28 Books We Can’t Wait to Read This Summer
The start of summer is full of promise — lush green nature inviting leisure, extended days brimming with possibilities, and stacks of new books just waiting to be cracked open. These months are most associated with the frothy paperbacks best enjoyed with your feet in the sand, and we’ve rounded up a few blistering thrillers and simmering romances. But we’re also ready to dive into books (both fiction and non-) full of family strife, essays that capture our frustrations with a deeply troubled country, and short stories that ruminate on the struggles of being anywhere else. And should you find yourself amid a sweltering heat wave, there’s even some climate fiction that won’t cool your agitation with the state of America’s current policies but will leave you emotionally charged. Somewhere out there, a new title is calling for you — here are 28 of your best bets.
May
Disappoint Me, by Nicola Danin
May 27
Nicola Danin’s first novel, the Lambda finalist Bellies, was a gorgeous tale of platonic entanglement and first love. In Disappoint Me, Danin builds on her astute portraits of romance to tell the story of Max, a trans woman in her 30s fed up with the way her life has turned out. Max decides to try something drastic: a heteronormative relationship. When she meets Vincent, she believes she has found a man capable of caring for her in ways she had only imagined. But despite his attentiveness and love for Max, Vincent must contend with the way his friends and family see him. And when Vincent is confronted with transgressions from his past, Max is forced to reconcile the person she loves with the person he was. —Isle McElroy
Disappoint Me, by Nicola Danin
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Forest Euphoria, by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
May 27
At a time when both science and the planet are increasingly under attack, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian’s debut memoir, Forest Euphoria, offers a vision of the sciences as a space of refuge and imagination. The book follows Kaishian from her childhood in the Hudson Valley, where she felt most herself in the forest surrounded by snails, amphibians, and fungi. Her love of fungi in particular helped Kaishian better understand herself as a queer, neurodivergent person and put her on the path of becoming a mycologist. As Kaishian builds her career, she uncovers expressions of queerness throughout the natural world, from intersex slugs to fungal species that encompass 23,000 different sexes. Forest Euphoria tenderly draws connections between ecological and personal discovery. —I.M.
Forest Euphoria, by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
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Never Flinch, by Stephen King
May 27
Stephen King continues his late-career turn toward the detective thriller with another outing for Holly Gibney. Unlike 2023’s Holly, however, Never Flinch features more of the ensemble-cast storytelling King does so well. While a detective tackles a vengeful serial killer’s promise to “kill 13 innocents and one guilty,” Holly defends a women’s-rights activist from an obsessive stalker. In recent Holly books, King has been at his most outspoken about the political evils of contemporary America. It will be fascinating to see him return to the battleground of reproductive rights for the first time since 1994’s Insomnia. —Neil McRobert
Never Flinch, by Stephen King
Also coming in May
➼ The South, by Tash Aw (May 27)
➼ The Stalker, by Paula Bomer (May 27)
➼ Harmattan Season, by Tochi Onyebuchi (May 27)
➼ When It All Burns, by Jordan Thomas (May 27)
June
I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, by Hala Alyan
June 3
Novelist and poet Hala Alyan, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her novel Salt Houses, is releasing her debut memoir. In I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, Alyan writes intimately about her long-held desire for a child and the decade of trying marked by miscarriages before she decides to use a surrogate. From this vantage point, she takes inspiration from the archetypal waiting woman — Scheherazade — to confront her feelings on motherhood and desire. Everywhere else, though, she finds herself shaped by urgency: the pressures of a husband wishing to leave her, the attacks on her childhood city of Beirut, the impact of past traumas resurfacing in her everyday life. Alyan takes this time to turn inward, diving into her lineage and working through family stories of displacement, liberation, and care, in an attempt to envision a life that honors her ancestors and protects future generations. —I.M.
I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, by Hala Alyan
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Clam Down, by Anelise Chen
June 3
Winner of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, Anelise Chen shifts from fiction to memoir with her second book, Clam Down. In the aftermath of Chen’s divorce from an older man she had been with since her 20s, her mother repeatedly advises her over text to “clam down.” Chen ignores the typo and takes her mother’s advice literally: She decides to pursue a reclusive life, to go back into her shell. Chen dives into this conceit with the audacity required to make the project compelling. Our language and our world, she discovers, is rife with recluses and shells used for survival. Her estranged father once disappeared for a decade to write an accounting software called Shell Computing. Like many other creatures, the two share a desire to retreat into themselves. Chen has written an inventive and emotionally compelling study of the contradictory impulses to connect and to hide. —I.M.
