessible thriller packed with suspenseful mystery, atmospheric storytelling, and rich examinations of the island’s Black history.
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Get Real, Chloe Torres
Crystal Maldonado (Holiday House)
When high schooler Chloe obtains three tickets to see her favorite boy band in concert, she persuades former besties Sienna and Ramona to accompany her, hoping that the impromptu road trip from Massachusetts to Nevada—and the summer antics they might get up to along the way—can repair the broken friendship. A queer love triangle adds sizzling rom-com energy to Maldonado’s heartwarming and hilarious novel, which tackles potent themes of transition.
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Summer Reads
Chris Chibnall (Viking/Dorman)
A seasoned detective returns to her hometown and finds it much changed in this utterly gripping British mystery from Broadchurch creator Chibnall. Though the plot is familiar, Chibnall wraps it in authentic atmosphere and populates it with characters who feel like friends.
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The Bewitching
Sylvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey)
In the 1990s, a college student’s investigation into her favorite horror author’s mysterious past turns up strange echoes of the stories her superstitious great grandmother told her in her youth and lands her in supernatural peril. Braiding a classic New England gothic with a tale of bloody witchcraft in 1900 Mexico, the sophisticated latest from bestseller Moreno-Garcia is dark academia at its most chilling and irresistible.
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The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon’s Enduring Impact on America
Mark Whitaker (Simon & Schuster)
This roving look at the many ramifications of Malcolm X’s life and death on American culture has lots of fascinating threads, from the publishing industry to hip-hop, and features a particularly excellent overview of the summer after Malcolm’s assassination when protesters and artists around the country were galvanized by his slaying to demand change. Readers will be swept up by Whitaker’s sprawling saga.
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Cranky, Crabby Crow (Saves the World)
Corey R. Tabor (Greenwillow)
A stoic-seeming bird on a wire engenders unexpected adventure in this wonderfully surprising picture book. After the corvid rejects a series of friendly creatures, a sudden signal kicks off a high-octane plot turn that brings them all together for a dazzling show. Clever pacing, bone-dry humor, and laugh-out-loud visuals distinguish this entertaining read from Tabor, whose ability to conjure up a fully fleshed-out scenario in just a few strokes contributes significantly to the action.
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Baldwin: A Love Story
Nicholas Boggs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
James Baldwin’s writings cut to the quick of the American Dream’s many contradictions with rare lyricism and precision. Literary scholar Boggs promises in this major reevaluation of Baldwin’s life to illuminate how his personal relationships with artists, collaborators, and lovers shaped his outlook. I can’t wait to dig in. —Marc Greenawalt, reviews editor
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Behooved
M. Stevenson (Bramble)
Wit, whimsy, and a stunning white horse animate Stevenson’s adorable romantasy debut. The arranged marriage between Lady Bianca of Demaria and Prince Aric of Gildenheim is imperiled when, on their wedding night, Aric is cursed to spend each day as a horse, only returning to human form at night. As they set out to break the spell (with Bianca riding on Aric’s back), quirky worldbuilding, simmering political intrigue, and slow-burning romance make the pages fly.
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Harmattan Season
Tochi Onyebuchi (Tor)
Told with Raymond Chandler swagger, this gripping fantasy noir combines an edge-of-your-seat mystery with a searing indictment of colonialism. World Fantasy Award winner Onyebuchi’s magic-infused West African setting comes vividly to life as private investigator Boubacar takes on an impossible case against a background of increasing political turmoil. The hardboiled tone hits just right, and the fast pace keeps the pages flying.
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The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland
Michelle Young (HarperOne)
Young’s inspiring tale features a clever art historian who kept track of the Nazis’ art thievery right under their noses. Paris museum curator Rose Valland had to smooth-talk her way through dangerous situations and connect with French Resistance fighters while keeping the paranoid Nazis occupying her museum off her back, an adventure which Young relays in thrilling style.
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Kill Creatures
Rory Power (Delacorte)
Breakneck pacing catapults readers into Power’s psychological thriller, in which a missing teen resurfaces, to the surprise of her murderer. A year after Nan kills her best friend Luce during a moonlit trip into Saltcedar Canyon, Luce is found alive, with no recollection of her death. As police investigate, a panicked Nan scrambles to obscure the facts in this unsettling and gleefully twisted drama told via Nan’s increasingly troubled—and troubling—narration.
