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27 New Books You Need to Read This Summer

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T here’s plenty to look forward to this summer, including a new crop of books that will transport you far away, regardless of your vacation plans. The best books arriving over the next few months take place in coastal Maine, an isolated part of Alaska, East Africa—and even a post-apocalyptic world, among other riveting destinations.

Some of the season’s greatest hits are by already beloved authors, like Tom Perrotta , Taylor Jenkins Reid , David Yoon , and Mohsin Hamid . Others are satisfying introductions to debut writers such as Joseph Han and Rebecca Rukeyser.

Here, the 27 best books to read this summer.

City of Orange , David Yoon (May 24)

David Yoon’s haunting new novel opens with a man lying supine in a desert, clueless as to what happened to him and where he is. The world has ended. The apocalypse has happened. As pieces of his memory slowly return, it becomes evident that he had a wife and daughter who are now lost forever. As the man figures out how to survive in this new barren land, he transitions from isolation to fear to, finally, acceptance. City of Orange is Yoon’s second book for adults, following Version Zero ; he’s also written the young-adult novels Frankly in Love and Super Fake Love Song .

Buy Now: City of Orange on Bookshop | Amazon

Either/Or, Elif Batuman (May 24)

In Elif Batuman’s second novel, a piquant sequel to her 2017 Pulitzer Prize-nominated debut novel The Idiot , protagonist Selin Karadag, a relentlessly curious Harvard student, ponders the value of love and lust as she mines her life for her burgeoning, semi-autobiographical creative writing. Drawing its title from Kierkegaard’s seminal work, with which Selin is obsessed, the narrative is a hyper-cerebral romp that is as brainy as it is charming.

Buy Now: Either/Or on Bookshop | Amazon

You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty , Akwaeke Emezi (May 24)

Akwaeke Emezi delivers a fresh summer romance with their latest novel, You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty . After the devastating loss of her partner, artist Feyi Adekola has nearly rebuilt her life, tentatively easing back into the dating scene. While Feyi begins dating a man who checks off every box, an unexpected spark with someone who’s off-limits makes her reconsider everything she thought she knew about love.

Buy Now: You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty on Bookshop | Amazon

Happy-Go-Lucky , David Sedaris (May 31)

David Sedaris’ signature wit has always thrived on the macabre, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that his latest collection of essays, Happy-Go-Lucky , written in the wake of the pandemic panic and the social and political unrest of 2020, is some of his darkest—and most astute—writing yet. From the death of his 98-year-old father to mask mandate drama, no topic is out of bounds for Sedaris’ acerbic humor and sharp observations.

Buy Now: Happy-Go-Lucky on Bookshop | Amazon

Yerba Buena , Nina LaCour (May 31)

Nina LaCour is well-known for her YA books, including Watch Over Me and We Are Okay . In Yerba Buena, her first adult novel, she introduces two women—Sara and Emilie—who cross paths while trying to figure out who they really are. Both are flawed, with family trauma to sort through, and they’re instantly drawn to each other. Their pasts, however, might interfere with their newfound love in this slow-burn, heartfelt story.

Buy Now: Yerba Buena on Bookshop | Amazon

Counterfeit , Kirstin Chen (June 7)

If you appreciate a good caper, you’ll want to pick up Kirstin Chen’s novel about two Asian American women who turn a counterfeit handbag scheme into a big business. The book is written as a confession, which helps readers get to know protagonists Ava and Winnie, and how their lives detoured toward crime. Counterfeit is fast-paced and fun, with smart commentary on the cultural differences between Asia and America.

Buy Now: Counterfeit on Bookshop | Amazon

Cult Classic , Sloane Crosley (June 7)

Magical realism meets romance in downtown New York in Sloane Crosley’s witty second novel, Cult Classic . Protagonist Lola is forced to confront her romantic past after she runs into a string of ex-boyfriends, all within the same five-mile radius in Manhattan’s Chinatown. But these occurrences are hardly coincidental, leading Lola on a mysterious and mystical chase to uncover what exactly is happening to her.

Buy Now: Cult Classic on Bookshop | Amazon

Nuclear Family , Joseph Han (June 7)

Migration, family secrets, and memory collide in Joseph Han’s gorgeous debut novel, Nuclear Family . For the Chos, a Korean American couple living in Hawaii, life has finally settled into comfort—that is, until their son, Jacob, who’s teaching English in Seoul, goes viral for attempting to cross the Demilitarized Zone into North Korea. Little does his family know that Jacob has been possessed by the ghost of his late grandfather, who still has unfinished business on earth.

Buy Now: Nuclear Family on Bookshop | Amazon

The Seaplane on Final Approach , Rebecca Rukeyser (June 7)

Mira heads to remote Alaska to spend the summer working at a floundering wilderness lodge. While there, she obsesses over her step-cousin and watches as the lodge owners’ dysfunctional marriage implodes. The Seaplane on Final Approach is a snappy character study and a meditation on sleaziness.

Buy Now: The Seaplane on Final Approach on Bookshop | Amazon

Tracy Flick Can’t Win , Tom Perrotta (June 7)

Twenty-four years after he published Election, Tom Perrotta revisits his cult classic antiheroine Tracy Flick in Tracy Flick Can’t Win. Picking up decades after Election left off, the ever-ambitious Tracy returns to navigating the turbulent waters of high school politics—but this time, on the other side of the student-faculty divide. As an assistant principal at a suburban New Jersey high school, Tracy is balancing a new relationship, single motherhood, and the demands of her job when an unexpected career opportunity pops up and promises to change life as she knows it.

Buy Now: Tracy Flick Can’t Win on Bookshop | Amazon

Horse , Geraldine Brooks (June 14)

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks turns her attention to the true story of a 19th-century racehorse named Lexington, one of the greatest in history. The story jumps between centuries: in Kentucky in 1850, an enslaved man bonds with a foal he vows to ride to victory. In New York City in 1954, a gallery owner becomes fixated on a mysterious oil painting of a horse. And finally, in Washington, D.C., in 2019, an art historian and a scientist make discoveries that lead back to Lexington. Horse isn’t just an animal story—it’s a moving narrative about race and art.

Buy Now: Horse on Bookshop | Amazon

Flying Solo , Linda Holmes (June 14)

When Laurie returns home to Maine to clear out her beloved great aunt’s estate, she’s only recently removed from calling off her wedding—and is coming to terms with the idea that a conventional relationship might not be in the cards. When she finds a mysterious wooden duck buried in her aunt’s belongings, she embarks on a wild goose chase to figure out its origins, getting reacquainted with her first love along the way. The novel—which follows Holmes’ 2019 summer hit Evvie Drake Starts Over —is a refreshing reminder that “happily ever after” doesn’t have to look one specific way.

Buy Now: Flying Solo on Bookshop | Amazon

Learning to Talk , Hilary Mantel (June 21)

Hilary Mantel is a literary legend: she’s won the Booker Prize twice, and garnered wide acclaim for her Wolf Hall trilogy, which concluded in 2020 and was adapted for television . In Learning to Talk , Mantel dispenses a series of semi-autobiographical short stories. The collection—a re-release from 2003—features a new preface. Many of the stories center on childhood, and Mantel brings England alive, writing with detail and intellect.

Buy Now: Learning to Talk on Bookshop | Amazon

Lapvona , Ottessa Moshfegh (June 21)

Ottessa Moshfegh transports readers to a medieval fiefdom in her new novel, which follows 2020’s Death in Her Hands . The book is about Little Marek, who was abused by his father, the village’s shepherd, and never knew his mother. He ends up in a power struggle that exposes the depravity of human nature and juxtaposes the difference between religion and manipulation. Lapvona is violent and provocative, and a departure from Moshfegh’s previous work.

Buy Now: Lapvona on Bookshop | Amazon

Thrust , Lidia Yuknavitch (June 28)

The protagonist in Lidia Yuknavitch’s new novel is Laisv, who’s a “carrier”—which means certain objects can help her travel through time to connect with interesting people from eras past. Laisv’s ultimate goal is to save these people, including a dictator’s daughter and an accused murderer. As in her previous work, including The Book of Joan and Dora: A Headcase , Yuknavitch’s writing is moving and incisive.

Buy Now: Thrust on Bookshop | Amazon

Life Ceremony: Stories , Sayaka Murata (July 5)

Sayaka Murata —a Japanese writer whose previous novels include Convenience Store Woman —delivers her first collection of short stories translated into English. Life Ceremony consists of 12 engrossing entries that probe intimacy and individuality while turning norms upside down. In one, for example, a curtain in a young girl’s room spirals into jealousy as she watches—and tries to stop—her owner’s first kiss. The stories are strange and bold.

Buy Now: Life Ceremony on Bookshop | Amazon

Crying in the Bathroom , Erika L. Sánchez (July 12)

Poet and young-adult novelist Erika L. Sánchez turns to the struggles and triumphs she’s experienced over the years for material for her latest book, the memoir Crying in the Bathroom . Touching on a wide range of topics that run the gamut from the deeply personal, like Sánchez’s bouts of depression, to the political, like immigration policy, each essay feels like a conversation with a good friend, thanks to Sánchez’s warm and vulnerable writing.

Buy Now: Crying in the Bathroom on Bookshop | Amazon

The Man Who Could Move Clouds, Ingrid Rojas Contreras (July 12)

Magic is not just a multi-generational occurrence in Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ family—it’s their legacy, something she details with both wonder and care in her memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds . Growing up in Colombia, Rojas Contreras witnessed her mother telling fortunes and her grandfather, a renowned curandero (or healer), predicting the future, healing the sick, and moving clouds. Rojas Contreras was unsure of her place in this world until a head injury caused her to have amnesia—an experience that her family believes may be key to her accessing her own magic.

Buy Now: The Man Who Could Move Clouds on Bookshop | Amazon

Upgrade , Blake Crouch (July 12)

Blake Crouch’s inventive new novel, equal parts thriller and sci-fi, examines how far our humanity can stretch. It’s about Logan, a scientist whose genome has been hacked—which alters him in unsettling ways. To stop these so-called upgrades from rolling out to the rest of the world, Logan has to spring into action. Readers who enjoyed Crouch’s previous novels , such as Dark Matter and Recursion , will find Upgrade just as thrilling. Steven Spielberg’s production company Amblin Partners has snapped up the film rights, and Crouch is attached to the project as an executive producer.

Buy Now: Upgrade on Bookshop | Amazon

Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional , Isaac Fitzgerald (July 19)

Isaac Fitzgerald’s life has zigged and zagged: He used to work at a biker bar, and he’s the author of the children’s book How to Be a Pirate . He’s been an altar boy and a “fat kid.” He’s also had stints as a firefighter and smuggler. In his memoir Dirtbag, Massachusetts , Fitzgerald reflects on his origins—and coming to terms with self-consciousness, anger, and strained family relationships. His writing is gritty yet vulnerable.

Buy Now: Dirtbag, Massachusetts on Bookshop | Amazon

The Last White Man , Mohsin Hamid (Aug. 2)

What is the value of whiteness, if it ceases to exist as we know it? That’s the question at the heart of Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man , where Anders, a white man, wakes up one morning to find that his skin has turned dark. As other similar cases occur throughout the land, Hamid poses larger questions about how we really see each other and ourselves.

Buy Now: The Last White Man on Bookshop | Amazon

Mika in Real Life , Emiko Jean (Aug. 2)

In Emiko Jean’s Mika in Real Life , Mika Suzuki sees a chance to not only reinvent herself, but also reimagine what her life could look like outside of her dreary reality. At 35, Mika’s situation is bleak: her love life is in ruins, her family is perpetually disappointed in her, and her living arrangement is less than ideal. But after she gets a phone call from the daughter she gave up for adoption, a tiny white lie turns into an opportunity for a second act—as long as her secret doesn’t come to light.

Buy Now: Mika in Real Life on Bookshop | Amazon

Autoportrait , Jesse Ball (Aug. 9)

In his first memoir, Jesse Ball—whose previous work includes March Book and The Divers’ Game —helps readers understand who he is and what shaped him. He reveals personal tidbits, like that one of his shoulders stands higher than the other, and that his left hand is quicker but weaker than his right. He also reflects on love and loss. Autoportrait was inspired by the memoir French writer Édouard Levé wrote shortly before dying in 2007.

Buy Now: Autoportrait on Bookshop | Amazon

The Women Could Fly , Megan Giddings (Aug. 9)

In Megan Giddings’ dystopian novel, The Women Could Fly , the mystical collides with the familiar when it comes to women’s autonomy. Josephine Thomas lives in a world where women are mandated to be married by 30 or forced to enroll in a registry that monitors them; with her 30th birthday around the corner, Jo finds hope for her freedom in the extraordinary last request of her long-lost mother, rumored to be a witch, who mysteriously disappeared when Jo was a child.

Buy Now: The Women Could Fly on Bookshop | Amazon

Afterlives , Abdulrazak Gurnah (Aug. 23)

Germany’s brutal colonization of East Africa (what is known as Tanzania, Burundi, and Rwanda today) provides the backdrop to Abdulrazak Gurnah ’s arresting novel, Afterlives . Centering on the intersecting lives of Ilyas, Afiya, and Hamza, three young people who return home after being separated by war and slavery, the novel explores what is gained and what is lost in the name of survival. Gurnah, who won the 2021 Nobel Prize for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism,” employs sensitivity and tenderness in each storyline.

Buy Now: Afterlives on Bookshop | Amazon

Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution , R.F. Kuang (Aug. 23)

The Poppy War author R. F. Kuang tackles dark academia and imperialism with her latest novel, Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. Centering on a plucky unnamed protagonist—a student at Babel, Oxford’s Royal Institute of Translation—and his rag-tag cohort, the book uses magic and agathokakological lessons to make a case for a post-colonial future.

Buy Now: Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution on Bookshop | Amazon

Carrie Soto Is Back , Taylor Jenkins Reid (Aug. 30)

Taylor Jenkins Reid has collected a devoted following for her made-for-summer books like Malibu Rising and Daisy Jones & The Six . She returns with a novel about tennis star Carrie Soto, who won 20 Grand Slam titles with her father, Javier, as her coach. Six years into retirement, Carrie’s record is shattered by a player named Nicki—so she leaps back onto the court for one final season to reclaim what’s hers. Don’t worry if you’re not big on sports stories; this is, ultimately, a heart-filled novel about an iconic and persevering father and daughter.

