The First Gentleman
by Bill Clinton and James Patterson
For their third thriller together, Clinton and Patterson dream up a political nightmare: The president’s husband is on trial for murder as she is up for re-election. Two journalists dig into the first gentleman’s past, which includes an N.F.L. stint. “We’re admittedly pretty tough on our fictional presidents,” Clinton has said of himself and his writing partner — putting it mildly.
Little, Brown, June 2
Flashlight
by Susan Choi
One night, a man and his 10-year-old daughter take a walk on a beach; the next day, the girl is found nearly dead, and her father has disappeared. Choi’s latest novel tells the sweeping story of this fractured family: Serk, the father, an ethnic Korean man born in Japan who emigrates to the United States in the 1960s; his former wife, Anne, an American dealing with the fallout of mistakes in her youth; and their daughter, Louisa, whose childhood is defined by crisis and pain.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, June 3
Atmosphere
by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The best-selling author of “Daisy Jones and the Six” and “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo” turns to the skies for her latest novel. Joan is selected as one of the first women to join NASA’s astronaut corps and quickly proves to be a formidable, even-keeled member of her cohort. The book opens in 1984 with a mission gone awry, and leapfrogs from there between the crisis and Joan’s pre-NASA life, training and eventual love story with a colleague.
Ballantine, June 3
The Listeners
by Maggie Stiefvater
Stiefvater, a popular young adult fantasy author, makes her adult debut with this supernatural twist on a real but seldom discussed part of American history. Set during World War II, “The Listeners” follows June, the manager of the luxurious Avallon Hotel in West Virginia, who is forced by the government to comfortably house captured Axis diplomats. It’s an ethically fraught assignment on its own, but the presence of these contemptible guests also threatens the magical springs that run underneath the hotel.
Viking, June 3
The Catch
by Yrsa Daley-Ward
Daley-Ward, a poet and memoirist, turns to fiction with this psychological thriller about twin sisters, Clara and Dempsey, who were separated as children after their mother’s death. Thirty years later, they are reunited — each spiraling in her own way. But when Clara sees a woman who seems to be their mother, but who hasn’t aged a day since she vanished, it upends everything the sisters thought they knew.
Liveright, June 3
The Dry Season
by Melissa Febos
Reeling from the end of a “ravaging vortex” of a relationship, Febos — a self-described serial monogamist who gave up alcohol and drugs at 23 — decides to give up sex and dating at 35, if only for three months. “To my great surprise,” she writes, those months become “the happiest of my life,” and turn into a year. This ode to female celibacy interweaves personal memoir with literary and historical research, incorporating the influence of Sappho, Virginia Woolf, Octavia E. Butler and others.
Knopf, June 3
Mother Emanuel
by Kevin Sack
When a white supremacist murdered nine congregants during a Bible study at Mother Emanuel church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015, he struck at the heart of an institution central not only to Black life in the city but also to the history of the South. Sack’s sweeping account, a decade in the making, situates the massacre within a larger story about the rise of the African Methodist Episcopal Church during the 19th century, its role as a champion of Black resistance and civil rights, and the often brutal efforts by white authorities to restrict its members’ freedom.
Crown, June 3
Buckley
by Sam Tanenhaus
William F. Buckley Jr. — American conservatism’s most eloquent pundit, the founder of National Review magazine, host of “Firing Line,” columnist, novelist and champion debater — left an outsize imprint on the political right before it was overtaken by MAGA. Tanenhaus’s immersive authorized biography recounts a singular life rich with incident (and a few scandals), from Buckley’s affluent Catholic childhood to his apotheosis as a political kingmaker who grasped better than almost anyone else how to adapt politics to the media age.
Random House, June 3
What Is Queer Food?
by John Birdsall
In this ambitious work of social history, Birdsall unspools the story of how queer culture has informed what we eat. From the restaurant world to the AIDS crisis, the recipes of Alice B. Toklas and the preferences of Truman Capote, Birdsall presents a soup-to-nuts-to-brunch-to-all-night-diner portrait of the inextricable link between queerness and food that’s as much cultural criticism as delicious celebration.
Norton, June 3
The Gunfighters
by Bryan Burrough
In this chronicle of the way real-life cowboys and their high-noon duels captured American attention in the late 1800s, Burrough takes readers on a wild tour of the West, complete with roaming buffalo, lawless lawmen and gunfights galore. His focus is Texas, a crucible of violent mythmaking and transformative change, where Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid and more loped their way into legend.
Penguin Press, June 3
Charlottesville
by Deborah Baker
Shocked by the violence unleashed by the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. — her hometown — in 2017, Baker returned to the city to try to understand the factors that led to that weekend and, eventually, to the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Encompassing activists, clergy, students and politicians, as well as neo-Nazis and white supremacists, her account draws on her knowledge of local and Southern history to create a deeply researched, and deeply felt, portrait of contemporary America.
Graywolf, June 3
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
by V.E. Schwab
Schwab, best known for books like “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue” and “Vicious,” returns with a time-sweeping, character-juggling, lesbian vampire mystery. Jumping between 1532 Spain, 1827 London and 2019 Boston, the novel follows three women, all woefully constricted by societal conventions. Each is given the power to change her fate — transformations that come with new appetites and huge risks.