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A Day at the Beach
Gary D. Schmidt and Ron Koertge, illus. by Yaoyao Ma Van As (Clarion)
Via story vignettes that capture the experiences of more than two dozen kids, Schmidt, Koertge, and illustrator Ma Van As present a winsome work about a single day on a New Jersey beach. Beginning at dawn, standalone narratives featuring competitive siblings and tender familial interactions unspool and intersect, culminating in one cohesive tale. Animated full-page illustrations enliven this immersive exploration of freedom, personal transformation, self-expression, and summertime fun in the sun.
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Fireworks
Matthew Burgess, illus. by Cátia Chien (Clarion)
Via onomatopoeic prose and sunny multimedia spreads, Burgess and Chien follow two children through a hot city Fourth of July. Events build until the duo climb a fire escape to a roof, waiting together until brilliant fireworks shower the skies. In this joyous seasonal idyll, the creators eloquently capture the city’s sensations, and establish the children’s day as free and expansive, with plenty of time to savor sounds, sights, and “summer on our skin.”
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The Doorman
Chris Pavone (MCD)
Pavone pivots from his espionage thriller roots with this socially minded pulse-pounder about a security guard at an upscale Manhattan co-op whose knowledge of the residents’ comings and goings becomes vital when an unthinkable crime occurs. Though the breakneck pace makes this easy to wolf down in a single sitting, it has staying power as a trenchant examination of Manhattan’s upper crust.
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The Compound
Aisling Rawle (Random House)
Rawle’s romp takes place on the set of a reality TV show gone wild, one that combines elements of dating shows like Love Island with the intense physical challenges of Survivor. The heroine, a contestant competing for men and other prizes, must choose between true love and ultimate victory. It’s a page-turner with plenty to talk about.
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Black Cohosh
Eagle Valiant Brosi (Drawn & Quarterly)
Brosi grew up in an Appalachian back-to-land commune, where the squabbling adults around him included circus performers. In loping, loose-lined portraits, Brosi depicts himself as a child speaking in scribbles, representing a speech impediment that attracted bullies young and old. Only his flawed mother listens closely enough to understand him—and in a series of unsparingly told moments, it’s the care she gave him that shines through the fractures. I loved this unexpectedly tender work, in all its weird specificity and woundedness. —Meg Lemke, reviews editor
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Gaysians
Mike Curato (Algonquin)
The cast of Lambda award winner Curato’s first graphic novel for adults are as bombastic as the characters of Crazy Rich Asians but live on a Singles budget. A young gay man named AJ moves to Seattle in the early aughts, and though tech bros have pushed queer kids to the city’s outer limits, he makes the best of rainy nights out with his “Boys Luck Club,” a crew of fellow oddballs including a drag queen, a cad, and a gamer.
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Can’t Get Enough
Kennedy Ryan (Forever)
Bestseller Ryan has earned a reputation for writing achingly emotional contemporaries starring nuanced and mature characters—and the stunning standalone third entry in her Skyland series is no exception. It pairs successful entrepreneur Hendrix, who has little time for romance while caring for her mother, who has Alzheimer’s, with billionaire Maverick, who’s determined to be there for her in whatever way she needs. Perfectly balancing realism and wish fulfilment, this hits all the right notes.
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Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
V.E. Schwab (Tor)
Spanning centuries and continents, this epic and utterly transporting fantasy traces the lives of three female vampires, each from a different era, slowly revealing the ways in which their stories are violently and sensually connected. It’s Schwab’s most ambitious—and most explicitly queer—novel yet. I was swept away. —Phoebe Cramer, reviews editor
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The Deserters
Mathias Énard, trans. from the French by Charlotte Mandell (New Directions)
A novel by a writer known for challenging literary experiments might not sound like an obvious choice for a summer reading list, but the adventurous-minded would do well to have this slim volume tucked in their back pocket for a day of immersion in cutting-edge prose. Énard juxtaposes a war veteran’s solitary journey from a near-future battlefield with the story of a cruise ship sailing on 9/11 in this dual narrative, which culminates in a bracing meditation on history’s repetitions.