Buy Now: Carrie Soto Is Back on Bookshop | Amazon

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Write to Cady Lang at [email protected]

T he Summer Reading Guide

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Grab One Last Beach Read

by Ann Patchett

I had a strange question while reading Patchett’s latest: Are novelists allowed to write stories about people who are this happy? Lara, the book’s narrator, lives contentedly on her cherry farm in North Michigan with her kind husband and three doting daughters, all merrily trapped together during the pandemic. To kill time while they pick cherries in the orchard, Lara tells them the story of her great, youthful, summer-long love affair with a rakish man, Peter Duke, who would go on to become a very famous actor (the character put me in mind of Ethan Hawke or Robert Downey Jr.). The daughters hang on her every word. The story itself has the sweetness and tartness of cherries, taking place mostly at a summer-stock-theater company called Tom’s Lake where Lara and Peter meet and fall in love as she herself decides whether or not to continue her almost-accidental career as an actress. But this nostalgia trip contains no regrets. As Lara emphasizes in one of many similar refrains, the life she went on to live is all she has “ever wanted in the world.” — Gal Beckerman

Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous With American History

by Yunte Huang

Daughter of the Dragon is a vivid and heartbreaking biography of the 20th-century Hollywood actress Anna May Wong, and Huang’s third book about a Chinese American icon’s “rendezvous with American history.” Wong grew up movie-obsessed in a Chinese immigrant family in Los Angeles. When she began to act professionally in the 1920s, she struggled to land leading roles: Anti-miscegenation laws meant that she couldn’t kiss a white man on-screen, and she was passed over for top jobs in favor of white actors in yellowface. Though Wong eventually became a bona fide celebrity, she was frequently forced into stereotypical parts—the tragic “Madame Butterfly,” the conniving “Dragon Lady.” (When blamed for perpetuating racist tropes, she responded that “when a person is trying to get established in a profession, he can’t choose parts. He has to take what is offered.”) Wong occupies a singular place in both Hollywood history and the history of Asian Americans in the 20th century; as Huang puts it, her existence was determined by “simultaneous repulsion and desire.” Through detailing her resilience in the face of these challenges, Huang tells an essential story about the tenuous place of Asians in America. — Maya Chung

Family Lore

by Elizabeth Acevedo

Many of the most pivotal scenes across Acevedo’s poetry and fiction take place near, or in, a kitchen. In Family Lore , her first novel for adults, the question of whether to serve pork takes on the weight of sacrament as a group of Dominican women reluctantly plans the menu for a still-living sister’s upcoming wake. Flor, one of four sisters, can predict the exact day of someone’s death. At the outset of the book, she announces that she’ll be holding a living wake for herself, and the decision rattles her sprawling family. Much of Acevedo’s work revolves around the primal emotions family can evoke—need, disappointment, belonging, connection. Her latest offering is her most impressive emotional excavation yet, a decade-spanning epic that sees Acevedo deftly stretching out into the new space afforded by a shift in audience. Vividly rendered and deliciously complex, Family Lore will stick with you long after you leave Flor’s table. — Hannah Giorgis

Learned by Heart

by Emma Donoghue

At a 19th-century York boarding school for young ladies, Eliza Raine, the daughter of an English father and an Indian mother, studies French, geography, and how to be a wife. Since leaving Madras for Britain, she’s felt she has something to prove; her parents weren’t legally married, and her social standing has suffered as a result. In class, she is focused, working hard to memorize and recite lessons. But her new roommate, Anne Lister, doesn’t have to try at all—she’s effortlessly brilliant. And that’s not the only reason she stands out. Learned by Heart is the culmination of Donoghue’s long obsession with Lister, the real-life 19th-century figure whose exhaustive, coded diaries, which describe her many affairs with other women, inspired the television show Gentleman Jack . Lister, as she makes classmates call her, is an oddity—she walks with a masculine swagger and is constantly breaking rules—and Eliza is fascinated. In close quarters, the two build a tentative romance. Donoghue’s affection for the savvy, strange Lister is obvious, and the author makes her teenage couple’s partnership both deeply serious and wonderfully naive. But the reader knows from the first page that their infatuation won’t last, and the novel is ultimately a tender, sad account of first love. — Emma Sarappo

Transport Yourself to Another Place

by Penelope Lively

The pleasure of Heat Wave is its slow, mesmerizing drama. Set in the English countryside over a hot summer, Lively’s slender novel introduces us to Pauline, a divorced editor in her 50s who has opted for an existence “rich in carefully nurtured minor satisfactions.” Among those satisfactions is the freedom she feels in her summer cottage, unleashed from London, her partner, and her office job. Staying next door—and buzzing at a different frequency—are her daughter, Theresa; her son-in-law, Maurice, a smarmy, up-and-coming writer; and their toddler. With a gimlet eye, Pauline observes Theresa’s unhappiness and Maurice’s shifty egotism, the amalgam of repression and delusion that seems to hold their relationship together; as she fixates on them, she thinks back on her own marriage. Lively’s wry prose captures the mundane clarity of Pauline’s life among the wheat fields and the way that a maternal ache, when left to its own devices, can crescendo. Never has a mother-in-law’s judgment seemed so deliciously understated—and so devastating in its conclusion.   — Jane Yong Kim

by Don Paterson

The Scottish poet Don Paterson is kind of a genius. His poems are ferocious, his critical writings are chatty or witheringly technical or both, and he’s also produced—who does this?—several collections of aphorisms. (“Anyone whose students ‘teach him as much as he teaches them’ should lose half his salary.”) And now a memoir, Toy Fights : It covers God, guitar, origami, breakdown, and Dundee, Scotland, the poet’s hometown, “dementedly hospitable in the way poor towns are,” he writes. It was a place where, once upon a New Romantic time, you could encounter beautiful Billy Mackenzie of operatic popsters The Associates: “He had the attractive power of a 3-tesla MRI scanner, and if there was as much as a paperclip of susceptibility about your person, forget it: you’d find yourself sliding across the room as if you were on castors.” The prose is fizzing-brained, it’s hyperbolic, and it has a hyperbolic effect: It makes you want to delete everything you’ve ever written and start again, this time telling the truth.   — James Parker

Love in Color

by Bolu Babalola

Babalola’s story collection updates and retells romantic myths and fables from a bevy of cultures, tossing a reader into the richly imagined world of characters from Egypt or Nigeria, then sending them to her version of Greece or China. (She also has some fun with history: Here, Queen Nefertiti runs a club-slash-criminal-underworld-headquarters, where she punishes abusive husbands and protects vulnerable women.) The characters and scenarios can feel a tad archetypical, though that is understandable given her source material. But the stories are just fun , and none of them is long enough to drag. Many of them end with a new couple on the precipice of a great adventure. And in each encounter, love is neither an uncontrollable fever that sneaks up on a person, nor an inevitable force that shoves a couple together. It’s a kind of shelter where artifice can be abandoned—the result of careful attention that does away with illusions and misconceptions.   — E. S.

Friday Black

by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

My first exposure to Adjei-Brenyah’s work was in a crowded, airless classroom where he read aloud a passage from the title story of his collection, Friday Black : “It’s my fourth Black Friday. On my first, a man from Connecticut bit a hole in my tricep. His slobber hot.” In the scene, the employees of a big-box retailer face down a horde of (literally) rabid shoppers lured by deals that are (again, literally) to die for. Each story in this brutally absurd, original book, Adjei-Brenyah’s debut, similarly whisks the reader somewhere unexpected: an amusement park where customers can legally fulfill violent racist fantasies against Black actors; a courtroom where a George Zimmerman analogue explains why he was justified in murdering children with a chain saw. But these summaries don’t capture the alchemy that Adjei-Brenyah performs. Friday Black presents a warped reflection of our own reality that feels both horrifying and clarifying.   — Lenika Cruz

Take a Deep Dive

The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power

by Garry Wills

Come join the cult of Garry Wills, the greatest of all American political journalists. His books smuggle the psychological acumen of a novelist and the insights of a first-rate cultural critic into exegeses of the most familiar figures in American history, whom he somehow interprets anew. The first book that members of his cult will thrust into your hands is Nixon Agonistes . By all means, read it. But in the pleasure-seeking spirit of the season, take The Kennedy Imprisonment and plant yourself under an umbrella. It’s a riveting critique of the first family of 20th-century liberalism, a work that, among other things, scrutinizes the sexual and drinking habits of the Kennedys. Not fixating on Wills’s baser insights is hard. (For example: Jack’s womanizing was born of competition with his father’s philandering. Or: The Kennedys acted more like English aristocrats than Irish immigrants.) But really those are just enjoyable grace notes, because the book is, in the end, a deep essay on that irresistible intoxicant—power.   — Franklin Foer

Travels in Hyperreality

by Umberto Eco, translated by William Weaver>

Imagine you’re taking a road trip across America—but forgoing the country’s natural splendors for its manufactured ones: Disneyland, wax museums, amusement parks. Oh, and your guide on the journey is an Italian semiotician with a roving intellect and a keen eye for the absurd. That’s Travels in Hyperreality . Eco’s travelogue collects 26 dispatches, mostly written in the 1970s during the author’s visits to the U.S. In the essays, the theorist and novelist plays a classic role: the foreigner who is alternately amused and appalled by American maximalism. (A famously kitschy roadside inn, in Eco’s rendering, resembles “a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli”; Disneyland is “an allegory of the consumer society” whose “visitors must agree to behave like its robots.”) But Eco’s postcards from the past are also infused with insight—and a sense of prophecy. They explore, in technicolor detail, what Eco calls our “faith in fakes.” Travel the country long enough, his trip suggests, and it becomes difficult to tell where the landscape ends and the dreamscape begins.   — Megan Garber

by Umberto Eco, translated by William Weaver>

The Last Whalers

by Doug Bock Clark

Like an anthropologist determined to get lost in the world of his subject, Clark, a journalist, went to live on a remote Indonesian island in the Savu Sea a decade ago so that he could get as close as possible to the Lamalerans, a tribe of 1,500 people who are some of the last hunter-gatherers on Earth. Their various clans subsist mostly off the meat of sperm whales, when they manage to harpoon and kill the large animals. Clark goes out to sea with them on their hunting boats, becomes emotionally involved in their conflicts, and sees firsthand the way modernity, in the form of cellphones and soap operas, encroaches on their isolated community. In the book, Clark recounts the lives of the Lamalerans with a deep respect while also spinning a wondrous, thrilling story out of their struggles to balance their traditions with all that entices them to step outside their communal way of life.   — G. B.

Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955

by Harald Jähner, translated by Shaun Whiteside

Two of the most unavoidable presences in German life after Hitler were rubble and a disproportionate number of women. Bombarded ruins were everywhere. Cities like Frankfurt that managed to quickly remove them would flourish. Others lived with the mess and stagnated. Women did most of the cleanup, as part of bucket brigades, because of a postwar imbalance in the population—many men never returned home from the front. For every 1,000 German men in 1950, there were 1,362 women. This is the off-kilter society dissected in Jähner’s highly readable cultural history. What makes his book so fascinating—and so poignant—is the relative banality of his subject: a country of one-night stands and wild dance parties, with little recognition of the atrocities it had committed. In fact, Germany largely wallowed in self-pity. Rendered with irony and based on skillful scholarship, Jähner’s book describes both a democratic rebirth and a moral evasion, uncomfortably and inextricably linked.  — F. F.

Feel Wonder About the Universe

by Alison Mills Newman

Mills Newman originally published Francisco , based on her life and love affair with her eventual husband, the director Francisco Newman, in 1974; the publisher New Directions rereleased it earlier this year. It’s told by a young Black actor in California, and the eponymous character is her lover, who is obsessively working on a documentary. The narrator is dissatisfied with Hollywood and her career, but she’s hungry for everything else life offers. She is a wise and insightful reader of people, and she and Francisco hang out with a lot of them, up and down the coast of California. Mills Newman’s novel feels like a long party, punctuated by difficult questions: about white standards of beauty, what it really means to be a revolutionary, how to be an artist, and how to be a woman partnered with a man. In the decades since it was published, Mills Newman has become a devout Christian and come to reject elements of the novel. These include, as she mentions in a new afterword, the “profanity, lifestyle of fornication, that i no longer endorse”—adding another layer of complexity to this curious, short book.   — M. C.

Elena Knows

by Claudia Piñeiro, translated by Frances Riddle

Elena Knows is a mystery novel, but it’s certainly not a traditional page-turner. It follows the narrator, Elena—a stubborn, cynical 63-year-old woman with Parkinson’s—over the course of a single excruciating day. She’s traveling by train to reach someone she believes can help her find her daughter’s killer, but the journey is near impossible: Even when her medication is working, she can’t lift her head to see where she’s going or walk without great effort. As her pills wear off, she risks being stranded wherever she happens to be at the time. Still, Elena’s not meant to be pitied; she’s flawed and funny and irreverent. (Her name for Parkinson’s is “fucking whore illness.”) Piñeiro’s book is smartly plotted and genuinely suspenseful, but her greatest achievement lies elsewhere: She describes Elena’s minute-by-minute experience so meticulously that I was almost able to comprehend—even just for a moment—the incredible multitude of perspectives that exist in this world at once. And isn’t that the point of fiction, after all?   — Faith Hill

by Victoria Kielland, translated by Damion Searls

The universe is a live wire in the hands of Byrnhild, later called Bella, later called Belle Gunness, in Kielland’s short, electric novel. Her book reimagines the real Gunness, a late-19th-century Norwegian immigrant and early American female serial killer, as a woman overcome by yearning. Belle can’t shut her eyes to the dazzling, splendid world; in Searls’s translation, the thoughts running through Belle’s head are breathless. “All this longing, this dripping love-sweat, it stuck to everything she did,” the narration frantically recounts. From the first pages she craves a blissful obliteration that can be found only through intimacy. After she moves from Norway to the American Midwest, her desire curdles into something more delusional that threatens everyone in her orbit—especially her lovers. Kielland gives readers scarce glimpses of lucidity as the novel takes on the tone of a dream. Belle has “the northern light tangled around her ribs”; she feels “the wet grass grow in her mouth.” Empathy slowly turns to horror, though, as it becomes clear that nothing can fill up the canyon inside her except an ultimate, bloody climax.   — E. S.