Clam Down, by Anelise Chen
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Flashlight, by Susan Choi
June 3
Susan Choi writes characters so deep in their own yearning that they struggle to see anything else. In her past two novels, My Education and Trust Exercise, the need they wrestle is erotic. In Flashlight, Choi turns her skill at writing missed connections and desire toward the family unit. Cycling between the perspectives of a white American mother, a Korean father born in Japan, and their mixed-race American daughter, the story starts with calamity: The father disappears during a walk on a Japanese beach. It’s a whodunit with geopolitical implications and all the brutal big feelings of familial drama. —Madeline Leung Coleman
Flashlight, by Susan Choi
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The Dry Season, by Melissa Febos
June 3
It may come as a surprise that Melissa Febos, an essayist celebrated for writing about sex and relationships, would turn her attention to celibacy, but The Dry Season is anything but a refutation of her earlier work. Rather, the book reveals Febos at her sharpest as she chronicles a celibate year after the dissolution of the tumultuous affair at the center of her 2017 memoir Abandon Me. As much as it’s a book about celibacy, The Dry Season is also a book about recovery and attention. Who does a person become when they cede their life to infatuation? And how does one return to the things they most love after losing a lover? —I.M.
The Dry Season, by Melissa Febos
How to Lose Your Mother, by Molly Jong-Fast
June 3
Erica Jong, the feminist author who became extraordinarily famous when her novel Fear of Flying was published in 1973, was a complicated woman. No one knew that better than her daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, herself a writer and political commentator, who endured all the turmoil of her parent’s alcoholism, neglect, and unstable relationships even as she sought out the irresistible glow of her mother’s attention. In her memoir of their lives together, Jong-Fast is honest about what it was like growing up with a mother who became addicted to fame — and who lost herself as the public’s attention shifted before dementia nudged her even further from reality. —Emma Alpern
How to Lose Your Mother, by Molly Jong-Fast
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Parallel Lines, by Edward St. Aubyn
June 3
A sequel to Edward St. Aubyn’s dense and dark 2019 novel Double Blind finds its loosely connected characters five years in the future. It begins with Sebastian, who’s in the middle of a schizophrenic episode while under treatment by a level-headed psychoanalyst, Martin. To describe the scope of the plot would be difficult, but millionaires, drug users, and a documentary series about human extinction all play into it. St. Aubyn, author of the semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose series, is as caustically clever as ever. —E.A.
Parallel Lines, by Edward St. Aubyn
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King of Ashes, by S.A. Cosby
June 10
S.A. Cosby has been on a meteoric rise since 2021’s Blacktop Wasteland. His vision of a southern United States blasted by crime, poverty, and inequality has put him on Barack Obama’s reading list and at the pinnacle of contemporary southern noir. King of Ashes takes a step further toward the epic, pitting a troubled family on the rim of the criminal world into conflict with the real bad men to whom they owe a debt. Cosby’s honest, brutal prose is the perfect vehicle for an underdog story about last resorts and final stands. —N.M.
King of Ashes, by S.A. Cosby
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Homework, by Geoff Dyer
June 10
“How readily children accept the world they are born into,” the novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer writes in his new memoir, Homework. That can be a sinister thing; for him, it was more or less a gift. Raised as an only child by a sheet-metal worker and a mother who worked in his school’s cafeteria, he grew up in a small house during a quiet turning point in England: after World War II but with its scars still visible in the landscape. In tender detail, Dyer writes about this age of tentative postwar plenty and the education that eventually shuttled him into a world far different from what his parents knew. —E.A.
Homework, by Geoff Dyer
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The Sisters, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
June 17
The Sisters, Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s sixth novel, is a 656-page family epic about the Mikkala sisters: Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia. They are the daughters of a Tunisian carpet seller and a mysterious Swedish man who abandoned his family when they were girls. The novel follows the three women as they grow up and apart from one another, falling into marriages and chaotic acting careers and leaving home to chase queer relationships. Throughout their lives, a curse hangs over their family, shaping how they move through the world. Over the next 30 years, a young man named Jonas, also of Swedish Tunisian ancestry, follows the lives of the women from a distance. After Evelyn disappears in New York, Jonas is able to track her down. This gripping, ambitious novel of love and lineage spans countries and generations. —I.M.