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Graciela in the Abyss
Meg Medina, illus. by Anna and Elena Balbusso (Candlewick)
A mortal boy is waylaid in his mission to dispose of an enchanted harpoon by the unexpected interference of the weapon’s creator. Now he must team up with a spirit from the bottom of the sea to retrieve the item and protect the living and the dead. The Balbussos’ haunting b&w illustrations render richly imagined elements of magical realism in this introspective high-stakes adventure, Medina’s first fantasy offering.
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Ecstasy
Ivy Pochoda (Putnam)
Pochoda swaps the dusty Southwestern landscape of her previous novel for the Greek island of Naxos, where the recently widowed Lena escapes for a much-needed vacation with her best friend. Once she arrives in Greece, Lena’s wretched son tries to control her every move, so she seeks out the comforts of a mysterious group of women. This brooding feminist fable is best enjoyed alongside a bitter, brightly colored cocktail.
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The Magician of Tiger Castle
Louis Sachar (Ace)
The National Book Award–winning author of Holes makes his adult debut with this transportive, fairy tale–inflected meditation on whose history gets told and who does the telling. Set in a Renaissance-esque fantasy world and narrated by a hapless court magician, it chronicles the forbidden romance between a princess and a scribe. Sachar, writing in his singular and often understated voice, proves his storytelling chops transcend genres and ages.
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The Gathering Table
Antwan Eady, illus. by London Ladd (Knopf)
A child recounts a family’s tradition of gathering around a table under a Spanish moss–draped river birch in this artfully rendered picture book that spans numerous events. Eady movingly traces the occasions, highlighting concepts that the table represents. In acrylic paint, cut paper, and tissue paper, Ladd gives each verdant image impasto-like height, elegantly underlining themes “Of love. Of hope. Of pride. Of freedom” as the family comes together again and again and again.
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Salvación
Sandra Proudman (Wednesday)
By day, 17-year-old Lola assists her mother in healing ailing travelers. By night, she is the sword-wielding vigilante Salvación. Upon learning that a dangerous man possessing deadly magic is heading for her Coloma, Calif., home, Lola must thwart his plans to protect everything she loves. The 1848 setting, and an inventive magic system that draws on Central American history, support weighty themes in Proudman’s swashbuckling, Zorro-inspired historical fantasy helmed by a stubborn yet vulnerable heroine.
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Dianaworld: An Obsession
Edward White (Norton)
After countless biopics, documentaries, and think pieces, readers would be forgiven for assuming there’s little left to say about the Princess of Wales. Biographer White proves skeptics wrong by looking at what she meant to people across the globe. Presenting Diana as a kind of cipher, this probing inquiry doles out profound insights into the nature of fame and celebrity with precision and style.
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Disappoint Me
Nicola Dinan (Dial)
Dinan’s modern love story ranges from London to France as a British trans woman hopes the man she’s dating will turn out to be the one. Her path to happily ever after hits a snag, though, when she finds out her beau did some shady things during his gap year in Thailand. There are no easy answers in this lush and yearning novel.
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Disco Witches of Fire Island
Blair Fell (Alcove)
At the heart of this effervescent romance is an uplifting and earnest ode to found family. In the summer of 1989, Joe Agabian heads to Fire Island, where he grieves his late boyfriend’s death from AIDs, meets a strapping sailor, and is promptly taken in by a group of queer elders who, unbeknownst to him, perform magic rituals to keep their community safe. It’s a moving mix of magical realism and sweet summer love.
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Of Monsters and Mainframes
Barbara Truelove (Bindery)
Dracula, werewolves, and Frankenstein’s monster make their way to outer space in this gloriously gonzo genre-bender. As the sentient spaceship Demeter contends with a barrage of Halloween monsters preying on her human passengers, Truelove gleefully blends pulp science fiction and B-movie horror tropes. The result is pure entertainment.
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Sanskari Sweetheart
Ananya Devarajan (HarperCollins)
Groundhog Day mechanics get a Bollywood spin in Devarajan’s lively rom-com. After dancer Raina sustains a head injury mid-performance and realizes she’s stuck in a time loop, she must relive the humiliating incident—and a devastating breakup—as she struggles to escape the cycle. Alongside exciting depictions of competitive dance, Raina and (ex-?)boyfriend Aditya’s sparkling chemistry propels this charming romp, which bursts with tension, banter, and romance.