The Afterlives

by Thomas Pierce

The Afterlives is set in the near future, in a town full of holograms; the plot involves a haunted staircase, a “reunion machine” meant to reunite the living and the dead, and a physicist who argues that everything in existence is roughly 7 percent unreal. And yet, the protagonist—a 33-year-old loan officer named Jim—is a thoroughly normal guy. Even as the book’s events spin off in strange, supernatural directions, its real focus is on Jim and his developing relationship with Annie, a high-school girlfriend who’s recently been widowed; when they’re offered the chance to try the reunion machine, the story is less concerned with the details of that futuristic technology than it is with Annie’s grief and Jim’s quiet, persistent love for her. No matter how surreal things become, Pierce implies, people will keep moving forward in much the same way, living humdrum little lives together, wondering and hoping in the face of existential mystery. Our desperate curiosity about the afterlife is really about this life, and the people in it we don’t want to give up.   — F. H.

Mrs. Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf

Woolf’s 1925 fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway , is made for summer reading or rereading, overflowing with vitality. “What a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge!” Clarissa Dalloway thinks as she sets out to buy flowers on a June day in London. An upper-class English woman in her early 50s, she is preparing to throw a party with her husband that evening, not yet aware that two people she once loved passionately will be there. Woolf slips in and out of Clarissa’s consciousness, “tunneling” (her term) into other minds, too, as the day unfolds. The most notable of them belongs to Septimus Smith, a young World War I veteran who hallucinates, hears voices, and speaks of suicide—and yet who is, like Clarissa, a celebrant of life in all its abundance: For him, death offers the only way to preserve his vision of plenitude. Treat yourself to a beautiful supplement as well, The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway , full of notes, photos, and insights, and edited by the critic Merve Emre. But first, just pick up a paperback and dive into Woolf’s daring experiment to find out whether “the inside of the mind,” as she put it in her notebook, “can be made luminous.”   — Ann Hulbert

Her First American

by Lore Segal

The originality of this love story between two outsiders in 1950s New York City, Carter Bayoux and Ilka Weissnix, cannot be overstated. Bayoux is a middle-aged Black intellectual, a former United Nations official who seems to know everyone and can opine on every topic; he is also an alcoholic at the bottom of a deep pit. Weissnix is a 21-year-old Jewish refugee from Vienna who can barely speak English when the book begins, unsure if she has been orphaned by the war. The story of their affair is also a story about Ilsa’s American education: She learns from Bayoux how to function at the margins, how to succeed by charming, how never to lose a sense of one’s own distance from the center. The more she grows into her independence, though, the further he sinks, until it’s clear that he can’t be saved even as she begins to build a life of her own.   — G. B.

The Stone Face

by William Gardner Smith

Following the path of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Chester Himes, a Black American émigré arrives in 1950s Paris to find an existential freedom in the city’s cafés and bars, a space free of white leering and judgment. Simeon Brown, an aspiring painter and the protagonist of Smith’s deeply underappreciated novel, grew up in Philadelphia, where he suffered a brutal racist attack that left him blind in one eye, an incident that haunts him. While abroad, his reprieve from racial animus dissolves when he befriends a group of young Arabs struggling against France’s colonial atrocities in Algeria. These young men see Simeon as benefiting from a kind of whiteness, insofar as he’s free from the racial violence of their state. But Simeon’s Black expat friends believe taking up the Arab cause risks the very freedom they all came searching for. Trapped by a dizzying moral question, Simeon is forced to confront the shifting realities of identity and racial allegiance as he fights the personal demons that have followed him across the ocean.   — Oliver Munday

Hotel du Lac

by Anita Brookner

Hotel du Lac is technically a vacation novel. On the page, though, it’s much cooler and more dispassionate than that description implies. When Edith Hope, a 39-year-old romance writer, arrives at a Swiss hotel as fall begins for a period of self-imposed exile, the landscape is gray, the gardens are damp, and everything in her bedroom is “the color of overcooked veal.” Edith has committed a sin that Brookner withholds until midway through. Suffering through dreary evening dinners with the Hotel du Lac’s similarly compromised guests is her uncomfortable penance, until she receives an offer that forces her to think about how she really wants to live. The novel, Brookner’s fourth, drew uncharitable responses after it won the Booker Prize in 1984. But there’s fascinating, bracing tension amid the book’s women, each deemed unfit to be anywhere else: Monica, whose aristocratic husband bristles at her eating disorder; the narcissistic, flamboyant widow Iris Pusey and her stolid daughter, Jennifer; the elderly Madame de Bonneuil, deaf and desperately lonely. Edith can’t quite bond with any of them—she’s too brittle and skeptical for sisterhood—but each woman shades a different kind of existence that throws Edith’s final decision into sharper relief.   — Sophie Gilbert

Devour Something Totally New

by Emma Cline

Alex, the protagonist of Cline’s second novel, is an escort in her early 20s, desperate to evade paying both her New York City back rent and a menacing ex-boyfriend to whom she owes an apparently hefty sum of money. She’s been spending time on Long Island’s East End with her much-older boyfriend, Simon, who dumps her shortly after the book begins. But Alex doesn’t want to return to the city, where the only thing that awaits her is her debt. So she whiles away the week until Simon’s Labor Day party, where she plans to win him back. She’s broke, with a busted phone and nowhere to stay; she survives only by taking advantage of everyone who crosses her path. Some of her victims: a group of rowdy young house-sharers, an unstable teenage boy, a lonely young woman who thinks she’s found a new friend. Alex, a blatant (and terrifyingly skilled) user of people, maintains a chilly distance from each of them, even as she sleeps in their beds, eats their food, and takes their drugs. As the novel closes in on the party, Cline creates a feeling of sweaty anxiety—though her protagonist never panics.   — M. C.

Quietly Hostile

by Samantha Irby

No one describes the human body quite like Irby. She’s a poet of embarrassment: Her confessional style is frank and unashamed about all of its possible fleshy or sticky causes. (Straightforward lines like “Yes, I pissed my pants at the club” abound.) The discomfiting yet universal phenomena of aging, being ill, and having your body let you down are Irby’s most reliable subjects, and anaphylaxis, perimenopause, and diarrhea all get their moments in Quietly Hostile , her fourth essay collection. But the book is also a receptacle for her wildest dreams, such as what she would say to Dave Matthews if she could meet him backstage, or a self-indulgent meditation on how she would rewrite original Sex and the City episodes (fueled by her time as a writer on its reboot, And Just Like That ). When she wants to, Irby can evoke grief without blinking: She recounts, for example, her final, painful, conversation with her mother. But her writing about the great transition from being “young and lubricated” to middle-aged is reliably moving in its own way, and consistently hilarious.   — E. S.

by David Grann

The dramatic story of the 18th-century shipwreck of the HMS Wager seems almost ready-made for Grann, the best-selling New Yorker writer famous for dynamic narrative histories, such as his previous book, Killers of the Flower Moon . When the British ship gets shredded traversing the treacherous waves and rocks of Cape Horn on a quixotic mission to search for and plunder enemy Spanish boats, the survivors find themselves stranded on an island off the coast of Patagonia. What happens next can be neatly summed up by the fact that Grann has used a quotation from Lord of the Flies as part of his epigraph. His dogged search through ships’ logs and other contemporaneous accounts of the disaster and its mutinous aftermath has turned up the kind of sterling details that make his writing sing; he is also interested in the way these events were recorded and then recounted, with many different people trying to shape the memory of what happened. Grann simultaneously reconstructs history while telling a tale that is as propulsive and adventure-filled as any potboiler.   — G. B.

The Late Americans

by Brandon Taylor

A small, quiet act “had the indifference of love,” Taylor writes near the end of a chapter in The Late Americans . In this scene, a couple is on the outs; they each seem to feed off of needling the other. Yet even as the relationship fissures, Timo makes sure Fyodor gets home safe, driving behind him as Fyodor walks, unsteadily drunk, through the Iowa City night and back to his cold, blank apartment. Their distant togetherness echoes across the novel, where young poets, pianists, meatpackers, and aspiring investment bankers are clumped on and around a university campus, teetering through graduate courses, financial strain, hapless affairs, and the casual dread of not quite knowing their place in the world. The connections between Taylor’s multiple protagonists seem alternately random, doomed, and deeply romantic—much like the conditions that tie them to their creativity, and that keep them moving elliptically, tenderly, toward coming of age.   — Nicole Acheampong

Photography Credits from top to bottom: Guy Le Querrec/Magnum; Herb List / Magnum; JK / Magnum Photos; Herb List / Magnum; Clinton Cargill; Donovan Smallwood for The Atlantic

20 new books you need to read this summer

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There was a time when “summer books” meant popcorn reads you consumed in a sunbaked afternoon — disposable books devoured and left behind for the next hotel room guest.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the joy of a high-paced thriller, the passionate heights of romance or the horror that raises goosebumps in the heat. We love them ourselves. But summer is also a time for slowing down to taste lots of literary flavors, whether it’s the spiciness of a globe-trotting adventure, the sweetness of late-life companionship or the bite of salt-and-vinegar short stories. Summer 2024 is an overflowing picnic basket of choices.

Here are 20 forthcoming books — publishing between late May and August — that we recommend to kick off the reading season. For those of us unable to travel this year, nothing beats the simple pleasure of a great book with a cold drink on a summer afternoon.

Ah, summer. The time of year when school lets out, days grow long and grills fire up. Even in places like L.A., though, where rain can be scarce, there are plenty of reasons (too hot, too lazy, too sunburned) to stay inside and curl up with some AC. That’s where The Times’ 2024 Summer Preview comes in: As you check out our guides to the movies, TV shows and books we’re looking forward to this season, be sure to read the stories below about some of the most highly anticipated.

• We strap in with director George Miller, the ‘Mad Max’ mastermind, back with ‘Furiosa’
• ‘I relive it every night’: Jeremy Renner reflects on the day he almost died, and why he’s alive
• A gender-fluid childhood at an RV park in the desert. Zoë Bossiere wouldn’t change a thing

Kittentits By Holly Wilson Zando-Gillian Flynn Books: 368 pages, $28 (May 21)

Ten-year-old homeschooled Molly is bored with life at the nun-haunted House of Friends. Scuzzy daredevil Jeanie arrives at their living community after a disastrous fire, leaving Molly enthralled. When Jeanie fakes her own death, Molly runs away to find her at the 1992 Chicago World’s Fair and to connect with their dead moms. Molly learns a passel of thinpgs in this surrealist, carnivalesque bildungsroman.

Swift River By Essie Chambers Simon & Schuster: 304 pages, $28 (June 4)

Chambers’ funny debut is set in a 1980s New England mill town in decline. Seven years after her father’s disappearance, Diamond Newberry and her mother are struggling, but Diamond’s observations provide comic leavening. During the summer of 1987, her mom files to have Pop declared dead, which is when things get complicated. Diamond receives a letter from an unknown relative, which starts her on a path to learn her family — and the nation’s — history.

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May 2, 2024

Godwin By Joseph O’Neill Pantheon: 288 pages, $28 (June 4)

“The next Pelé” or “the next Messi” are words sure to ignite the fantasies of soccer fans anywhere. When tech writer Mark is contacted by his sports agent, half-brother Geoff, Mark leaves Pittsburgh to join him on a madcap adventure to find such a phenom: an African teenager known only as “Godwin.” O’Neill combines the brothers’ exploits with sharp observations about international business and issues like greenwashing and corruption that have tarnished the world’s game.

The Phoenix Ballroom By Ruth Hogan William Morrow: 320 pages, $19 (June 11)

How late is too late for a woman to change her life? In Hogan’s novel of life during widowhood, Venetia Hargreaves searches for a new self in her 70s. After 50 years of marriage, Venetia, who used to be an accomplished dancer, embraces her newly independent life. On a walk, she passes by an old building that had once been the Phoenix Ballroom, which she buys and restores. In hopes of a return to her youthful days, Venetia finds community in an entertaining motley crew of lost souls.

Summer Books Preview

20 books to keep you reading through August If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Sons of El Rey By Alex Espinoza Simon and Schuster: 384 pages, $29 (June 11)

Lucha libre took its hold in Mexico, and its high-flying masked performers are the superstars in its freestyle wrestling rings. In Espinoza’s entertaining and poignant novel, he writes of Ernesto Vega’s fame and fortune as a luchador known to his fans as El Rey Coyote. In East Los Angeles, his son, Freddy, fights to save his dad’s gym while Freddy’s gay son, Julian, seeks purpose. As Ernesto reaches the end of his life, his son and grandson will find their own answers in the streets of 1980s L.A. and the present reality of West Hollywood.

Bear By Julia Phillips Hogarth: 304 pages, $28 (June 25)

One of “Grimms’ Fairy Tales” inspired Phillips, a 2024 Guggenheim fellow and lauded author of “Disappearing Earth.” Sisters Sam and Elena live on an island off the coast of Washington, their birthplace that’s become a dead end for them both. When Sam spies a swimming bear from the ferry where she works, she is shocked, but it’s an even bigger surprise when the bear shows up at their house. A retelling of “Rose Red and Snow White,” “Bear” is a fantabulous delight.

Another North By Jennifer Brice Boreal Books: 240 pages, $18 (June 25)

Brice previously chronicled her Alaska youth in “Unlearning to Fly.” In “Another North,” she returns to Fairbanks as a divorced woman longing for a sense of home. The new collection takes readers from her life as a professor in New York‘s Leatherstocking Country to her days piloting small planes in the Alaska bush. Brice is a beautiful prose stylist, and her book navigates the turbulence of middle age with a steady — and elegant — hand.

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Pink Slime By Fernanda Trías Scribner: 240 pages, $24 (July 2)

Trías won the National Uruguayan Literature Prize in her native country, and “Pink Slime,” newly translated by Heather Cleary, is a great display of her chops. Set in a city diminished by plague and a poisonous algae bloom, the narrator focuses her attention on her remaining relationships. In writing about the ways folks hold together during difficult times, Trías untangles the myths and realities of resilience.

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore Riverhead: 496 pages, $30 (July 2)

Moore takes readers to an Adirondack summer camp in the mid-’70s. When Barbara Van Laar’s bunk turns up empty one morning, it sets off a frenzied search by the surrounding community. Barbara appears to have suffered the same fate as her brother, who disappeared 14 years prior. Moore’s familiarity with the Adirondacks — and the area’s long history as a playground of the rich — inspired this multilayered novel about wealthy wilderness camp people and the blue-collar folks who must accommodate them.

All This & More By Peng Shepherd William Morrow: 512 pages, $30 ` (July 9)

Shepherd, a finalist for a 2023 L.A. Times Book Prize, returns with another clever novel that plays with time and space. Here readers meet Marsh (short for Marshmallow), a 45-year-old woman who is disappointed with her lot in life. Happiness beckons when she is selected to star in a reality show where all of her past mistakes can be fixed, if she is willing to accept the consequences. Shepherd includes “choose your own adventure” moments for readers so Marsh’s fate is in their hands.