The Sisters, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
The Möbius Book, by Catherine Lacey
June 17
After Biography of X, a wry novelistic experiment in biography and historical record, Catherine Lacey continues to probe and puncture the membrane between what is real and what is imagined. Named after the twisty, single-sided mathematical strip, The Möbius Book, neither straightforward novel nor memoir, presents readers with two distinct narratives, each beginning on either cover. One is an intimate chronicle of the aftermath of the author’s sudden breakup with a man she refers to as The Reason, the other a story in which friends Edie and Marie process their relationships while ignoring what appears to be blood leaking from a neighbor’s apartment. Recurring elements and themes in both include friendship, memory, broken teacups, broken hearts, and faith. This is a curious and unique work. —Jasmine Vojdani
The Möbius Book, by Catherine Lacey
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Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship, by Dana A. Williams
June 17
Is there anything better than literary gossip? The relationship between writer and editor is fractious, tender, and ever-changing, with resentments and gratitude sloshing back and forth like a rooftop pool during an earthquake. Now imagine the editor in question is Toni Morrison. Editing was Morrison’s middle career; she joined Random House after a successful stint as a professor and before becoming a totemic writer herself. She not only shepherded authors like Toni Cade Bambara and Lucille Clifton; she also convinced Muhammad Ali to write an autobiography. Morrison shaped culture around her pen long before The Bluest Eye. —Bethy Squires
Toni at Random, by Dana A. Williams
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The Compound, by Aisling Rawle
June 24
Lily, the young, beautiful protagonist of Aisling Rawle’s debut novel, The Compound, wakes up on the eponymous property in the middle of a reality competition. She is vying against 19 other contestants to win luxury prizes like Champagne and lipstick — like her peers, she desperately wants to remain on the show, where she is safely ensconced from the dystopia raging outside. As Lily successfully survives rounds of elimination, she grows close to the others, but the stakes must only get higher. And the contestants are forced to test their friendship against their desperation to win. Rawle’s novel offers a disorienting view of a world that doesn’t seem too far removed from how we are already living — trapped between the desire for connection and the impulse to only look out for ourselves. —I.M.
The Compound, by Aisling Rawle
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TERROR COUNTER, by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
June 24
TERROR COUNTER, the debut poetry collection from Palestinian American performance artist Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, is an evocative, boundary-pushing reaction to the languages of terror that systematically undermine the lives of Palestinians. Tbakhi experiments across this collection, producing a series of poems that challenge the reader’s expectations. From an invented visual form — the “Gazan tunnel” — to all-caps poems meant to evoke queer ecstasy, the writing in TERROR COUNTER attempts to portray Palestinian existence in a lyrical form that is detached from the reductive narratives often delivered by political leaders. The poems walk the line between paranoid survivalism and the vulnerability and care that fuel collective liberation. Tbakhi’s poems are ruthless, but at their core, they aspire to a kind of utopian vision, asking how, amid the ongoing threat of genocide and displacement and countless other expressions of terror, people can continue to love one another. —I.M.
TERROR COUNTER, by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
Also coming in June
➼ So Gay for You, by Leisha Hailey and Kate Moennig (June 3)
➼ Atmosphere, by Taylor Jenkins Reid (June 3)
➼ Fox, by Joyce Carol Oates (June 17)
➼ El Dorado Drive, by Megan Abbott (June 24)
➼ Among Friends, by Hal Ebbott (June 24)
➼ Misbehaving at the Crossroads, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (June 24)
July
I Want to Burn This Place Down, by Maris Kreizman
July 1
Between her literary reviews and her podcast, Maris Kreizman has spent the past half-decade establishing herself as one of the book world’s most prominent critics and interviewers. In her new memoir, I Want to Burn This Place Down, Kreizman turns a critical eye on herself, giving readers a personal look into the circumstances that led her to who she is today: a former ambition monster wary of the very institutions that so successfully sold her on the myth of meritocracy. In Kreizman’s view, there are signs of American society’s broken promises everywhere, from our political leaders to our families. I Want to Burn This Place Down presents a vision of how to rebuild trust where we still can, with one another, to help create the world we want to live in. —I.M.
I Want to Burn This Place Down, by Maris Kreizman
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Hot Girls With Balls, by Benedict Nguyễn
July 1
It’s hard to find a better opening sentence than the beginning of Benedict Nguyễn’s debut novel: “No one could think straight because everyone was actually gay.” Hot Girls With Balls gets only funnier and more audacious from there. This satire about competitive volleyball and social-media fame follows Six and Green, a pair of trans volleyball players who make the rash choice to compete in a men’s league — resulting in a series of escalating controversies. Six and Green are also dating. Despite her love for her girlfriend, Green can’t help but feel jealous over Six’s massive star power and fame. Although the two play on rival teams and travel far from each other, they continue to broadcast their romance to their adoring fans and haters alike, creating a groundswell of parasocial relationships that meets its striking conclusion when Six and Green face off in the tournament-championship game. —I.M.