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The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year without Sex
Melissa Febos (Knopf)
Febos, a former dominatrix, reflects on being celibate for a year “as an attempt to grow my world” in this liberating self-portrait. She catalogs the benefits and drawbacks of her experiment with clear eyes and a sharp wit, prodding readers to reconsider their own relationships with intimacy in the process.
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The Country Under Heaven
Frederic S. Durbin (Melville House)
As escapist reading goes, this episodic, 1880s-set weird-West odyssey from Durbin ain’t sunny. Durbin, a specialist in pulp-inflected, horror-adjacent storytelling, is fascinated by darker worlds edging into ours, and protagonist Ovid Vesper, a Union soldier shaken to the soul by the slaughter (and a glimpse of the uncanny) at the Battle of Antietam, inhabits an America even more fractured than our own. But at least Ovid—and, by extension, readers—can exorcise some grief and anxiety by hunting down tentacled beasts. —Alan Scherstuhl, BookLife reviews editor
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Next to Me
Daniel Salmieri and Sophia Haas (Rocky Pond)
In an opening collage made of hand-painted paper shapes, a child waves to an adult leading a scooter and two dogs. As the figures head through a city neighborhood, observational text considers the changing landscape (“LINES on the street” prove to be a crosswalk). Succeeding spreads invite readers to look closely, checking what they see against the narrator’s stated perceptions, in Salmieri and Haas’s absorbing picture book look at how a child interprets their surroundings.
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A Hero’s Guide to Summer Vacation
Pablo Cartaya (Kokila)
Young painter Gonzalo accompanies his estranged, curmudgeonly grandfather, a famous author, on a cross-country book tour in Cartaya’s buoyant novel. As the duo travel from Mendocino to Miami in a powder-blue convertible, playful prose and cheeky humor relay their growing bond over their cultural heritage, love of art, shared grief, and family history. It’s a touching intergenerational road trip epic that considers heavy themes through personable narration.
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Marble Hall Murders
Anthony Horowitz (Harper)
The always-meta Horowitz delivers another twisty whodunit that toys with the mechanics of the genre. Susan Ryeland has been hired to edit the unfinished manuscript for iconic fictional detective Atticus Pund’s final case. Buried in the text are clues to a possible real-life murder—which gain urgency when the person who put them there turns up dead. This is a long and deliciously complex book, and Horowitz makes it all go down as easy as a glass of lemonade.
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Simplicity
Mattie Lubchansky (Pantheon)
Comics rabble rouser Lubchansky follows up Boys Weekend with a sci-fi escapade in their trademark combination of bright cartoony art and scathing satire. In 2081, an idealistic anthropology student yearns for an escape from the high-tech big city and ventures out to study a remote hippie commune where free love, gender nonconformity, and psychedelic visions reign. Then dead bodies start to pile up, revealing the hard limits of utopia.
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The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties
Dennis McNally (Da Capo)
The author of the Grateful Dead biography A Long Strange Trip delivers a scintillating overview of 1950s and ’60s bohemianism. With a colorful and expansive cast of characters that spans from pop music to high art, and an engrossing focus on how governments around the world targeted bohemians with censorship, this fresh and nuanced look at the era makes for entertaining and immersive reading.
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The Girls Who Grew Big
Leila Mottley (Knopf)
Mottley’s Nightcrawling was a devastating debut I couldn’t stop recommending, and I have the feeling The Girls Who Grew Big will be the same. The novel centers on a group of teenage mothers, exiled from their communities, who come together to support one another during a huge turning point in all of their lives. I’m excited to see how Mottley challenges conceptions around young motherhood, agency, and society’s demands on girls with compassion and care. —Iyana Jones, assistant editor, children’s books
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Six Wild Crowns
Holly Race (Orbit)
Race’s Queens of Elben series launch invites readers into a lushly imagined alternate Tudor England where Henry VIII is married to all six of his wives at once. As Boleyn navigates her marriage to Henry and fraught relationship with lady’s maid Seymour, who is secretly a spy, she uncovers startling truths about the way magic works in her patriarchal world. Add in an abundance of dragons and plentiful romantic angst, and this is a winner.