Tor, June 10
Great Black Hope
by Rob Franklin
Less than a gram of cocaine in his pocket launches Smith, the protagonist of Franklin’s debut novel, into an ordeal involving the criminal justice system, intense personal reflection and the many complexities of being a queer, Stanford-educated Black man facing both high expectations and low opinions from his own friends and family.
Summit Books, June 10
So Far Gone
by Jess Walter
The latest novel by the best-selling author of “Beautiful Ruins” is a family caper set in rural northeastern Washington State, where a retired environmental journalist has lived for years in utter seclusion — no phone, no running water, only a single dirt road connecting him to the outside world. That is, until one spring day when his grandchildren, ages 9 and 13, arrive on his doorstep to tell him that their mother, his daughter, has gone missing.
Harper, June 10
King of Ashes
by S.A. Cosby
Cosby’s latest thriller is a high-octane story of a family imploding. Roman Carruthers is a successful wealth manager in Atlanta who is suddenly called home to Virginia after a car crash leaves his father in a coma. Roman soon discovers that his father isn’t the only one struggling: His brother is being hounded by gangsters to whom he owes a tremendous debt, his sister is worn down taking care of the family business, and, it turns out, the car crash that injured their father might not have been an accident after all.
Pine & Cedar, June 10
Murderland
by Caroline Fraser
This work of speculative true crime by a Pulitzer Prize winner returns Fraser to the Pacific Northwest where she grew up, a region once known for both its toxic industry — including a mammoth copper smelter in Tacoma, Wa. — and its serial killers. Fraser provocatively connects the two, tracing suggestive links between the poisoned air, water and soil, and the violence perpetrated by men like Ted Bundy, Charles Manson and Gary Ridgway.
Penguin Press, June 10
The Sisters
by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
The three Mikkola girls have always been different; the daughters of an eccentric Tunisian mother and an absent Swedish father, they never quite seemed to fit with the people around them. As the sisters crisscross the world from Stockholm to Tunis to New York, their lives are recounted by their childhood friend Jonas, who is also Swedish Tunisian — and who closely resembles the author.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, June 17
Fox
by Joyce Carol Oates
Oates’s new novel — we’ve given up trying to count them — centers on Francis Fox, a predatory middle-school teacher who charms parents and colleagues but grooms and abuses his female students. When Francis disappears and human remains are found near his car, a detective must piece together the story of his sordid past.
Hogarth, June 17
Bug Hollow
by Michelle Huneven
It’s the mid-1970s in the California suburbs when the teenage baseball star Ellis Samuelson goes missing, and then dies in a freak accident only weeks after he’s returned. Huneven’s sprawling family epic follows the ripple effects of this event across generations of the Samuelson clan — from Ellis’s alcoholic mother and adulterous but well-meaning father to his younger sisters, his pregnant girlfriend and their daughter.
Penguin Press, June 17
Sounds Like Love
by Ashley Poston
In Poston’s latest paranormal romance, Joni, a songwriter whose inspiration has run dry, returns to her North Carolina hometown hoping to get her musical groove back. As she navigates strained friendships and family drama, she starts hearing a faint melody in her head, along with a man’s voice — which turns out to belong to Sasha, a musician who is just as flummoxed by their psychic connection as she is. Hoping it will cut off their access to each other’s most intimate thoughts, the pair agree to work together to turn the melody into a song.
Berkley, June 17
The Möbius Book
by Catherine Lacey
Start from the front cover of Lacey’s latest and you’re reading a novella about two women chatting about a third friend over drinks — while a puddle of blood pools nearby. Flip it over and you’re reading a memoir in which Lacey takes stock of a relationship gone south. Is there a connection? Leave it to the gnarly author of “Biography of X” to put you to work.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, June 17
Claire McCardell
by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson
The designer Claire McCardell is often credited as the inventor of American sportswear — practical separates, flats, wrap dresses, pocketed skirts and zippers women could do up themselves. In the hands of Dickinson, this is more than just the biography of a fashion revolutionary: It is a story of the fight for women’s identity and, incidentally, the birth of an American industry.
Simon & Schuster, June 17
The Compound
by Aisling Rawle
In a house in the middle of a desert, 19 men and women — all young, single and attractive — flirt and compete for “rewards” that range from the necessary (wood to build a front door, sunscreen, food) to the luxurious (makeup, clothing, diamond earrings). They are contestants on a reality show whose ominously enforced rules prohibit sharing any detail of their personal lives — and dictate that anyone who sleeps alone, e.g. without a member of the opposite sex, will be expelled. Rawle’s eerie debut is an “Animal Farm” for our age of relentless materialism.
Random House, June 24
“Make It Ours”
by Robin Givhan
When Virgil Abloh was named head of men’s wear for Louis Vuitton in 2018, he became the first Black designer to serve as artistic director in the brand’s history. In “Make It Ours” — a biography both of the designer’s short, impactful life and of the changing face of luxury — Givhan shows how Abloh’s unusual path reflected not just a sea change for one house, but an industry figuring out its place in the modern world.
Crown, June 24
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