The Heart in Winter By Kevin Barry Doubleday: 256 pages, $28 (July 9)

Irish Booker Prize nominee Kevin Barry traverses the Atlantic in this story set in 1891 Montana. Immigrant workers toil in the copper mines that build Butte’s fortunes. In the midst of the archetypical frontier town, Tom Rourke fuels himself by drinking, doping and writing. When he falls head over heels for the mine captain’s new wife, Polly, a cadre of crazy Cornishmen take off in hot pursuit of the poet and his muse.

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April 1, 2024

Bad Tourists by Caro Carver Avid Reader: 336 pages, $29 (July 9)

In addition to malfunctioning airplanes, one of the hazards of traveling is getting caught up in a group of bad tourists. In Carver’s tropical paradise of a book, a trio of friends heads to the Maldives to make over their 40-something lives. What should be fun turns dangerous when a body shows up on the white beaches outside their resort. In both a romp and a thriller, Carver immerses readers in secret-filled waters.

The Striker and the Clock: On Being in the Game By Georgia Cloepfil Riverhead: 208 pages, $27 (July 16)

A watershed moment in women’s sports this past spring has cast a light on the athletes who, instead of riches, face uncertain futures after graduation. In this riveting memoir by professional soccer player Cloepfil, she takes readers on a trip with her to find a living playing in South Korea, Australia, Lithuania and other far-flung locations. A paean to the beautiful game, the book chronicles how Cloepfil overcame adversity to strike joy.

Sugar on the Bones By Joe R. Lansdale Mulholland: 336 pages, $29 (July 16)

Lansdale makes a triumphant return to his Hap and Leonard novels with this scorcher. When Minnie Polson comes to the duo’s PI agency seeking help, things go south after an ill-timed remark causes her to storm out. She later turns up dead and the guilt-stricken pair seeks her killer. Minnie’s family — full of eccentricities and petty grievances — are the unusual suspects.

The Bright Sword By Lev Grossman Viking: 688 pages, $35 (July 16)

Grossman follows up his wildly successful “The Magicians” trilogy with this tale of misfits at King Arthur’s Round Table. Arthur is dead and just a few of his knights remain in Camelot. Enter Collum — two weeks too late to serve Arthur — a young knight who teams up with Merlin’s former apprentice and Sir Bedivere, Sir Palomides and Sir Dagonet. Their journey through a land riven by conflict in search of Arthur’s successor will reveal the country’s bloody origins.

Instead of writing about Princess Diana, Chris Bohjalian opted for her Vegas impersonator

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March 19, 2024

The Wilds By Sarah Pearse Pamela Dorman Books: 400 pages, $30 (July 16)

Detective Elin Warner can’t get a break from her job. Each time she goes on a vacation or retreat, murder follows. She travels to Portugal to immerse herself in nature but her sojourn is interrupted by a young woman’s disappearance. The missing woman’s map leads Elin into the wilderness where scenes of great beauty turn dark and threatening. Pearse has written another intriguing page-turner.

Queen B: The Story of Anne Boleyn, Witch Queen By Juno Dawson Penguin: 224 pages, $18 (July 23)

Dawson is the queen of young adult fiction in the U.K., and her nonfiction works have explored LGBTQ+ issues. Set in the court of Henry VIII, “Queen B” follows Lady Grace Fairfax as she seeks the traitors who betrayed Anne Boleyn. When witchfinders are sent to root out members of the condemned queen’s coven, court intrigue follows. Juno summons a tale that is the perfect length for a sultry weekend read.

The Modern Fairies By Clare Pollard Avid Reader: 272 pages, $28 (July 23)

Those in search of a bawdy fairy tale should look no further than Pollard’s novel set during the reign of Louis XIV. Intellectuals from Versailles gather at the home of Madame Marie D’Aulnoy. They bring court gossip and romantic desire with them, and they entertain each other with ribald tales of missing glass slippers, beauties and beasts, while remaining oblivious to the wolf that waits outside their salon door. Pollard imagines the origins of many of the tales gathered by Charles Perrault.

The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982 By Chris Nashawaty Flatiron: 304 pages, $30 (July 30)

The summer of 1982 took moviegoers on epic rides through the sci-fi worlds of a future L.A. and the Australian desert, and introduced a lost extraterrestrial trying to get home. In all, eight sci-fi adventures were released that summer, and Nashawaty, former Entertainment Weekly film critic, expertly covers their behind-the-scenes conflicts and (not surprising) ego clashes. Hollywood boldly went where it hadn’t gone before and Nashawaty chronicles the journeys.

Mystery Lights By Lena Valencia Tin House: 256, $18 (Aug. 6)

Kelly Link has praised the “gorgeous” “Mystery Lights.” It’s the debut short story collection by former L.A. resident Valencia. Among the collection’s delicious bonbons are stories about an anxious screenwriter trapped in an SUV; 20 women who need a retreat from the business retreat they’re on; and an obsessed artist who longs to capture an otherworldly light. In the umbra of these darkly tinged stories, readers will experience late-night fears and the sweet relief of daylight.

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Critics share their picks for this summer’s most anticipated reads

Jeffrey Brown Jeffrey Brown

Anne Azzi Davenport Anne Azzi Davenport

Alison Thoet Alison Thoet

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It's summertime and the reading is easy. At least, we hope you’ll all get the time to enjoy books during vacation and travel. Jeffrey Brown is here to help and speaks to two big-time readers who offer some guidance. It’s part of our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

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Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Amna Nawaz:

It's summertime, and the reading is easy. At least, we hope you will get the time to enjoy some books during vacation and travel.

Here to help Jeffrey Brown. He speaks to two big-time readers, who offer some guidance.

It's part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown:

We look at some of the many books out or soon out for your summer reading pleasure with Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR's "Fresh Air," and Gilbert Cruz, books editor at The New York Times.

It's nice to see both of you.

Gilbert, I'm going to start with you.

A couple of summer books, however you want to define those. Why don't you start us off?

Gilbert Cruz, Books Editor, The New York Times:

So there are two books I want to start off with.

The first is called "The Five-Star Weekend." It's by an author named Elin Hilderbrand, and she's a summer staple. This is a woman, an author who has written almost 30 books, most of which are set on Nantucket Island. She's a perennial bestseller.

This one involves a recently widowed food blogger who brings a bunch of friends together on Nantucket to sort of help her heal. I have read many of these books. I have read one a summer for the past many summers, and they all share similar themes and similar dynamics, and they're quite entertaining. And I'm looking forward to reading this one very much on my vacation soon.

Another book I'm looking forward to this summer is "Crook Manifesto" by Colson Whitehead. Many of your viewers probably know Colson Whitehead's name. He's a two-time Pulitzer winner. He's won for very serious books about the Black experience in America, "Underground Railroad" and "The Nickel Boys."

But he's worked across many genres, and he has written a heist novel. And this is a sequel to that heist novel "Harlem Shuffle," which came out a couple of years ago. That novel was set in 1960s Harlem, and this one is set in 1970s Harlem.

And if you know anything about New York in the 1970s, it was a grimy place, a dangerous place, but it was also a very exciting place. So I'm looking forward to seeing how Colson Whitehead sort of tackles that time period.

Maureen Corrigan.

Maureen Corrigan, NPR Book Critic:

One novel that I think really is perfect for summer is Luis Alberto Urrea's novel "Good Night, Irene."

Usually, he's writing about issues of the U.S.-Mexican border. But here he's drawing on a story that derives from his mother's experiences during World War II. She was a volunteer with the Red Cross. She was a so-called Donut Dolly. She and another woman rode around in a truck delivering coffee and donuts to servicemen.

I had no idea — my dad was in World War II, and I had no idea that these women did more than just meet soldiers at the railroad station. His mother followed Patton's Army behind the lines in Battle of the Bulge. I mean, so we're kind of getting a Herman Wouk-type big history, but also with a lot of twists and turns, and very affecting.

So, "Good Night, Irene" is one of my recommendations.

And then Lorrie Moore's "I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home." Lorrie Moore, there's nobody like her, the way she plays with language, her kind of warm, but absurdist view of life. She's telling a double story here. One is a story set in the 19th century, and it has something to do with Abraham Lincoln.

So anybody who's read George Saunders' "Lincoln in the Bardo," this kind of has that feel to it. And then the other story she's telling, it's very up to the minute about a young man who's lost his lover. And it plays into that fantasy of, if only I had a few more hours with this person I have loved. And they go on a road trip together, he and his dead lover.

Sounds very uplifting for summer.

Maureen Corrigan:

It's great.

Gilbert, I don't know if — does your reading change during the summer or do you turn to other genres, other things that you want to — give us a couple of other picks.

Gilbert Cruz:

I love the horror genre. And there's a young author, a Mexican-Canadian author named Silvia Moreno-Garcia, who has a new book out this year called "Silver Nitrate."

She's had some wonderful titles the past couple of years, "The Daughter of Doctor Moreau." A very big one in 2020 was "Mexican Gothic." And this one is set in the 1990s Mexico City film scene. It stars a sound editor, her best friend, who is a soap opera actor, and this cult horror director that they come across who believes he's been cursed by a piece of film that a Nazi occultist sort of handled.

It's spooky and it's scary, but it's also set in Mexico City. So you have both the cool and the hot. It's something that I'm looking forward to checking out this summer.

You know, Maureen, you have both mentioned some big-name authors. Colson Whitehead, we heard Lorrie Moore.

I noticed — I don't know if this is different — but there seem to be a number of novels coming out by some well-known names.

Ann Patchett, Richard Ford, Isabel Allende.

Any that you want to tell us about or…

You know, I'm looking forward — who could not to — Ann Patchett's "Tom Lake," in which she kind of plays with Chekhov's three sisters. These are three sisters who isolate at a family cherry orchard during the pandemic. So there's that.

Richard Ford. he's bringing his Frank Bascombe novels to a close with a fifth novel called "Be Mine." What an achievement. I love Richard Ford. I love his writing. And to think that he's sort of saying farewell to this character whose life has followed his own through the seasons of his own life is really touching.

So, I'm also looking forward to James McBride, "The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store." He too is so wonderful at combining social commentary. This novel is set in the 1970s in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, a Jewish and African American community. But a body is found under the floor of a building site.

So that's something I'm really looking forward to. It does seem as though more big-name authors like Colson Whitehead too are now publishing in the summer. And summary used to be more lighter fare, but I'm happy to see that.

Let me ask you with both of you one final thing.

A lot of us, a lot of people use the summer to reread an old favorite or perhaps a classic. I don't know if either of you do that. Gilbert, is there anything that you want to go back to?

I wish I could say that there was. In this job, I feel incredibly guilty if I'm going back and rereading books.

Oh, you're not allowed to anymore, huh?

No. No, it's in the contract.

But there are classics that I have not read. It embarrasses me to say so. So, is this the summer that I finally get to "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens? Is this the summer when I finally get to "The House of Mirth"? I don't know. You know, hope springs eternal. I'm hoping that I — this might be the one.

All right, Maureen, you have one or two?

This is a big year for Willa Cather, who we're celebrating the 150th anniversary of her birth. This year, "A Lost Lady" celebrates 100 years of its publication. That was made into a film in the '30s with Barbara Stanwyck. And Cather hated the film so much, she wrote a clause into her will: No more films of any of my novels.

Oh, I have heard that from other novelists who don't like what happened to their…

But I have been rereading Cather, "One of Ours," her novel about World War I, and "A Lost Lady." And, as a native New Yorker, I came late to Cather. But these novels of the Great Plains are really spectacular.

All right, that's great, some old books and some new books.

Maureen Corrigan, Gilbert Cruz, thank you both very much.

Thank you. Thank you.

And you can find the full list of book recommendations online at PBS.org/NewsHour.

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The 33 Must-Read Books of Summer 2022

Buzzy novels, compulsively readable non-fiction, and a few deliciously guilty pleasures.

Every item on this page was chosen by a Town & Country editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy.

This season, you have no excuse for being without something good to read. Offerings include explosive novels, revealing memoirs, brilliant biographies, and everything in between. No matter what you like to read, there's a title coming out this summer that's sure to be just what you're looking for.

Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me

New York Times-bestselling author Ada Calhoun offers a must-read memoir about artistic ambition and a complicated father-daughter relationship. Calhoun’s journey began as a simple mission, to finish what her father, art critic Peter Schjeldah, had started—a biography detailing the life of poet Frank O’Hara. However, what ensued was an unimagined trip down memory lane, where Calhoun not only discovered O’Hara’s past, but confronted her father’s, and her own.

On Gin Lane

If you’re looking to dive into historical fiction this summer, look no further than Brooke Lea Foster’s On Gin Lane . It’s the summer of 1957, and New York City socialite Lee Farrows seems to have it all: a handsome fiancé, a load of money, and a beachside hotel on Gin Lane in Southampton. But after a tragic incident occurs during the hotel’s opening weekend, Lee’s picture perfect life is suddenly shattered and she is forced to reckon with herself.

Belle Greene

Alexandra Lapierre’s Belle Greene tells the true story of Belle da Costa Greene, a librarian and intellectual living in New York City during the early 1900s. At the time, Greene was best known for managing the personal library of J. P. Morgan. But behind her monumental achievement was a well kept secret, her race. Greene was in fact a Black woman and the daughter of a famous Black activist, passing as white to experience freedom and control her own destiny.

The Midcoast: A Novel

The Midcoast , one of the most anticipated novels of the year, follows a chilling story of crime and drama small town Damariscotta. After Andrew returns to Damariscotta and visits old acquaintances Ed and Steph Thatch, he’s impressed by their lifestyle, and maybe even a bit jealous too. But not everything is as it seems, and Andrew soon discovers that the Thatches are hiding dangerous secrets.

Cult Classic

Sloane Crosley's Cult Classic is unputdownable. The story centers on Lola, out to dinner in Chinatown, in New York City, when she runs into on of her ex boyfriends. Soon, she bumps into another. Before long, Lola is running into nearly every person she's dated, and it's no longer just coincidences. No spoilers, but this is a fun, gripping read on relationships, modern love, and what closure truly looks like.