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Seven Skies All at Once
Ted Kooser, illus. by Matt Myers (Candlewick)
As two children on facing brick buildings’ rooftops wave across a laundry line, Kooser describes various cloud types as celestial washing hung out by the skies. Altocumulus, cumulus, and more scud into view in thickly stroked art that shows magnificent, billowing shapes dwarfing the buildings and the children. Dramatic visual storytelling from Myers incorporates layers of power and feeling throughout a work of extended metaphor that playfully illuminates cloud forms and their scientific descriptors.
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When Javi Dumped Mari
Mia Sosa (Putnam)
In college, besties Javi and Mari made a promise that they would each get approval of the other’s romantic partners. But now Mari’s getting married, and Javi, who’s been nursing a crush on her for years, hasn’t even met the guy. He’s got six weeks to stop the wedding—leading to both laugh-out-loud antics and heartfelt revelations on both sides. Sosa’s latest rom-com is friends-to-lovers done right.
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Kakigori Summer
Emily Itami (Mariner)
Three sisters retreat to their seaside childhood home in Japan, where the elder two hope to help the youngest weather a crisis. What makes this so alluring is the way in which Itami portrays the sisters’ indulgences of nostalgia, even as they deal with the truth behind their mother’s long-ago untimely death. There’s plenty of refreshing sunshine in this bittersweet tale.
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Into the Bewilderness
Gus Gordon (HarperAlley)
Animal buddies Luis and Pablo enjoy an idyllic existence playing music, admiring nature, and sharing meals with neighbors in their cozy woodland hamlet. Then Luis is invited to an event in the city, prompting the furry BFFs to leave their comfortable routine behind. Enriched by a warm, earth-toned color palette, Gordon’s loose line art relays the duo’s delightful journey in an inviting graphic novel debut featuring new experiences, social-emotional learning, and enduring friendship.
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Murder on Sex Island
Jo Firestone (Bantam)
Comedian Firestone makes her literary debut with this riotous puzzler set behind the scenes of a reality show called Sex Island. Staten Island PI Luella Van Horn gets her biggest case yet when Sex Island’s producers ask her to go undercover as a contestant to track down a missing hunk. Firestone’s confidence, well-drawn characters, and an overarching sense of ridiculousness make this sing.
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The Summer I Ate the Rich
Maika and Maritza Moulite (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Having been born a zombie who craves human flesh, 17-year-old Brielle struggles to manage her appetite alongside medical, financial, and familial challenges, which the Moulite sisters relay using fluid narration peppered with riveting Haitian folklore. Though an internship with Miami’s most powerful white family alleviates some of her burdens, things get messy when Brielle uses her supernatural abilities to balance the scales of class and racial inequity in this biting horror novel.
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Make Me Famous
Maud Ventura, trans. from the French by Gretchen Schmid (HarperVia)
Angst-ridden pop star Cleo Louvent’s narration is as irresistible as her singing voice in Ventura’s gripping novel. The action takes place on an exclusive island in the South Pacific, where Cleo has traveled to work on her next record. There, she reflects on her rise to stardom, and the reader gradually learns the shocking extent of her ruthlessness and the cost of her success.
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The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains
Pria Anand (Washington Square)
Neurologist Anand debuts with a captivating and energetic tour through the mysteries of the mind. Drawing on literature, case studies, and stories from her own patients, she vividly brings to life the brain’s inner workings while revealing how medicine is intimately shaped by narratives—the ones patients tell doctors, the ones doctors record, and the cultural myths that influence both.
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The Summer of the Bone Horses
Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, illus. by Steph Littlebird (Amulet)
Seamlessly layered plotting builds to a captivating climax in Sneve’s gentle chapter book about an Indigenous boy immersing himself in his heritage. Away from his mother and father for the first time while visiting his grandparents, Lakota youth Eddie struggles with intense loneliness. But as the summer progresses, he helps Grandma and Grandpa care for their Rosebud Reservation home and gains valuable skills and confidence, experiences conveyed in Littlebird’s vivid colored pencil drawings, which are enhanced with block print textures.