Hot Girls With Balls, by Benedict Nguyễn
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Killing Stella, by Marlen Haushofer
July 1
The Austrian novelist Marlen Haushofer, who died in 1970, is best known for her existential dystopian novel The Wall. This summer will see the first English translation of her earlier novella, Killing Stella, a slim domestic horror story that serves as a perfect entry point to Haushofer’s work. When Stella, the teenage daughter of the narrator’s friend, comes to stay with the narrator and her husband, it isn’t long before the older man begins a one-sided affair with their house guest. The narrator is not surprised by her husband’s affairs; he is a selfish, charming man, and this isn’t his first. His decision to take Stella as a lover, however, and the cruelty he shows her, forces the narrator to reckon with the true character of the man she married — and question how his nature might be passed on to their children. —I.M.
Killing Stella, by Marlen Haushofer
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Long Distance, by Aysegül Savas
July 8
Last year, Aysegül Savas’s stunning third novel, The Anthropologist — a portrait of two married expats of different origins in an unnamed city searching for community and purpose in their otherwise quotidian lives — topped Vulture’s list of the Best Books of 2024. Now, in her debut story collection, the author explores similar territory with tales of students, artists, and wanderers seeking connection as they strive to forge new paths in foreign places: Rome, Paris, Russia, and a body changed by pregnancy. The settings may be grand and distant, but the characters’ concerns are intimate and recognizable. Savas sees the struggles of modern life and relationships with an elegant clarity and is breathtaking in her precision. —Tolly Wright
Long Distance, by Aysegül Savas
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Vera, or Faith, by Gary Shteyngart
July 8
Gary Shteyngart’s sixth novel, Vera, or Faith, is the story of a family trying desperately to stay together through everyday crises both massive and mundane. Shteyngart is excellent at capturing the difficult places where emotional bonds grow thin even as love remains potent. For this family, a modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England Wasp, love isn’t always enough. Cash is hard to acquire for Daddy, and Anne Mom struggles to keep the household in order, while their eldest son, Dylan, seems to take pride in an America that values his good looks and Mayflower lineage. The novel is told through the perspective of Vera, the youngest of the family, who wants only to make friends, meet her birth mother, and keep her parents together. Shteyngart’s work is always saturated with humor and heart, and his latest novel offers a new perspective on one of literature’s most prominent subjects: How can a family survive in America? —I.M.
Vera, or Faith, by Gary Shteyngart
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The Convenience Store by the Sea, by Sonoko Machida
July 15
Japanese convenience stores already verge on magical realism. A perfect jammy egg nestled between white bread so fluffy it may as well be a cloud? Absurd. Self-heating ramen containers? The future. The Convenience Store by the Sea is about one such konbini in southern Japan. The owner wants to fulfill his customers emotionally as well as nourish their bodies. From there, interconnected melancholic stories roll out and criss-cross the store. If you miss those dramedies from the mid-aughts where all the characters are connected through fate and everyone is in love or having a nervous breakdown — the Magnolia, Me You and Everyone We Know, I Heart Huckabees school of sondering — this is the book for you. —B.S.
The Convenience Store by the Sea, By Sonoko Machida
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Simplicity, by Mattie Lubchansky
July 29
The first thing that stands out about Mattie Lubchansky’s illustrations is the disconcerting humanity in every image, how it captures something both real and surreal about moving through the world. In her latest graphic novel, Simplicity, Lubchansky leans further into Surrealism. In the year 2081, Lucius Pasternak, a highly organized trans man living in the New York City Administrative and Security Territory, wants only to keep his head down and get by. But when the mayor offers him a job surveying the people of Simplicity, an intentional community formed in 1977, Lucius reluctantly agrees, drawn less to the job than to the people who live there. One such person, Amity, is of special interest to Lucius, who admires their carefree confidence and ease in their body. Lucius soon discovers the mayor’s intentions are far more sinister than data collection, and as residents of Simplicity disappear, Lucius and Amity must work together to uncover what really is happening to this isolated community. —I.M.