Nuclear Family: A Novel

The latest from Ottessa Moshfegh ( Eileen, My Year of Rest and Relaxation ) is a story of secrets and power set in a medieval village, where a young boy growing up without a mother finds himself on an unexpected path. Over the course of an eventful year, he'll question everything he's been told, find himself at odds with the most terrifying man he knows, and uncover truths that will change the course of his live forever.

The Angel of Rome: And Other Stories

Jess Walter’s intriguing and witty collection of short fiction stories shines a light on the lives of a diverse range of characters experiencing existential crises while searching for inspiration. Despite the fact that The Angel of Rome: And Other Stories is fictional, it’s unequivocally relatable and insightful, perhaps even encouraging the reader to do a little bit of their own introspective thinking.

Tracy Flick Can't Win: A Novel

When Tom Perrotta's Election (and the beloved movie it inspired) was released, it made the bulldozer of an overachiever Tracy Flick into a pop-culture touchstone. More than two decades later, Perrotta is revisiting Flick in this dark, funny new novel, which finds her back in high school as an assistant principal whose life isn't quite as perfect as she might have planned. It's a witty, sly look at the things we want, the people who get in our way, and how much of it really matters. We can't be the only ones keeping our fingers crossed for a big-screen adaptation.

City of Likes

When Megan Chernoff and her family move to New York City, she isn't expecting to fall in with a crowd of posh and polished social-media influencers. But when one of the set's queen bees takes Megan under her wing, a picture-perfect world seems to be at her fingertips. It's worth remembering, however, that things are rarely as they seem—especially on Instagram. In Jenny Mollen's observant novel, the world of momfluencers is a dazzling and dangerous backdrop for a story about friendship, deceit, ambition, and how we choose to let the world see us.

Horse: A Novel

Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks's latest novel spans centuries. Set in 1850 Kentucky, 1954 New York City, and 2019 Washington, D.C., Brooks charts the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred race horse named Lexington. The story begins with an enslaved groom named Jarett and goes through Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, who teamed up to understand the Black horsemen lost to history.

Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks

Anything Patrick Radden Keefe is a must-read— Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty and Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland are his two other books—and his newest are no exception. Well, it's not quite new: Rogues is twelve of his New Yorker articles in one collection, featuring profiles of everyone from the late Anthony Bourdain to an international black market arms dealer. Nevertheless, a must read for anyone who loves a good story.

Growing Up Getty: The Story of America's Most Unconventional Dynasty

In this deep dive on one of the world's richest and most storied families, T&C contributor James Reginato looks closely not only at how the Getty family's riches and influence were built—including impressive and unprecedented access to diaries, love letters, and more—but uncovers at a new generation of family members who are redefining what it means to be a modern scion and making their own way in the world, famous last name or not.

Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence

Nearly two decades after first profiling the now-disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein for the New Yorker , Ken Auletta couldn't stop thinking about him. Despite the reporting in both The New Yorker and the New York Times that eventually toppled Weinstein, Auletta wanted to explore more deeply how his subject became who he did and why he was able to get away with his barely concealed behavior for so long. In this fascinating, revealing new book, the writers gets to the heart of how Harvey was made, and the ways he built a world that protected him from consequences—until, of course, it didn't.

Learning to Talk: Stories

Hilary Mantel's sprawling Wolf Hall was a worldwide sensation—a best selling trilogy that spawned a television series and a Broadway show. In the author's latest, she goes in a much more succinct direction ; Learning to Talk is a collection of short stories that put all of the author's skill and style on display in a more truncated form.

The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach

For a book that's not a thriller, this could be one of the scariest beach reads imaginable this summer. That's because Sarah Stodola's journalistic look at beach resorts—their history, their impact, and how they've changed the world of luxury travel—pulls back the curtain on paradise and reveals some of the shocking truths behind the surf and sand.

Sisters in Resistance: How a German Spy, a Banker's Wife, and Mussolini's Daughter Outwitted the Nazis

Italy's Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, kept secret diaries during World War II, and these documents were key evidence used by the prosecution at the post-war Nuremberg Trials—but they almost didn't make it there. Ciano's wife (and Benito Mussolini's daughter), Edda, along with Hilde Beetz, a German spy, and Frances De Chollet, an "accidental spy," worked to make sure the diaries were published for use by the allies. A little-known history finally comes to light in Sisters in Resistance .

Growing Joy: The Plant Lover's Guide to Cultivating Happiness (and Plants)

Whether you're actually tending a garden this summer or simply dreaming of one, this must-read book from Maria Failla (creator of the hit Bloom & Grow Radio podcast) shares not only sage advice for living with and caring for plants, but delves into the science behind what makes cohabitating with them so beneficial.

Rough Draft: A Memoir

“By the time I was two years old, I knew to yell ‘Story! Story!’ at the squawks of my parents’ police scanner. By four, I could hold a microphone and babble my way through a kiddie news report. By the time I was in high school, though, my parents had lost it all. Their marriage. Their careers. Their reputations,” MSNBC anchor Katy Tur writes in her memoir. In Rough Draft , she details her childhood as the daughter of journalist parents, and her career from local reporter to national correspondent.

Can't Look Away

This thriller from the talented author of Tell Me Lies (which is currently being developed into a series for Hulu) follows Molly, whose life in an affluent Connecticut town seems to offer everything she could want, but still somehow leaves her wanting. When a bolt of excitement comes care of a new-to-town friend, Molly's outlook improves—until it becomes clear that this newcomer has an agenda, and Molly's buried past is threatening to catch up with her and fast.

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23 books to read this summer

Whether you’re traveling or catching the sun at home in the coming months, here are 23 books we’ve enjoyed this year that make for good summer reading.

‘Age of Vice’

By Deepti Kapoor

Fiction | This lush thriller swings back and forth through time and up and down the social ladder, from the hovels to the palaces of contemporary India. On the first page, a Mercedes speeding through Delhi careens off the street and kills five people. That deadly accident ricochets through one of India’s most powerful crime families — and from there the intrigue never pauses to take a breath. (Riverhead, $30)

Review: Deepti Kapoor’s thriller starts 2023 with a bang

‘Alexandra Petri’s U.S. History: Important American Documents (I Made Up)’

By Alexandra Petri

Fiction | Washington Post columnist Petri shows what happens when a gifted comedic writer takes bona fide pieces of history and uses them as occasions to go brilliantly bananas. The titles of these 84 short texts include “Richard Nixon Tapes But Just the Parts Where He’s Yelling at Checkers” and “The Team at Build-a-Bear Responds on the Thirteenth Anniversary of 9/11.” (Norton, $27.95)

Review: Alexandra Petri saves U.S. history as only she can: By making it silly

‘The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions’

By Jonathan Rosen

Nonfiction | We know how this haunting story will end: with a murder that made national headlines. Rosen was friends with the eventual killer, Michael Laudor, from the time they were 10 years old. Throughout this book — part memoir, part manifesto — Rosen asks uncomfortable but crucial questions, some of them unanswerable, all of them compelling, and the result is an incisive but intimate tour de force. (Penguin Press, $32)

Review: Michael Laudor was a Yale golden boy. Then a psychotic break led to tragedy.

‘Birnam Wood’

By Eleanor Catton

Fiction | In the decade since Catton published her gargantuan Booker Prize-winning novel, “The Luminaries,” she dabbled in film, adapting the latest version of “Emma” (2020) for the silver screen. Her new novel is a sleek contemporary thriller featuring a group of guerrilla gardeners that dramatizes political, technical and environmental crises with delicious wit. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28)

Review: In ‘Birnam Wood,’ the end of the world creeps up fast

‘Collected Works’

By Charles Portis

Fiction | An ex-Marine from the Texas Panhandle adopts a performing chicken on a long bus ride home from New York. A touchingly ineffectual pseudo-religion turns out to harbor real cosmic truth. A hard-nosed, narrowly reformed antiques smuggler finds unlikely love in rural Mexico. These are the sorts of things that occur in the singular novels of Portis. “True Grit” and the rest of his funny, strange novels are gathered here, along with his essays and journalism. (Library of America, $45)

Review: Charles Portis, model outsider, gets the canon treatment

‘Confidence’

By Rafael Frumkin

Fiction | “Confidence” begins with a scrappy underdog down on his luck. Frumkin’s narrator, the spiky but vulnerable Ezra Green, meets fellow grifter Orson Ortman, the handsome and magnetic Jay Gatsby to his Nick Carraway, and the two try to con the wellness industry. This social satire in the form of a crime novel is a propulsive, cheeky, eat-the-rich page-turner to satisfy the craving for a well-crafted caper. (Simon & Schuster, $27.99)

Review: ‘Confidence’ skewers the rich in a most satisfying, clever way

‘The Covenant of Water’

By Abraham Verghese

Fiction | The author of “Cutting for Stone” delivers a rich, heartfelt novel, a lavish smorgasbord of genealogy, medicine and love affairs, tracing the evolution of a family in India from 1900 through the 1970s. The family’s dark secret? “In every generation … at least one member has drowned unexpectedly” — even though those who sense they are afflicted with “The Condition” try their utmost never to get wet. (Grove, $32)

Review: ‘The Covenant of Water’ is a rich, heartfelt novel

‘Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You: A Memoir’

By Lucinda Williams

Nonfiction | The great singer-songwriter Williams still considers herself a rebel at age 70, and her memoir tracks her early life and her late path to fame. She was born in Lake Charles, La., the grandchild of Methodist preachers on both sides, and lived in 12 different towns by the time she was 18. Songwriting was a way for her to process her traumatic early years, to talk about it without really talking about it, even if she didn’t always realize it. (Crown, $28.99)

Review: Lucinda Williams hit fame at 45. Her memoir explores the before and after.

‘The Guest’

By Emma Cline

Fiction | The second novel by Cline (her debut was “The Girls”) is a quintessentially American tale that explores desire and deception from the point of view of a 22-year-old escort named Alex. The story opens in late August, when Alex has fled danger in New York City to find refuge in the Hamptons. We follow her with a mixture of thrill and dread as she lurks around the island, appearing wherever hosts are too polite to question her presence. (Random House, $28)

Review: Emma Cline sets a smoldering thriller in the Hamptons

‘Happy Place’

By Emily Henry

Fiction | “Happy Place” may be Henry’s most serious novel to date, but this book from the queen of romance still deserves a place in your beach bag. When a group of friends convenes in Maine for vacation, one couple — still not over each other — can’t bear to let everyone know they’ve broken up. “Happy Place,” in typical Henry fashion, brings readers wit, charm and heart, satisfying to the last page. (Berkley, $27)

Review: ‘Happy Place’ shows that Emily Henry is still queen of romance

‘King: A Life’

By Jonathan Eig

Nonfiction | The most compelling account of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life in a generation, Eig’s new biography draws on more than 200 interviews, including with scores of people old enough to have known or observed King, and numerous accounts gathered by other journalists and scholars, some of them never published before. The result is a deeply reported psychobiography, infused with the narrative energy of a thriller. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35)

Review: A major new bio of Martin Luther King Jr. balances saint and sinner

‘Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages’

By Carmela Ciuraru

Nonfiction | “The problem with being a wife is being a wife,” Ciuraru writes in her new book, which tracks the marriages of five literary couples, including Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl. A tour de force that focuses on “how women have defined themselves through or in opposition to men,” the book delves into these colorful relationships as a way to show how not to be married. (Harper, $32)

Review: Lessons on marriage from five spark-filled literary pairings

‘Lone Women’

By Victor LaValle

Fiction | Sci-fi and fantasy lovers will enjoy LaValle’s latest novel, which strays from his typical urban settings and ventures into the Great Plains. The story’s heroine, Adelaide Henry, sets out from Southern California in 1915 to live in Montana, lugging a trunk that contains a literal demon. LaValle adroitly intertwines the eerie fairy tale with early-20th-century historical realism. (One World, $27)

Review: ‘Lone Women’ recasts the American frontier narrative

By Jessica George

Fiction | In George’s striking debut novel, 25-year-old Maddie, a Londoner of Ghanaian descent, strives to find her place in the world as she balances the pressures of filial duty with a yearning for independence. With its lively self-referential tone, its many lists and texts, “Maame” has a Bridget Jones vibe, but with richer substance. (St. Martin’s, $27.99)

Review: In ‘Maame,’ a dependable daughter finally gets to live her own life

‘Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma’

By Claire Dederer

Nonfiction | How badly must an artist behave before he is canceled? Should any artist be canceled, ever? Is there a proper way to balance our admiration for their work with our loathing of their deeds? These are the questions Dederer considers in this vital, exhilarating book. She shows the queasy, perhaps unresolvable back-and-forth we engage in when we consider these issues. (Knopf, $28)

Review: Turns out, your favorite artist is a creep or a criminal. Now what?

‘My Father’s House’

By Joseph O’Connor

Fiction | O’Connor’s new novel is a gripping drama featuring the unlikeliest of heroes, one whom the reader roots for every step of the way. It’s based on the true story of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, an Irish envoy to the Vatican who assembled a ragtag group to smuggle Jews out of Italy during World War II. This is a hugely satisfying book, from its explosive opening to its bittersweet end. (Europa, $27)

Review: In the gripping ‘My Father’s House,’ a priest takes on the Nazis

‘Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World’

By Malcolm Harris

Nonfiction | Palo Alto: land of Stanford University, heart of Silicon Valley. In his new book, Harris does for the city of 70,000 what Mike Davis’s classic “City of Quartz” did for Los Angeles, looking past the fables about the place to its darker underbelly. Harris narrates the town’s evolution and influence throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and theorizes, above all, that it is defined by its rapacious, exploitative approach to capitalism and profit. (Little, Brown, $36)

Review: A new history unveils the exploitative origins of the tech giants

‘The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos’

By Jaime Green

Nonfiction | Humanity has entered its singleton era, searching for life in a universe where we fear there is none. In this wide-ranging and delightful survey, science journalist Green argues persuasively that it’s the search that matters; looking for friends among the stars is what defines us as human. Inventing aliens — in science and in fiction — gives us a vantage point from which to see ourselves anew and figure out where we’d like to go next. (Hanover Square, $32.99)

Review: In the search for extraterrestrial life, we are the real aliens

‘Romantic Comedy’

By Curtis Sittenfeld

Fiction | Sittenfeld’s novel is set in the writers’ room at “The Night Owls,” a show modeled on “Saturday Night Live.” Its narrator, Sally Milz, is a misanthrope who has given up on the idea of romantic partnership. But when a pop star hosts the show, sparks fly and complications ensue. Sally is hyper-aware of the conventions of romantic comedy, and she knows full well that real life is no fairy tale. But could it be this time? (Random House, $28)

Review: ‘Romantic Comedy’ finds love in an SNL-like place

‘Small Mercies’

By Dennis Lehane

Fiction | Lehane’s latest novel visits a setting similar to that of his powerful “Mystic River” (2001). “Small Mercies” takes place in Boston in 1974, when a federal judge has ordered the busing of students to desegregate the city’s public high schools. The suspenseful story tracks a fearless mother’s search for her missing daughter. Lehane’s sociological precision gives this book a gravitas seldom found in crime novels. (Harper, $30)

Review: Dennis Lehane’s masterful new novel revisits the terrain of ‘Mystic River’

‘The Terraformers’

By Annalee Newitz

Fiction | This work of science fiction takes place in such a distant future — 60,000 years from now — that its author is free to imagine an entirely different Earth. The result is a thrilling world that will leave readers stunned. This generously overstuffed tale has enough ideas and incidents to populate half a dozen lesser science fiction books. (Tor, $27.99)

Review: ‘The Terraformers’ is a dazzling look at the distant future

‘The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder’

By David Grann

Nonfiction | Grann, a master of narrative nonfiction (including “The Lost City of Z” and “Killers of the Flower Moon”), takes to the sea in this relentless, horror-filled story of an 18th-century disaster. “The Wager” is a maritime tale in which everything goes wrong over and over — and over — again. It’s a tightly written, relentless, blow-by-blow account that is hard to put down. (Doubleday, $30)

Review: Anything can go wrong at sea. On this voyage, everything did.

