A Forbidden Alchemy
by Stacey McEwan
McEwan, a best-selling author who also runs a popular BookTok account, has begun a new series with this action-packed romantasy about Nina, a miner’s daughter with magical powers, and Patrick, a working-class revolutionary. The book is set in a world divided between Artisans (wealthy elites who possess the supernatural ability to wield various elements) and Crafters (working-class laborers who do not).
Saga Press, July 1
Clint
by Shawn Levy
Clint Eastwood released his latest film, the legal thriller “Juror #2,” last fall, at 94, making his career — seven decades and counting — among the longest and most prolific in Hollywood history. In reckoning with his life and work, both behind and in front of the camera, Levy depicts Eastwood as an “inkblot” for a complex American century: a squinting paragon of aggressive masculinity and rough justice whose films showcase his love for the downtrodden, his libertarian politics and his fierce commitment to environmental conservation.
Mariner, July 1
These Summer Storms
by Sarah MacLean
It’s been five years since Alice Storm last saw her family, but she reluctantly returns to their Rhode Island estate after her tech billionaire father is killed in an accident. What begins as a funeral morphs into a “Westing Game”-esque series of challenges stipulated in her father’s will — and administered by his enigmatic aide — in this contemporary novel by MacLean, an acclaimed author of historical romance.
Ballantine, July 8
Vera, or Faith
by Gary Shteyngart
Shteyngart’s latest novel follows a precocious 10-year-old and her family: her Russian intellectual father, her Boston Brahmin mother, her goofy younger brother and her Korean birth mother, whom she’d like very much to meet. The many interwoven story lines are set in a near-future America in political turmoil.
Random House, July 8
Our Last Resort
by Clémence Michallon
Michallon blazed onto the scene two years ago with “The Quiet Tenant,” an exceptionally creepy serial-killer thriller. Now she returns with the tale of a brother and sister, raised in a cult, who reunite at a five-star luxury hotel in the Utah desert — only to be caught up in a murder investigation after the death of another guest.
Knopf, July 8
A Marriage at Sea
by Sophie Elmhirst
In 1972, a young British couple decided to ditch their jobs, sell their house and sail the world. All went well until their boat was capsized by a breaching whale, at which point their story became one not merely of miraculous survival but also of a relationship placed under the greatest imaginable pressure. Elmhirst’s account is as much a meditation on intimacy as a remarkable adventure tale.
Riverhead, July 8
2024
by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf
Three journalists from some of the biggest news outlets in the United States — The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post — join the fray of authors that have taken on last year’s presidential race. The result is an immersive and philosophical tour of an election whose outcome, they argue, was anything but inevitable.
Penguin Press, July 8
The Bewitching
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Moreno-Garcia returns with a time-hopping, witch-filled mystery about three women: Minerva, a scholar in the 1990s working on a dissertation about a cult-favorite horror author; Beatrice, the author herself, who a generation before attended the same university as Minerva and whose beloved novel may have been inspired by real events that occurred on campus; and Minerva’s great-grandmother, Nana Alba, who has eerie witch stories of her own.
Del Rey, July 15
If You Love It, Let It Kill You
by Hannah Pittard
Pittard is a divorced professor who teaches at the University of Kentucky. So is Hana P., her novel’s heroine. Those bare details only hint at the autofictional echoes in this comic novel (Pittard’s fifth), which follows Hana’s discovery that her former husband plans to write about their breakup. As Pittard told Publisher’s Weekly: “I started this book the same day I discovered that a fictional version of myself had been knifed to death in a story by my ex.”
Holt, July 15
A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping
by Sangu Mandanna
Sera Swan was once the most formidable magical prodigy in Britain — until she drained her powers resurrecting her beloved, briefly deceased great-aunt. Fifteen years later, she’s busy running an inn when she discovers an old spell that could restore her power, and enlists a handsome magical historian to help her crack it.