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Sundust
Zeke Peña (Kokila)
When two siblings see a trail of magenta-colored “sundust” streak through the sky, it lands “where no one goes anymore/ ...the galaxy at the end of our street.” Multimedia illustrations cleverly highlight a desertscape as the children head beyond their border city’s rock wall and are pulled into intimate communion with the universe. It’s a wide-ranging solo debut from Peña, and a surreal-feeling exploration of the natural world’s power to endure and transform.
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A Language of Limbs
Dylin Hardcastle (Dutton)
Hardcastle breathtakingly explores the life of the same girl in two different realities: one where she embraces her queer identity and one where she denies it. Both versions experience heartwarming triumphs and gut-wrenching tragedy, while similarities echo through their lives. This mirroring effect creates a poignant tension as their story lines come together in familiar and unpredictable ways. Lyrical language elevates the storytelling, transforming it into something immersive and visceral. —TreVaughn Malik Roach-Carter, digital editorial assistant
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The Tournament
Rebecca Barrow (McElderry)
In this stunning and propulsive dark academia thriller, three teenagers attending a Washington all-girls school must decide to what lengths they’ll go to win an intense survivalist competition. Barrow balances nuanced discussions of class differences and belonging with gruesome portrayals of hunting and wound care to deliver a harrowing tale about expectations and ambition. Everyday stress relating to school and family—as well as a complicated love triangle—ground the novel’s Shakespearean tragedy vibes.
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No One Was Supposed to Die at This Wedding
Catherine Mack (Minotaur)
When mystery author Eleanor Dash takes a break from overseeing the film adaptation of her latest novel to attend the nuptials of its two lead actors, a pile of problems stack up: she receives menacing notes, a storm threatens to rip through the wedding, and she discovers a dead body. The rollicking plot pairs well with Dash’s frisky, funny narration, which jabs at the drudgery of mystery writing even as Mack demonstrates her mastery of it.
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Spent: A Comic Novel
Alison Bechdel (Mariner)
Fame and fortune are made to look ridiculous in this caricature of the Fun Home cartoonist’s own precipitous rise, which questions how to best turn literary success into activism. Alternate-world Alison tries to parlay her notoriety into a platform to critique capitalism but keeps getting tripped up in the minutia of sustainable goat farming. Bonus points: there’s a wonderfully diverse queer ensemble cast that’s sure to delight fans of Dykes to Watch Out For.
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My Name Is Emilia del Valle
Isabel Allende, trans. from the Spanish by Frances Riddle (Ballantine)
Chilean bestseller Allende delves into her country’s 1891 civil war via the perspective of her title character, a young Irish Chilean woman. Now an intrepid reporter in San Francisco, Emilia travels to cover the conflict with her colleague, who soon becomes a love interest. The cinematic and propulsive novel is as good with romance as it is with the nitty-gritty of newspaper work, and it culminates with Emilia’s satisfying reconciliation with her roots.
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A Lesser Light
Peter Geye (Univ. of Minnesota)
I’ve been a fan of Peter Geye’s literary fiction set in 1900s northern Minnesota ever since I read his 2014 novel, The Lighthouse Road. He just captures so brilliantly the complexities of human relationships set against a dramatic backdrop of Lake Superior. I especially appreciate the nuanced portrayals of Geye’s female protagonists: despite the isolation and social restraints placed on them in this harsh land, they still manage to live life on their own terms. —Claire Kirch, Midwest correspondent
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Summerhouse
Yiğit Karaahmet, trans. from the Turkish by Nicholas Glastonbury (Soho Crime)
Meditations on long-term monogamy and anti-gay repression might not scream “beach read,” but Karaahmet brilliantly weaves them into the fabric of this scintillating suspense tale. When a gay couple retreats to a quiet island off of Istanbul to celebrate their 40th anniversary, the arrival of a handsome teenager exposes fault lines in their supposedly stable union. What unfolds is a sweat-soaked, gasp-inducing tale tinged ever so slightly with sun-bleached melancholy.
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The Salmon Cannon and the Levitating Frog: And Other Serious Discoveries of Silly Science
Carly Anne York (Basic)
Science writing doesn’t get more enjoyable than York’s quirky survey of strange discoveries with unexpectedly profound consequences. Exploring how algae paved the way for the Human Genome Project, a beached whale changed wind turbine design, and uncrushable cockroaches led to the creation of more flexible robots, this takes readers for a walk on the weird side of scientific research.