‘The White Lady’

By Jacqueline Winspear

Fiction | Winspear, whose Maisie Dobbs detective series has achieved cult status, brings fans a new character to love: Elinor White, the enigmatic war hero at the center of this stand-alone novel. Elinor’s war with London’s most-feared crime family opens the door for Winspear to write about the dark side of post-World War II Britain. (Harper, $30)

Review: Fans of Maisie Dobbs now have a new heroine to admire

An earlier version of this article misidentified the publisher of "Maame," by Jessica George. It is St. Martin's, not Grove.

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Books We Love

20 new books hitting shelves this summer that our critics can't wait to read.

Meghan Collins Sullivan

June is around the corner, meaning summer is almost here! As we look forward to travel and staycations, plane rides and trips to the beach, we've asked our book critics for some advice: What upcoming fiction and nonfiction are they most looking forward to reading?

Their picks range from memoirs to sci-fi and fantasy to translations, love stories and everything in between. Here's a look:

Daughter of the Merciful Deep by Leslye Penelope

I was hooked when I first saw the gorgeous cover for Daughter of the Merciful Deep by Leslye Penelope. But the novel's premise put it at the top of my summer reading list. Penelope is known for unforgettable characters, world-building, beautiful writing and robust storytelling. Her latest work, inspired by actual events — the drowned Black towns of the American South — promises a magical, mythical and powerful tale of a young woman's quest to save her town. A historical fantasy must-read. (June 4) — Denny Bryce

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The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan

The Future Was Color by Patrick Nathan has everything I look for in a book: a unique and startling voice, a queer protagonist and a deep understanding of a particular time and place. George — once György — is a gay Hungarian immigrant working as a screenwriter in McCarthy-era Hollywood, occasionally fantasizing about his officemate, Jack. When a once-famous actress named Madeline invites George to stay and write at her spacious Malibu house, she won't take no for an answer — and so George finds himself in a hedonistic milieu where pleasure, politics and strong personalities intermingle. (June 4) — Ilana Masad

Mirrored Heavens: Between Earth & Sky, Book 3 by Rebecca Roanhorse

Rebecca Roanhorse is one of my auto-read authors — and one major reason is because of her fire Between Earth and Sky series. That trilogy comes to a stunning, fevered conclusion with Mirrored Heavens . All of the characters you love, hate and love to hate will converge on the city of Tova. Get ready for an epic battle between ancient gods, their human avatars and the mortals caught in between. (June 4) — Alex Brown

Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water by Amorina Kingdon

You may know about 52 Blue , whose vocalizations likely go unheard by some other whales; it captured worldwide sympathy and became a pop-culture metaphor. But did you know all whale song is critically disrupted by ships? If that gets you wondering, keep an eye out for Sing Like Fish , which promises to illuminate the fragile symphony of the deep. (June 4) — Genevieve Valentine

Consent: A Memoir by Jill Ciment

I look forward to reading Jill Ciment's Consent and to the discussions it's sure to provoke. In this follow-up memoir to Half a Life, Ciment reconsiders what she wrote 25 years ago about her teenage affair and marriage to her art teacher, 30 years her senior. Half a Life was written before the #MeToo movement, and before her husband died at the age of 93 after 45 years of marriage. Consent promises a fuller picture. (June 11) — Heller McAlpin

Do What Godmother Says by L.S. Stratton

As we continue to experience the frenzy of Harlem Renaissance celebrations, commemorations and historical resonance, Do What Godmother Says by L.S. Stratton is the perfect addition to the litany of works set in this artistic period this year. It examines the intense and frequently degenerating relationship between patrons and artists during this intellectual and cultural movement. In this dual-timeline gothic thriller, a modern writer discovers a family heirloom painting by a Harlem Renaissance artist, which connects her family to a mysterious past. This historical novel is one I'm eager to read because it deftly exposes the layers of creative ownership, especially when race and wealth are involved. (June 11) — Keishel Williams

Horror Movie: A Novel by Paul Tremblay

Paul Tremblay is one of the most entertaining and innovative voices in contemporary fiction regardless of genre. Horror Movie , a story about a cursed movie that never came out and is about to get a remake, is a love letter to horror novels and horror movies, as well as a tense narrative that will redefine the cursed film subgenre. Tremblay is one of the modern masters of horror, and this new novel promises to be packed with the author's distinctive voice, knack for ambiguity and intrigue, and superb atmosphere. (June 11) — Gabino Iglesias

Cue The Sun! The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum

Every so often there's a nonfiction title I covet like it's the next installment in my favorite mystery series. This summer it's Cue the Sun! Based on in-depth interviews with more than 300 sources from every aspect of the production process, this book is a cultural history of the genre that ate American entertainment, from New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum. It combines the appeal of a page-turning thriller and the heft of serious scholarship. Juicy and thoughtful, it's a must-read for anyone interested in television or popular culture. (June 25) — Carole V. Bell

The Undermining of Twyla and Frank by Megan Bannen

In this return to the delightfully wacky world established in one of my personal top-five romance novels of all time, The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy , Megan Bannen takes on the friends to lovers trope with a combination of madcap joie de vivre and the exhausted practicality of a mom who's had enough. Also, there are dragons! (July 2) — Caitlyn Paxson

The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş

I am eagerly awaiting Ayşegül Savaş' The Anthropologists . Born in Istanbul, Savaş has lived in England, Denmark and the U.S. also and now resides in France; in this novel she takes up themes of cultural migration through focus on a young couple seeking an apartment in a foreign city. I'm intrigued to discover how Savaş gifts her characters with an anthropological lens of exploration. (July 9) — Barbara J. King

Elevator in Saigon by Thuân, translated by Nguyen An Lý

Elevator in Saigon is a literal and structural exquisite corpse , capturing Vietnam's eventful period from 1954 to 2004. Mimicking an elevator's movement, the novel heightens our yearning for romance and mystery, while unflinchingly exposing such narrative shaft. Channeling Marguerite Duras and Patrick Modiano, the book also offers a dead-on tour of a society cunningly leaping from one ideological mode to the next. As if challenging Rick's parting words to Ilsa in Casablanca , Thuận's sophomore novel in English implies that geopolitical debacles might have been mitigated if personal relations were held in more elevated regard than "a hill of beans." (July 9) — Thúy Đinh

Goodnight Tokyo by Atsuhiro Yoshida, translated by Haydn Trowell

Atsuhiro Yoshida's Goodnight Tokyo begins with a film company procurer who's tasked with finding fresh kumquats for a production. From there, interlinked tales of Tokyo residents unspool in unpredictable directions. Characters range from a cabdriver to a star of a detective TV series who might be an actual detective. Readers will be reminded of Jim Jarmusch's 1991 movie Night on Earth , which also takes place in the wee hours of the morning and threads together the stories of strangers. (July 9) — Leland Cheuk

Navola: A novel by Paolo Bacigalupi

I love when a beloved author — especially one known mostly for a certain type of book — throws us a daring curveball. Navola is exactly such a pitch. Paolo Bacigalupi, who has won pretty much every major award in the science-fiction field with his climate-conscious dystopianism, is veering hard left with his new novel. It doesn't take place in the future, and it isn't a cautionary tale. Instead, it's a hefty tome of high fantasy set in a dreamed-up world akin to Renaissance Florence. Only with, you guessed it, dragons. But also high finance, political intrigue, and de' Medici-esque opulence. Bacigalupi is one of today's most gripping spinners of speculative fiction, and I can't wait to dive into this surprising magical foray. (July 9) — Jason Heller

The Lucky Ones: A Memoir by Zara Chowdhary

In 2002, two train carriages were set on fire in Gujarat, India. Within three weeks, more than 2,000 Muslims were murdered in response by Hindu mobs. By the end of the year, more than 50,000 Muslims became refugees in their own country. The Lucky Ones is a unique memoir in English of this largest-ever massacre in independent India . It is also about a communal crisis bringing a fractured family together. A must-read in our warring world today. (July 16) — Jenny Bhatt

Sharks Don't Sink: Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist by Jasmin Graham

Author Jasmin Graham is a marine biologist specializing in smalltooth sawfish and hammerhead sharks. Who are the real sharks in this story? Graham had to face the sharp-teethed truths of academia, while creating a world of curiosity and discovery around the complex lives of sharks. To combat the racism she encountered in academia, Graham created an "ocean of her own" to become an independent scientist and a champion of social justice, a journey she unspools in this new memoir. (July 16) — Martha Ann Toll

Liars by Sarah Manguso

I have long been a fan of Sarah Manguso's crystalline prose, from her fragmented illness memoir The Two Kinds of Decay to her tightly constrained 2022 novel Very Cold People . Her second novel , Liars , marries restraint with rage — in it, Manguso traces the full arc of a 15-year relationship between Jane, a successful writer, and John, a dilettante artist-cum-techie, in aphoristic vignettes. The result is a furious, propulsive meditation on wifehood, motherhood and artistic ambition. (July 23) — Kristen Martin

The Horse: A Novel by Willy Vlautin

Musician and Lean on Pete author Willy Vlautin captures the American West like few other writers. His prose is always excellent, his characters always beautifully drawn, and that promises to be the case with his next novel, about an isolated Nevada man in his 60s who is visited by a blind horse that refuses to leave. (July 30) — Michael Schaub

Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up With the Universe by Ken Krimstein

Art and science collide in Ken Krimstein's new graphic biography . In this book, the author of the brilliant and whimsical The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt similarly translates careful research into scenic, emotive comics — in this case tracking the potential effects of an adventitious meeting in Prague between two geniuses on the cusp of world-changing discoveries. (Aug. 20) — Tahneer Oksman

Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

I'd probably be interested in a new biography of Audre Lorde if it focused on the eating habits of the brilliant thinker, poet, feminist and activist. But biographer Alexis Pauline Gumbs promises to more than exceed that bar. An award-winning poet, writer, feminist and activist in her own right, Gumbs is among the first researchers to delve into Lorde's manuscript archives. The resulting book highlights the late author's commitment to interrogating what it means to survive on this planet — and how Lorde's radical understanding of ecology can guide us today. (Aug. 20) — Ericka Taylor

Et Cetera: An Illustrated Guide to Latin Phrases by Maia Lee-Chin, illustrated by Marta Bertello

To those claiming Latin is dead, I say res ipsa loquitur — the thing speaks for itself — in children's cartoons , Hollywood cartoons and enduring epics . As a fan of both Mr. Peabody and the Muses, the idea of combining Maia Lee-Chin's thoughtful scholarship and Marta Bertello's dynamic artistry is captivating. Their new book reimagines the world of Latin's invention and tops my summer reading list. (Aug. 27) — Marcela Davison Avilés

• summer books

What We’re Reading This Summer

New Yorker writers recommend books featuring a sixteenth-century tennis match, old Hollywood, a society wedding gone wrong, and the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Fiction & Poetry

Cassandra at the Wedding

I recently spent forty-eight hours visiting my childhood home, where, in 2013, I deposited an unconscionable number of books before moving to California. Ten years on, the bookshelves are something like a mood board of my early twenties: short-story collections with the same flat affect; rangy, unread best-sellers; New Directions Pearls. I was thrilled to be reunited with Dorothy Baker’s “Cassandra at the Wedding,” a strange, funny, delicious novel, published in 1962 and reissued, twice, by NYRB Classics. The novel is narrated, for the most part, by Cassandra Edwards, a charismatic, self-destructive, drifting graduate student prone to tepid affairs and suicidal ideation. When the novel opens, she is tearing through California’s Central Valley in a sports car, en route from Berkeley to her childhood home, where her identical-twin sister, Judith, is due to be wed. Like all good weddings, this one doubles as a reunion: Cassandra and Judith, long accustomed to insular codependence, have spent the previous nine months apart, a tense separation. For Judith, distance has provided an opportunity for individuation; for Cassandra, whose selfhood is deeply reliant on her sister, it has precipitated, or exacerbated, an existential crisis. When I first read “Cassandra at the Wedding,” I took pleasure in the tightly wound dialogue and neat, zero-waste structure of the novel; being the same age as Cassandra and Judith, I was also the natural audience for the story of a chaotic, lost, self-sabotaging protagonist—an aspiring writer, naturally—who was still, somehow, winning. More recently, I was moved by the women’s delicate relationships with their father and grandmother, and by the oblique but unsubtle depiction of the compromises involved in striking out on one’s own. This is an ideal beach read—all the better if you live someplace where the beaches are cold.

— Anna Wiener

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Eros the Bittersweet

Summer is, famously, the season of frivolous crushes and escapist reading, and those looking to combine the two will find no shortage of sexy page-turners to skim on the beach. But anyone keen to wade beyond the shallows, or already caught in the riptides of attraction, should consider Anne Carson’s treatise “Eros the Bittersweet.” I discovered the book as a college sophomore suffering from an infatuation with a “straight” friend that was so embarrassingly unworkable that its persistence seemed to demand intellectual justification. Enter Carson, the great poet and classicist, who not only anatomized my feelings but argued that they were core to the very birth of written language—quite a relief after so much time wasted on daydreaming and chit-chat.