Berkley, July 15
The Mission
by Tim Weiner
In 2007, Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, rankled U.S. spy organizations with “Legacy of Ashes,” a chronicle of the C.I.A.’s 20th-century failings that won a National Book Award. He’s back with the story of the agency’s evolution since Sept. 11 — a period when American covert services took an increasingly militaristic role in the Middle East and, Weiner contends, pushed the business of war deeper into the dark.
Mariner, July 15
A Flower Traveled in My Blood
by Haley Cohen Gilliland
Among the thousands of people “disappeared” by Argentina’s military dictatorship in the late 1970s and early ’80s were hundreds of pregnant women who were killed as soon as they gave birth, their babies distributed to military officials. In this gutting history, Gilliland, a former Argentina correspondent for The Economist, retraces the lives of these women and their offspring through the stories of the determined Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo whose demand for information, and for their grandchildren, was unflagging.
Avid Reader Press, July 15
The Club
by Jennifer Dasal
In this vivid story of Belle Époque Paris, the art historian Dasal shines a light on a legendary female boardinghouse for expats, the American Girls’ Club in Paris. From 1893, “the Club” played host to a generation of independent young artists — complete with cameos from Emmeline Pankhurst and Gertrude Stein.
Bloomsbury, July 15
The Aviator and the Showman
by Laurie Gwen Shapiro
In this double biography, Shapiro illustrates the unlikely partnership — business and personal — of the flamboyant publishing impresario George Putnam and the earnest young social worker and part-time pilot, Amelia Earhart, whom he recruited in 1928 to be the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. As her manager/husband, Putnam pushed Earhart’s career in ever-riskier directions; the result was a tragic mystery that lingers today.
Viking, July 15
Maggie; Or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar
by Katie Yee
In Yee’s debut novel, the visit to a bar turns out not to be a setup for a joke, but a husband’s admission to his wife that he’s leaving her for a woman named Maggie. Then our narrator — the soon-to-be-ex-wife — learns that she has cancer. She navigates both upheavals with dry humor, even finding it in her heart to write a “Guide to My Husband: A User’s Manual.”
Summit Books, July 22
Pan
by Michael Clune
After suffering debilitating panic attacks, the teenage protagonist of Clune’s debut novel tries to identify the source of his anxiety, only to encounter increasingly complex and alarming mysteries instead of answers. He and his friends wonder whether his turmoil isn’t just psychiatric, and whether magic and myth might have something to do with it.
Penguin Press, July 22
Lonely Crowds
by Stephanie Wambugu
Ruth is 9 when she meets Maria, the only other Black girl at their Catholic school in suburban Rhode Island, and is instantly mesmerized by her new friend — who soon becomes something more like a sister, and then something harder to define. This debut novel traces the intense and at times painful bond between two young women as they come of age, first amid the confines of their New England upbringing and then as fledgling artists in 1990s New York City.
Little, Brown, July 29
An Oral History of Atlantis
by Ed Park
In his latest story collection, Park explores the absurdities of technology and the creative process, using his humor and free-roaming imagination to delight readers. But whether his subject is password prompts, space movies or specialized translations, the author (“Same Bed, Different Dreams”) remains committed to dissecting universal, human relationships.
Random House, July 29
Angel Down
by Daniel Kraus
War gets a supernatural twist in Kraus’s latest, about a group of American soldiers during World War I who are sent to investigate the source of a mysterious wailing. When they finally reach their destination, they find that the screaming isn’t coming from an injured ally, as they assumed, but from a fallen angel whose very existence could reshape the war.
Atria, July 29
The Trembling Hand
by Mathelinda Nabugodi
A scholar of British Romanticism, Nabugodi here doubles as a literary detective, delicately probing the archives of the period’s most celebrated writers for traces of what she calls the “racial imaginary.” What she finds — in a prizewinning ode by a college-age Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair and a teacup prized by William Wordsworth, among other artifacts — amounts to a hidden history, the largely unacknowledged effects on her subjects’ lives and imaginations of imperial Britain’s slave trade.
Knopf, July 29
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