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The Payback
Kashana Cauley (Atria)
The class war is on in Cauley’s blistering heist novel. It’s about three Black women relegated to retail jobs while drowning in student debt, who pool their talents to take down their draconian loan servicer. Cauley sharpens the narrative with harrowing speculative details that feel all too real, like the brutal “debt police” who come knocking on the door.
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Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness
Michael Koresky (Bloomsbury)
Hays Code–era Hollywood was more queer than casual viewers might have noticed, argues Koresky, studying how Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, Vincente Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy, and William Wyler’s The Children’s Hour “constructed an entirely new language” for exploring “sublimated desire” while escaping the notice of censors. Film buffs will relish the behind-the-scenes stories and whip-smart analysis.
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The Undoing of Alejandro Velasco
Diego Boneta (Amazon Crossing)
After the heir to a Mexican business dynasty dies at UCLA, his best friend travels to his home in San Miguel de Allende with hopes of ferreting out the murderer. There, Boneta’s hero falls for his dead friend’s sister and learns that the family business isn’t as legitimate as it seems. What begins in a Saltburn vein has a series of shocking secrets up its sleeve.
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The Möbius Book
Catherine Lacey (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
As a massive fan of Lacey’s ambitious alternate-history novel Biography of X, I couldn’t be more thrilled that she’s following it up with something similarly audacious: a half-fictional, half-memoiristic meditation on her own breakup. Leave it to Lacey to put a tantalizing asterisk on her first foray into autobiography. —Conner Reed, reviews editor
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Warhol’s Muses: The Artists, Misfits, and Superstars Destroyed by the Factory Fame Machine
Laurence Leamer (Putnam)
In this riveting group biography, Leamer chronicles how a series of “superstars”—attractive, well-connected socialities like Edie Sedgwick—helped catapult Andy Warhol to fame before being discarded when they were no longer of use to him. Enriched by kaleidoscopic detail, it’s an enthralling window into the making of a legendary artist and the beginnings of celebrity culture, set against the volatile art scene of 1960s and ’70s New York City.
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Room on the Sea: Three Novellas
André Aciman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
In an afterward to this elegant and wistful collection, Aciman describes the inspiration for the closing novella about a lovesick woman in Italy, telling of how it came to him while sunbathing and reading 17th-century French literature on a rooftop in Cambridge, Mass. Each of these transportive tales, whether they’re set on the Amalfi Coast or in a gloomy New York City courtroom during jury duty, introduces readers to startling new possibilities.
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Morgenstern’s Finest Ice Cream: A Cookbook
Nicholas Morgenstern (Knopf)
Nothing goes better together than summer and ice cream. I’ve tried over the years to make it myself—and failed. Now New York City sugar impresario Morgenstern promises to explain how to make some of his most memorable flavors, including French Fry and Olive Oil Chocolate Eggplant. They sound weird, but they have that wow factor. I’m down to try them, but I won’t be mixing flavors. Honestly, I cannot think of a more delicious way to make a bunch of messy mistakes. —Ed Nawotka, senior news and international editor
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The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay
Christopher Clarey (Grand Central)
Nadal’s dominance of the French Open is recounted here in crackling detail. Readers can practically hear Nadal’s grunts as Clarey recreates some of the tennis legend’s biggest matches, including his defeat of Mariano Puerta for his first Open title in 2005 and his triumph over Roger Federer in 2008. Propelled by fleet-footed storytelling and sharp insights into Nadal’s technique, this is ideal courtside reading.
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The South
Tash Aw (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Teenager Jay secretly explores his love for an older boy who works on his family’s Malaysian farm during his summer break. Much more is happening in the backdrop of Jay’s hidden drama, as his parents’ marriage strains and his lover’s father tries to rejuvenate the failing tamarind grove. Aw’s sense of place is as vivid as his view into his characters’ inner turmoil.