The book is constructed as a series of meditations on ancient Greek poetry. In prose so taut and graceful that it almost seems braced against her destabilizing theme, Carson teases out the wily contradictions of the desiring imagination, from what is “sweetbitter”— glukupikron , Sappho’s coinage, which put the pleasure before the pain—to its tendency to recast the absent beloved as a ghostly enemy. Gradually, irresistibly, a thesis steals up from the readings. Eros, with its painfully sharpened awareness of the boundary between self and other, is inseparable from the shift that split speech into the privacy of speaking and writing, and words into fragmentary vowels and consonants. Even when Carson’s grand narrative of love and language overreaches, it’s thrilling to accompany one of the most sensitive and formidable minds that ever reckoned with either. “Words do have edges,” she writes. “So do you.”

— Julian Lucas

Everybody Was So Young

Has anyone ever written better about being depressed in the heat and the crackling potential of a lazy, steamy afternoon than F. Scott Fitzgerald? To me, his books feel as essential to the season as coconut popsicles. There is something so beautiful and so deeply silly about his writing; it is jejune and desperately nostalgic and tidal in its ebb and flow between self-seriousness and overheated irresponsibility. Which is to say, it feels like summer.

This year, in addition to rereading Fitzgerald in the humidity, I am also reading about him, in Amanda Vaill’s 1998 book “Everybody Was So Young.” The biography is centered on the married couple Gerald and Sara Murphy, wealthy Americans who expatriated in the nineteen-twenties and devoted themselves to cultivating a bohemian life style in France. The Murphys first lived in Paris, where they fell into an artsy coterie (their friends included John Dos Passos, Pablo Picasso, Dorothy Parker, and Ernest Hemingway), but it was not until they purchased a house in Cap d’Antibes and named it Villa America that they created a social hub for creative types flitting about France. It was at this house that Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, spent many summer weeks partying and causing scenes, and it was during Fitzgerald’s time in France that he found the primary subject for his 1934 novel “Tender Is the Night.” In that novel, Fitzgerald loosely based the characters of Dick and Nicole Diver—whose marriage is passionate but rocky and undone by mental illness—on Gerald and Sara, a move that annoyed and unsettled the couple for years afterward. For bonus Murphys lore, you must read Calvin Tomkins’s legendary Profile of the couple in this magazine, called “Living Well Is the Best Revenge.”

— Rachel Syme

A Question of Power

I am travelling, and my companion and I are taking turns reading “A Question of Power,” by Bessie Head, aloud until one of us falls asleep. We began in northern Greece and now we are hundreds of miles south, in the Cyclades. It would not be accurate to say we are tearing through the novel. The novel is tearing through us. “A Question of Power” is a fragmentary picture of a fragmented mind. Like much of the spiritually draining, transcendent fiction written by Head, a South African writer who died in her chosen country of Botswana in 1986, at the age of forty-eight, it can be taken as autobiographical. Elizabeth is a woman displaced. She lives in the village of Motabeng, in Botswana, with her son, after being exiled from South Africa. She works on a sort of farm. She has a sort of breakdown. Elder women had marked her, as a young girl, destined for madness. It was, to them, a simple matter of inheritance. Elizabeth was born in an asylum; in the novel, we learn that her mother, a white South African, had been confined to a psychiatric hospital when it became known that she was pregnant by a Black stable boy. In Motabeng, Elizabeth’s disintegration takes the shape of a love triangle with two destructive men, Dan and Sello. Are Dan and Sello flesh-and-blood men? Personifications of the violence inflicted on Elizabeth by the apartheid regime? Head is original and merciless with her language, as she carves, through the ordeals of Elizabeth, a post-colonial subjectivity.

— Doreen St. Félix

Brotherless Night

I’ve found myself recommending V. V. Ganeshananthan’s “Brotherless Night” often recently; it’s the most fully realized new novel that I have read in a good while. Set against the escalation of the Sri Lankan civil war, in the early nineteen-eighties, the narrative is relayed by the voice of a young woman, Sashikala, growing up with four brothers in the mostly Tamil city of Jaffna. She wants to be a doctor and, even amid the chaos of the early conflict, navigates her way through an education in care. Her brothers and contemporaries, meanwhile, become increasingly enmeshed in violence in ways that draw her closer to the moral front lines of the war. Ganeshananthan’s considerable achievement, it seems to me, is in carrying off this big, ambitious thriller of a conflict novel—crossing years of growth and great events, fleshed out with ample research on the textures of moment and place—without losing the intimacy and reflective center of a character portrait. Sashi is smart, perceptive, and filled with the excited ambition of first ascent: an intellectual coming into her own mind. The deeper she travels into the conflict the more she sees its flattened premises and social costs. “Brotherless Night” succeeds in telling all its stories—the historical and the personal, the factual and the ethical—as one, and that narrative has echoes. Ganeshananthan is writing about Sri Lanka, but she is an American novelist. This book, a careful, vivid exploration of what’s lost within a community when life and thought collapse toward binary conflict, rang softly for me as a novel for our own country in this odd time.

— Nathan Heller

Sudden Death

A poet and a painter play a tennis match. The year is 1599. The poet is the Spaniard Francisco de Quevedo; the painter is Caravaggio, the master of darkness and light. The tennis ball is a bit smaller than usual, and more tightly wound; it’s made of leather and the hair of Anne Boleyn, which was preserved by her French executioner. Interspersed with the match—a duel, with life on the line—are scenes of the conquistadors’ bloody and brutal march on the Aztec capital; descriptions of debauched Renaissance Popes; brief histories of ball sports; discussions of colonialism, art, and religion; cameos by Galileo and Mary Magdalene; and nagging e-mails from the book’s editor. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not supposed to make sense. “Sudden Death” is too much—too meta, too decadent, too scattered, too clever—but mostly, it’s too short. I didn’t want it to end. The prose, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, is sublime, profane, and propulsive. It’s the perfect summer read.

— Louisa Thomas

Seating Arrangements

In this highly quaffable tragicomedy of manners, set over three champagne-soaked days on the fictional island of Waskeke, Maggie Shipstead takes a scalpel to the absurdities of New England high society. Winn Van Meter has spent his life hewing to the conventions of his social set, but as he prepares for his eldest daughter’s wedding to a desirable young scion, his lofty existence is threatened from within by treacherous undercurrents of resentment and desire. While his wife, Biddy, oversees the festivities, Winn lusts feverishly after one of his daughter’s bridesmaids, ruminates on his failed attempts to join the island’s illustrious golf club, and seethes over the ascendancy of his Harvard nemesis, whose gigantic mansion looms like a “blatant, dazzling Oz set against the blue horizon of Waskeke Sound.” Shipstead’s lacerating social satire makes for an irresistibly summery romp, but her sublime sentences and gift for revealing the turbulence beneath the carapace of polite society elevate her début novel to a higher plane. “Seating Arrangements” is Whartonesque in its depiction of the elaborate architecture of privilege as its own kind of prison. Come for a sun-drenched weekend by the sea; stay for one of the most excruciating scenes of social unravelling in modern fiction.

— Heidi Blake

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam’s classic “The Best and the Brightest” is often and justly celebrated as one of the finest books on the origins of the Vietnam War. And there is plenty here about French colonialism in the aftermath of the Second World War and the complicated politics of nineteen-sixties Saigon. But the real reason to read Halberstam’s book is that it is a great Washington book, and as a result it remains strikingly relevant long after the run-up to the war in Southeast Asia it describes has been succeeded by the foreign-policy failures of more recent generations. The haute Wasp hegemony that Halberstam so memorably skewers has faded in the capital—there aren’t so many Groton boys or Harriman scions running around at the upper levels of the State Department, or anywhere else. “The Best and the Brightest,” though, endures because it is one of the sharpest cautionary tales about the dangers of miscalculation in Washington when it comes to parts of the world it little knows or understands—in other words, a perennial hazard of American foreign policy and not one by any means limited to history. Rereading it today, I was struck all over again by how thoughtful, confident, and deeply reported Halberstam’s book is—especially considering that it was published in 1972, when the United States was still embroiled in exiting Vietnam, and had yet to fully examine how it it had got there in the first place.

— Susan B. Glasser

Books & Fiction

Book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature, twice a week.

The Female Complaint

It is tempting to disregard sentimentality. So easy to scoff at its contemporary forms: the thoughts and prayers of flaccid politicians; post-racial reconciliatory weepies of the “Green Book” variety; narratives of minority experience that might take the adjective “heartwarming.” It requires tenacity, though, to pause upon the notion of identity fortified by this theatre, the everyday idioms of race and gender clung to as expressions of national belonging despite their repetitive insufficiency to that task. The clinging, “a love affair with conventionality,” is the subject of the essays in Lauren Berlant’s 2008 book “The Female Complaint.” The essays take as a beginning the “women’s culture” of the eighteen-thirties, which, Berlant argues, was the U.S.’s first “intimate public,” a mass-market culture premised upon a shared emotional world among its consumers. They go on to consider novels, films, musicals, and cultural moments whose emotional excesses reinforce an attachment to the suffocating conditions of an all-American fantasy: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “Show Boat,” John Stahl’s film “Imitation of Life,” the memorialized deaths of Princess Diana and J.F.K., Jr. “This was a depressing book to write because it is a case study in what happens when a capitalist culture effectively markets conventionality as the source and solution to the problem of living in worlds that are economically, legally, and normatively not on the side of almost anyone’s survival, let alone flourishing,” Berlant writes. “Nonetheless, flourishing happens.” Sentimentality isn’t finished with us yet, though may its fantasies be met not with finger-wagging—a favored sentimental mode!—but sustained analysis. Now is the summer of our female complaint! Which, if you have the fortune of being a woman, is every summer.

— Lauren Michele Jackson

Orlando Furioso

This winter, while writing an essay on Italo Calvino, I read Ludovico Ariosto’s “Orlando Furioso,” which Calvino described as “a poem that refuses to begin and refuses to end.” First published in 1516, the “Furioso” is an errant epic, one beholden to the whims of its passionate, distractible speaker, the teller of a tale that branches every which way. Through deep forests and across wide-open seas, we follow first one, then another of his fugitive characters: the paladin Orlando, in love with the pagan Angelica; the maiden-knight Bradamante and her suitor Ruggiero; and a crowded cast of sorcerers, giants, monsters, and dwarfs. They are spurred by the oldest passions—glory, desire, greed, and revenge—and the darkest magic. Enchanted books are passed from hand to hand. Spells are cast. Palaces are raised out of marble and gold. Daring quests are embarked on only to be broken off and swept into the war between the Christians and the Saracens. All the world is insatiable love and bloody battle, moonlight and madness—a “zigzag traced by galloping horses and the fitfulness of the human heart,” Calvino wrote. None of it can be taken too seriously—the poem, which I read in Guido Waldman’s prose translation, is a parody of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s 1495 chivalric romance, “Orlando Innamorato.” But it can be seriously enjoyed, thanks to Ariosto’s fantastical, sometimes maddening deflections, his sensual bravado, his hearty winks at literary history, his political savvy, and his pure good humor.

— Merve Emre

For many days this spring I walked around my neighborhood thinking about Sonali Deraniyagala. There are memoirs that seem to be shaped by the author’s awareness that her personal tragedy will manifest as a memoir. But the writing in “Wave” (2013)—the book opens with the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka, which killed Deraniyagala’s family—reads as if it had somehow trickled out sideways, an irrelevant by-product of all the work Deraniyagala had done to figure out how to want to live. As I read, I kept thinking, it’s possible to be an extraordinary sort of human who actually has a will to endure that, theoretically, makes no sense. The book felt so forthright that it somehow didn’t feel like she was “writing.” My friend, whom I made read the memoir, too, described it as a “pilgrim’s prayer.”

— Rachel Aviv

What Makes Sammy Run?

A couple of months ago, while browsing a used-book store, I came upon a Modern Library hardcover, whose tattered black-and-yellow dust jacket featured a couple high atop a hill, gazing down at the lurid lights of Los Angeles at night. This looks like something I might like, I thought. Indeed. “What Makes Sammy Run?,” Budd Schulberg’s 1941 novel of Hollywood, is narrated by Al Manheim, a good-guy New York newspaperman who moves West to try and make it as a screenwriter. But the book’s true protagonist is the titular Sammy Glick, an endlessly energetic, endlessly scheming young arriviste, whose speedy rise in Hollywood serves as the novel’s churning centrifugal force. Sammy, born a poor Jewish boy on the Lower East Side, “may not know a lot of cushy words,” but he sure knows about life. “Take Darwin, for instance,” he tells Manheim. “I didn’t have to read any books to know all about the survival of the fittest.”

Though more than eighty years have passed since the book’s publication, not a lot seems to have changed. (Back then, too, N.Y.C. journalists were jealous of their more well-off L.A. screenwriting friends; back then, too, those same Hollywood screenwriters were getting swindled by avaricious studios.) Schulberg, who published “What Makes Sammy Run?” when he was only twenty-seven, grew up in Hollywood, the son of a producer, but he writes with both an industry insider’s keenness and a sympathy for those shunted to that industry’s sidelines. Hollywood, after all, is just one case of the way things work in our world. As he notes in the 1952 introduction to the edition I picked up, “the Sammy-drive is still to be found everywhere in America. . . . It will survive as long as money and prestige and power are ends in themselves, running wild, unharnessed from usefulness.”

— Naomi Fry

American Prometheus

After Cormac McCarthy’s death , I read a remembrance that mentioned the atom-bomb test he described in the last pages of “The Crossing.” I reread the passage (“the light was drawing away along the edges of the world”), and then I wanted to read some more on the subject. The Bomb seems to be a subject of collective reflection this summer. Mushroom clouds erupt in the desert in “ Asteroid City ,” Wes Anderson’s newest movie, and “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s bio-pic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the development of the atomic bomb with the Manhattan Project, comes out later this month.

Nolan’s film is based loosely on a book, “American Prometheus,” a biography of Oppenhemier by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Today’s most frightening technology is often in the hands of hubristic people who have a much less well-rounded view of the world than Oppenheimer, whom Bird and Sherwin present with sympathy as a humanist: a student of philosophy and poetry as well as physics, a brilliant administrator and mentor, and someone concerned with economic and social inequality. Oppenheimer thought he was taking part in a war for democratic ideals until the moral consequences of developing a weapon that killed more than two hundred thousand people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki became undeniable. In 1954, his security clearance was revoked as a result of his friendships with members of the American Communist Party more than a decade earlier. Accused of being a security threat, he was cut off from his life’s work until his death, in 1967, even as he advocated against the development of hydrogen bombs. (In 2022, in a symbolic gesture that he had been wronged, Oppenheimer’s security clearance was posthumously restored.) The story of his life is an inquiry into the question of how to contain science that has great potential for destruction.