Simplicity, by Mattie Lubchansky
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The Dance and the Fire, by Daniel Saldaña París
July 29
Daniel Saldaña París’s new novel, The Dance and the Fire, has everything a reader could want: climate dystopia, hysterical dancing, and a long-standing love triangle. The novel, translated by Christina MacSweeney, follows three friends who return to their hometown of Cuernavaca, Mexico, years after their tangled romance left its mark on their psyches. Now, the city is surrounded by massive wildfires, and the three friends must face off against the complex desires they left their homes to avoid. As the surrounding landscape succumbs, one friend seeks solace in dance. Inspired by German Expressionism and medieval danse macabre, the performance expands into something more intense than any of them anticipated, fracturing boundaries between the present world and the past, between myth and reality. —I.M.
The Dance and the Fire, by Daniel Saldaña París
Also coming in July
➼ We Are Eating the Earth, by Michael Grunwald (July 1)
➼ Archive of Unknown Universes, by Ruben Reyes Jr. (July 1)
➼ Blowfish, by Kyung-Ran Jo (July 15)
➼ Information Age, by Cora Lewis (July 15)
➼ The Other Wife, by Jackie Thomas-Kennedy (July 15)
➼ Wayward Girls, by Susan Wiggs (July 15)
➼ First Time, Long Time, by Amy Silverberg (July 22)
➼ Love Forms, by Claire Adam (July 29)
➼ An Oral History of Atlantis, by Ed Park (July 29)
August
Extinction Capital of the World, by Mariah Rigg
August 5
Extinction Capital of the World, the debut collection of stories from NEA fiction fellow Mariah Rigg, takes its title from a phrase often used to describe the ecological collapse occurring across Hawai’i, which is considered ground zero for mass extinction. The book is not as dire as its title may suggest; rather, these ten stories of love and regret offer an intimate look at contemporary life in the state. In one story, an older man reflects on the impact American weapons research has had on his life. In another, a woman, heartbroken after a breakup, returns home to O’ahu, where she attempts to rebuild her relationship with her estranged father. Rigg’s voice is sharp and engrossing, her characters cunning but affable. This is climate fiction at its most humane and emotionally rich. —I.M.
Extinction Capital of the World, by Mariah Rigg
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Trying, by Chloé Caldwell
August 5
Chloé Caldwell’s 2014 novella Women, about a woman falling in love with another woman for the first time, became a queer cult classic. In Trying, the writer again uses the fragmentary form, candor, and wit to study “the brain of someone trying to get pregnant.” The narrator, who has received an unhelpful diagnosis of “unexplained infertility,” tracks the frustration and heartbreak of not getting pregnant when everyone around you seems to be. When another form of grief suddenly bursts into her life, it ultimately signals a rebirth. —J.V.
Trying, by Chloé Caldwell
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Whites, by Mark Doten
August 19
For their first book of short fiction, Mark Doten taps into the frenzy of our time with stories about anti-woke podcasters, a mother experiencing QAnon derangement, and the day we learned Donald Trump had COVID. The through-line is its characters’ belief in the overwhelming importance of their whiteness — and the havoc that conviction unleashes. Doten is a skilled satirist, and this collection matches the disorienting comic tenor of their previous novels, Trump Sky Alpha and The Infernal. —E.A.
Whites, by Mark Doten
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Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang
August 26
R.F. Kuang is one of the most prolific young novelists writing today. Following the successes of her best-selling novels Babel and Yellowface, Kuang returns with Katabasis, a satirical retelling of Dante’s Inferno that follows Alice Law, a student in the field of magick. Alice has sacrificed love, comfort, and family to study under her dream mentor: Professor Jacob Grimes, the foremost magician in the world. After Grimes dies in an accident, Alice must descend into hell in order to save her adviser’s soul — and obtain a letter of recommendation only he can provide. Alice’s nemesis has the same idea, and the two rivals find themselves reluctantly working together in the afterlife while vying for their adviser’s attention. Kuang brings to her latest story the trademark wit, fantastical imagination, and classicist rigor that has made her such a popular novelist. —I.M.
Katabasis, by R.F. Kuang
Also coming in August
➼ Moderation, by Elaine Castillo (August 5)
➼ Dwelling, by Emily Hunt Kivel (August 5)
➼ Blessings and Disasters, by Alexis Okeowo (August 5)
➼ The Hounding, by Xenobe Purvis (August 5)
➼ Sunbirth, by An Yu (August 5)
➼ The Unbroken Coast, Nalini Jones (August 12)
➼ The Island of Last Things, by Emma Stoley (August 12)
➼ Lucky Day, by Chuck Tingle (August 12)
➼ The Quiet Ear, by Raymond Antrobus (August 19)
➼ Where Are You Really From, by Elaine Hsieh Chou (August 19)
➼ Isabella’s Not Dead, by Beth Morrey (August 26)