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Palm Meridian
Grace Flahive (Avid Reader)
Does a novel set in a near-future, half-drowned Florida sound uplifting? How about one in which the main character is a septuagenarian with a grim cancer prognosis and 24 hours to go before she dies by physician-assisted suicide? And yet: Flahive manages the seemingly impossible by having Hannah, her protagonist, throw the mother of all goodbye parties at the utopian queer retirement community she calls home. You won’t want to miss it. —Carolyn Juris, features editor
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Typewriter Beach
Meg Waite Clayton (Harper)
Nothing beats Grace Kelly on the Riviera, as seen in Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief. But Clayton’s portrait of an aspiring Hitchcock blonde has intrigue to spare. Fledgling star Isabella Giori’s rise is cut short when she gets pregnant, after which she makes a fateful friendship with a blacklisted screenwriter while the McCarthy hearings rage on. Fans of Hollywood’s golden age will fall in love.
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Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece
James Romm (Norton)
Romm finds a fascinating new angle on Plato in this elegant study. Drawing on Plato’s letters (usually dismissed as fake by philosophers but deemed legitimate by historians), Romm reveals a Plato who was personally and politically entangled with the tyrannical ruling family of Syracuse. It’s a gritty, real-politick depiction of Plato that challenges the reverence that, according to Romm, built up for the thinker over the course of the 20th century. —Dana Snitzky, reviews editor
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Vera, or Faith
Gary Shteyngart (Random House)
Shteyngart’s reliable prescience and pessimistic wit are on full display in this affecting drama of a slightly more unsettling world than ours, one where a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution would give a five-thirds vote to citizens whose roots go back to the colonial era. It’s told from the perspective of Vera, a 10-year-old girl with a delightful ear for language and a stirring determination to finally meet her Korean birth mother.
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Setting a Place for Us: Recipes and Stories of Displacement, Resilience, and Community from Eight Countries Impacted by War
Hawa Hassan (Ten Speed)
The reasons this cookbook seems imperative at this moment in history, when empathy is given such short shrift on sociopolitical stages both national and international, are countless. Allow me to share one: the imperiled countries highlighted here feel very far away from most Americans, and there’s nearly nothing that brings one closer to another than sharing a meal. Cuisine, after all, can open hearts and minds alike. Haven’t you seen Ratatouille? —John Maher, news director
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Sharing in the Groove: The Untold Story of the ’90s Jam Band Explosion and the Scene That Followed
Mike Ayers (St. Martin’s)
Please Kill Me did it for punk; Our Band Could Be Your Life did it for indie rock. Now music journalist Ayers has compiled an oral history of Phish and the other jam bands that soundtracked my high school and college years. You might just catch me reading it in a parking lot somewhere along the East Coast this summer, because here’s a secret I’m happy to share: 40 years after the boys from Burlington, Vt., got together, they might just be better than ever. —David Adams, adult reviews director
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So Far Gone
Jess Walter (Harper)
I’ve learned from Walter’s superb stories and novels to follow him wherever he takes me, whether through a woman’s disastrous one-night stand with a movie star (“Famous Actor”) or two brothers’ quest for glory in early 1900s Spokane (The Cold Millions). Usually the destination is out west, as in his latest, about a man on a mission to save his grandchildren from a right-wing militia. I’m saving this one for a day of no distractions. —David Varno, reviews editor
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The View From Lake Como
Adriana Trigiani (Dutton)
Trigiani delights with another of her heartwarming, heartbreaking stories of Italian Americans with all their characteristic foibles and gifts for reinvention. (Believe me, I can relate.) Follow recently divorced Jess Capodimonte, a skilled worker in Uncle Louie’s marble company in Lake Como, N.J., as she takes herself off to the real Lake Como with a one-way ticket, where she finds herself, family secrets, and, of course, love. This is Italy, after all! —Louisa Ermelino, contributing editor
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Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly
Jeff Weiss (MCD)
I grew up in the early aughts, so Britney Spears’s rise to fame—and fall from grace—is indelibly imprinted in my brain via an increasingly hyperbolic series of tabloid headlines. Here, Weiss, a journalist who covered the pop star during her prime, peeks beneath those narratives to paint a sharply observed portrait of how the media used Spears to feed a public simultaneously hungering for a girlish innocent and an unhinged force of destruction, shedding fascinating light on American celebrity culture past and present. —Miriam Grossman, reviews editor