— Emily Witt

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10 Food-Filled Beach Reads for Your Summer Vacation

Casey McQuiston’s newest romance, a polyamorous romp through the mixology world, a pastry-filled Parisian memoir, and more have us excited for summer reading

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Share All sharing options for: 10 Food-Filled Beach Reads for Your Summer Vacation

We look forward to reading near a body of water all year, and this season’s food-themed releases don’t disappoint. Many of them are transportive, so whether you bring them on vacation or read them at home imagining a vacation, they’ll hopefully offer that needed bit of summer escapism.

This season’s food-themed books mirror real-life trends. It seems like everyone’s ready once again for their “ Euro summer ,” and that extends to our new slate of main characters. Italy, and especially Sicily, continue to have a moment. And we’re still clearly thirsty for chefs — amid all these releases comes season four of The Bear on June 27 . So whether you’re into historical fiction, family drama, memoir that feels like a romp, or fluffy and flirty romance, these are the food-related books you might want to toss into your beach bag this summer.

The Sicilian Inheritance by Jo Piazza

Dutton, out now

Jo Piazza’s newest book has gotten plenty of buzz, and for good reason. It’s an appealing mix of romantic escapism, whodunit intrigue, and feminist introspection. Sara is a burned-out butcher-turned-chef who’s reeling from her failed marriage and closing her Philly restaurant. When her great-aunt dies and leaves behind a plot of land in Sicily, Sarah travels to Italy hoping to find an easy solution to her financial problems. It’s not so simple: She learns that her great-grandmother, Serafina, might have been murdered — a plotline inspired by Piazza’s own family history . Of course, this all happens in Sicily, so there’s good food, flirtation, and mafia drama, too. With elements of historical fiction (Sara and Serafina’s stories are told in alternating timelines), romance, and mystery, The Sicilian Inheritance has something for everyone. — Bettina Makalintal

• $19 at Amazon
• $26 at Bookshop

The House of Broken Bricks by Fiona Williams

Henry Holt & Company, out now

Fiona Williams’s debut is for readers looking for something more serious. An approachable work of literary fiction, The House of Broken Bricks is an atmospheric, character-driven story of a family that’s falling apart. Tess, a Jamaican immigrant, lives in the English countryside with her husband Richard and her twin sons Max and Sonny. Race and the tensions it causes are a throughline: Tess is Black, Richard is white, and Max and Sonny, despite being twins, present as different races. As the family grapples with grief and tragedy, food features frequently, usually as an effort toward comfort and belonging, and Williams’s descriptions of food (in addition to nature and setting) are vivid and easy to imagine. The chapters, which alternate between family members, are short and self-contained. This is one you can pick up and put down to enjoy in small bites, lest seagulls or small children interrupt your reading. — BM

• $24 at Amazon

Effie Olsen’s Summer Special by Rochelle Bilow

Berkley Books, out now

Homecomings are always a compelling premise, and Effie Olsen’s Summer Special is no exception. It follows Effie, a chef, as she returns to her picturesque Maine hometown for what she’s convinced will be her last summer there. She gets a job at the local, highly sought-out Michelin-starred restaurant, Brown Butter, where, it turns out, her high school best friend Ernie also works. After a fight, she hasn’t talked to or seen him in years. Naturally, Effie’s summer offers her some surprises. With fizzy writing, a dreamy seaside setting, and hunger-inducing descriptions of food, Bilow captures that sentimental yearning of summer and ticks all the boxes of a satisfying, read-in-a-weekend beach book. — BM

• $18 at Amazon
• $17 at Bookshop

The Secrets of the Little Greek Taverna by Erin Palmisano

Grand Central Publishing, out now

Los Angeles waitress Jory St. James is a wanderer — the type of person who never wants to be pinned down in one place for too long. When she happens upon a brochure advertising a yacht trip to Greece, she can’t resist emptying her savings for a Mediterranean trip to satisfy her wanderlust.

When she gets there, without her phone or a single reservation, fate lands Jory in the village of Potamia, where she stays at a guesthouse surrounded by an olive grove. Jory quickly falls in love with Potamia’s quirky charms, some of which are tinged with magic. And her arrival sparks big change in the tiny village, especially for Cressida Thermopolis, the guesthouse’s formidable owner. Cressida is a distinctly gifted baker who’s mourning the loss of her husband, and Jory shows up just in time to change Cressida’s — and Potamia’s — trajectory forever as the duo plans to open the guesthouse’s next-door taverna.

Full of food, humor, and a big pinch of romance, The Secrets of the Little Greek Taverna will instantly transport you to the tiny island of Naxos, even if a flight to the isles isn’t in the budget this summer. And don’t skip author Erin Palmisano’s decadent moussaka recipe, included at the end of the novel. — Amy McCarthy

• $17 at Amazon
• $18 at Bookshop

Triple Sec by TJ Alexander

Atria Books, June 4

If you have throuples on the brain after watching Challengers (or reading all that polyamory discourse ), might I recommend TJ Alexander’s Triple Sec ? With their first two books, Chef’s Kiss and Chef’s Choice , Alexander proved themselves talented in food-themed romance . With Triple Sec , they shift their focus to cocktail bars as they follow Mel, a bartender in New York City, as she makes her first foray into polyamory after meeting a married couple named Bebe and Kade. It’s not just new romance keeping Mel busy: She also enters a citywide cocktail competition in hopes of winning money to open her own bar. As with Alexander’s previous books, Triple Sec is a fun, flirtatious story that’ll pair well with a cold drink enjoyed poolside. Like a good cocktail, it goes down easy. — BM

I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris by Glynnis MacNicol

Penguin Life, June 11

In 2021, after a year of being stuck indoors due to the pandemic, writer Glynnis MacNicol headed to Paris. She’d spent many summers in the city, and following a year of deprivation, she’s fully prepared to indulge in its specific pleasures — good wine, French men, and of course, incredible food — with abandon. In this vulnerable essay collection, plates of pain perdu and mugs of chocolat chaud punctuate meditations on writing, dating, and economic uncertainty — you know, all the essential existential crises of our era. Paris, with its stunning scenery and refined charm, is the perfect setting for MacNicol to soothe what ails her. — AM

• $30 at Amazon
• $28 at Bookshop

Pearce Oysters by Joselyn Takacs

Zibby Books, June 25

Pearce Oysters is a family drama centered around a Louisiana oyster-farming family in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Even before the oil spill happens, the Pearces have been having a rough time. Jordan has taken over the family business, which is struggling, after the unexpected death of his father; his brother Benny is adrift, living in New Orleans until circumstances call him back home; and their mother May feels lost without her husband. Takacs’s debut novel is a thoughtful story of family and community that also considers important themes of corporate greed and environmental crisis. With so many fictional food books focused on chefs, it’s refreshing to see the focus shifted to farmers. Pearce Oysters is a reminder of the fragile ecosystem we all live in. — BM

• $28 at Amazon

The Townsend Family Recipe for Disaster by Shauna Robinson

Sourcebooks Landmark, July 2

Mae Townsend is getting married. That would normally be cause for celebration, but the thought of dealing with her complicated family has her on edge. Mae’s parents split when she was young, and she yearns for connection with her late father’s side of the family, who didn’t approve of his relationship with her mother. And now she’s trying to put all that aside so she can marry her fiance Connor, who hails from a wealthy family of white wedding planners.

As they plan the big day — complete with a deeply millennial doughnut wall — Mae recognizes that her wedding might be her only opportunity to heal her family’s decades-long estrangement, and get to the bottom of some lingering family secrets. A family tragedy spurs Mae to head to North Carolina in search of answers, and when she arrives, she tries to build connection the best way she knows how: by cooking for her estranged relatives.

It’s of course much more complicated than that, as Mae soon learns. As she hones in on perfecting her grandmother’s famed mac and cheese, Mae gets a crash course in her family’s distinct dynamic. Like a good meal, don’t be surprised if you finish The Townsend Family Recipe for Disaster all in one sitting. — AM

• $16 at Bookshop

Just One Taste by Lizzy Dent

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, July 16

Lizzy Dent’s The Summer Job — which featured a woman who found love while impersonating her sommelier friend at a Michelin-starred restaurant in the Scottish countryside — was one of my favorite light reads of 2021. Dent’s newest, similarly food-related book, Just One Taste , didn’t disappoint either. It follows restaurant critic Olive, whose estranged chef father has just died and, to her chagrin, left her his restaurant. Not only that, but she must also travel to Sicily to finish the cookbook he was writing. And because Olive is a restaurant critic, not a recipe developer, she must work on it with Leo, her father’s former sous chef and her nemesis — you can probably tell where this is going. Just One Taste had all the things I liked so much in The Summer Job : bubbly writing, a sense of humor, a dreamy setting, and page-turning chemistry. — BM

The Pairing by Casey McQuiston

St. Martin’s Griffin, August 6

The newest from author Casey McQuiston follows sommelier Theo and immensely flirtatious pastry chef Kit, two exes who inadvertently end up on a food tour together across Europe after years of no contact. As you might expect, The Pairing offers plenty of vacation inspiration as they travel through Bordeaux, Monaco, Florence, Naples, and more. Sexy and queer, this is certainly a book for hedonists: Rounding out Theo and Kit’s pleasure cruise of food and drink is the hookup competition that they’ve challenged each other to as they cross the continent. The Pairing has all the sass and seduction that made McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue such a hit, but with more spice. It’s slightly too bad that it comes out so late in the season, but save it for those final beach days and let it guide your plans for next summer. — BM

• $16 at Amazon
• $19 at Bookshop

This Comically Easy, Orange-Infused Cocktail Attends Every Dinner Party I Do

Screw it, spoil yourself at the pool snack bar, do i have to invite my best friend’s awful partner to dinner.

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University Leaders Face a Long, Complex Summer

Many officials may be confronting federal investigations, disputes over student discipline — and the prospect that the protests start all over again in the fall.

By Jeremy W. Peters

Around now, university officials might usually take a deep breath. Campuses are emptying out for the end of the academic year. Gone, for the most part, are the tent cities that student activists erected as a symbol of opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza.

But this summer might feel longer than most.

Congressional Republicans have promised to press their investigation into college antisemitism, even as they have completed their latest hearing, which they tried to turn into a public shaming session for the leaders of Rutgers, Northwestern and the University of California, Los Angeles, over their handling of campus encampments.

And protesters have likewise promised not to give up — with hundreds walking out at Harvard’s graduation on Thursday, and students at U.C.L.A. pitching new tents and briefly taking over a building.

Over the next few months, colleges will need to navigate a complex set of challenges. There are ongoing federal investigations at scores of universities and school districts over their handling of antisemitism claims. There are hundreds of discipline cases to be decided. And plans are needed for the fall, when college quads will fill back up just a couple of months before the presidential election — possibly with more protesters.

Here is what may keep university presidents up at night.

Suspensions, Expulsions and Reprimands

One of the major takeaways from the hearing on Thursday was that the three universities had yet to resolve scores of disciplinary cases involving student protesters.

The chancellor of U.C.L.A., Gene Block, said on Thursday that the school was conducting more than 100 investigations into student conduct involving both antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Northwestern’s president, Michael Schill, and the president of Rutgers, Jonathan Holloway, said that their schools were also continuing to investigate reports of harassment. At Rutgers, four students had been suspended and 19 others were subject to other disciplinary action.

Republicans pressed the leaders on whether they would suspend students who violated codes of conduct, and schools will now have to make disciplinary decisions knowing that Republicans will want to know the results.

During the hearing, Mr. Schill declined to provide a timeline for Northwestern’s investigations. “We believe, at Northwestern, in due process,” he said.

Congressional and Federal Investigations

Republicans have threatened to cut off billions of dollars in financial aid and research funding for schools and universities that they say have failed to protect Jewish students. Numerous Congressional committees are looking into whether universities have violated certain aspects of the law — from the tax code to anti-discrimination statutes.

Representative Virginia Foxx , the North Carolina Republican who leads the Committee on Education and the Workforce, has begun an inquiry to examine “the learning environments” at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the disciplinary procedures at those schools.

And the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has opened discrimination investigations into scores of universities, colleges and school districts, including Rutgers, Northwestern, U.C.L.A., Harvard and Columbia, based on complaints about antisemitic and anti-Muslim harassment after the Israel-Hamas war broke out.

Fall Is Right Around the Corner

At three House hearings, college presidents repeatedly talked about how surprised and unprepared they were for the protests on their campuses. They will have no excuse come fall.

Students will return to campus roughly two months before the presidential election. And student activists are promising to continue their protests.

Throughout the demonstrations, students displayed a defiant tone, refusing orders to disperse and resisting entreaties from college administrators who sought compromise as a way to dismantle the encampments.

A flavor of what could lie ahead came on Thursday afternoon from U.C.L.A.

While the university’s chancellor was at the congressional hearing, protesters set up a new, small encampment on campus.

And that morning, the university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine posted a message: “We’re back.”

Jonathan Wolfe and Maya Shwayder contributed reporting.

Jeremy W. Peters is a Times reporter who covers debates over free expression and how they impact higher education and other vital American institutions. More about Jeremy W. Peters

The Campus Protests Over the Gaza War

News and Analysis

​​A union for academic workers in the University of California system announced that an ongoing strike challenging the system’s handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations would extend to two more campuses , U.C.L.A. and U.C. Davis.

​​With speeches canceled , students at the City University of New York School of Law ceremony chanted, carried signs and walked out .

​​Hundreds of students walked out of Harvard’s commencement ceremony , while hundreds of others chanted “Let them walk!”, a reference to 13 student protesters who were not allowed to graduate.

A Complex Summer:  Many university leaders and officials may be confronting federal investigations, disputes over student discipline  — and the prospect that the protests start all over again in the fall.

Graduation’s Pomp Goes On:  Commencement is the rare American ritual that still has rules. That’s why it’s ripe for disruption .

A New Litmus Test:  Some Jewish students say their views on Zionism — which are sometimes assumed — have affected their social life on campus .

College President Openings:  Presidential posts are available at U.C.L.A., Yale, Harvard, Cornell, Penn and many others. But the job is not what it used to be .