Literary Fiction
Country People
by Daniel Mason
Mason follows up “North Woods,” one of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2023, with a larkish campus novel set in a cheery corner of southern Vermont. It starts out well for a visiting professor; her husband, Miles, an underemployed Russian folklore scholar; and their two adorable kids. Then Miles gets swept up by a local legend that, it turns out, may not be as fantastical as it sounds.
Random House, July 7
Family Saga
The Great Wherever
by Shannon Sanders
Struggling with work while grieving the death of her father, 32-year-old Aubrey has one thing she’s been looking forward to: She’s expecting her boyfriend to propose. But when she sees him, he breaks up with her instead. Then Aubrey gets a note informing her that she has inherited a stake in a farm in Tennessee. With little keeping her at home, she travels to the strange property, which turns out to hold contentious family history and several ghosts, who narrate the novel.
Holt, July 7
Graphic Novel
Heartstopper: Vol. 6
by Alice Oseman
It’s hard to imagine anything but a happy ending for Nick and Charlie, the schoolboys-turned-boyfriends who’ve captivated millions over the course of this graphic novel series and its Netflix adaptation (which also concludes this summer). Still, stories require hurdles and the final volume serves up a biggie: Nick is leaving for university and Charlie has one important year left in school.
Graphix, July 7
Satire
The Simp
by Roshan Sethi
Inspired by a comically unreasonable real-life advertisement published by a wealthy New York art world family seeking a personal assistant to “make life easier for the couple in every way possible,” this novel follows an unemployed actor named Raj who gets hired, on false pretenses, for a similar role by an unnamed “Hollywood Family” in Los Angeles. Sethi, a filmmaker and practicing oncologist, weaves into this deadpan satire a sobering look at the impacts of racism and colonialism on the pursuit of fame.
Simon & Schuster, July 7
Thriller
Helpless
by Jessica Knoll
Faye and Henry reunite on their college campus for a professor’s funeral, 12 years after their all-consuming relationship ended in flames. Both have moved on — to marriages, thriving careers, kids. But a flirty drink date turns nightmarish when Faye wakes up in Henry’s secluded mountain cabin, unsure what her ex turned abductor wants.
Scribner, July 7
Cultural Criticism
A Sudden Flicker of Light
by David Thomson
An inveterate cinephile and the author of more than 20 books, Thomson serves up second thoughts in this “revisionist history of movies.” And he’s not just talking about dumb blockbusters, juvenile comedies and cynical retreads. Great movies — perhaps all movies, he argues — have trained us to value fantasy, power, greed and other forms of ugliness.
Simon & Schuster, July 7
Biography
A Vast Horizon
by Anna Thomasson
In Britain, bohemians had Bloomsbury. In France, they had the Hôtel Vaste Horizon, a bougainvillea-draped pension in a hilltop village on the Côte d’Azur. Drawing on letters, memoirs, artworks and hundreds of photos, Thomasson captures the creative and sexual ferment of the group of talented free spirits — Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Man Ray, the photographer Lee Miller and the poet Paul Éluard among them — who took over the hotel in the summer of 1937, in an exuberant last gasp of artistic abandon as World War II loomed.
Pegasus, July 7
Literary Fiction
Famous Men
by Julie Buntin
The “Marlena” author returns with a novel about a young aspiring writer named Will who escapes her small Midwestern town, and a traumatic high school experience, for New York City. There, she seeks out the mentorship of a well-known author, Nathaniel Fellow — who Will suspects may be her absent father.
Random House, July 14
Literary Fiction
I Want You to Be Happy
by Jem Calder
Chuck, a newly single 35-year-old copywriter, meets Joey, a 23-year-old barista, at a London bar; after ranting about the end of his 12-year relationship with his fiancée, Chuck drunkenly apologizes, and takes Joey back to his place. From there this hyper-realist novel follows the progression of their ill-defined relationship, complicated by his career frustrations and increasingly apparent alcoholism, and by her financial anxieties and dreams of becoming a poet.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, July 14
Contemporary Romance
Extracurricular
by Rachel Lynn Solomon
What does a child star turned pop idol do when she leaves the spotlight behind? In Ramona Wilder’s case, she enrolls at U.C.L.A. and, like so many lost freshmen before her, signs up for Psych 101. A lifetime of being manipulated and scrutinized — by her parents, the paparazzi, a string of clout-hungry boyfriends — has left Ramona prone to panic attacks, and with no idea how to be a normal civilian. But Nick Navarro, her kindhearted (and recently divorced) professor, might be the perfect person to help her figure it out.
Berkley, July 14
Romantasy
Dominion
by Jean Kwok
Kwok, best known for contemporary family dramas like “Girl in Translation” and “Searching for Sylvie Lee,” swerves into romantasy with this Chinese mythology-infused epic. Rubi Morningtail is a refugee making a living as a ribbon dancer after a demonic attack on her homeland left her with amnesia. After catching the attention of the leader of the Tyger Warriors, a powerful mage named Blake Axefire, she finds herself fighting alongside him against forces that could destroy their world.
Putnam, July 14
True Crime
Catch the Devil
by Pamela Colloff
Meet Paul Skalnik, a nine-times-married con man who for 30 years ran scams on the Gulf Coast, resulting in a series of stints in prison. And it was while incarcerated that he ran his biggest con of all: trading on alleged confessions by fellow inmates that allowed an unscrupulous judicial system to convict people, in return for clemency for himself. Colloff, an investigative reporter, digs deep into the story of a figure who remains unrepentant, even as he could save a man currently on death row.
Knopf, July 14
Art History
The Renoir Girls
by Catherine Ostler
Immortalized as children in Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s 1881 double portrait “The Pink and the Blue,” Alice and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers, the daughters of a wealthy Jewish family, would go on to live lives that were anything but idyllic. By examining the fate of the girls (and their older sister, Irène), Ostler presents a vivid picture of life for French Jews, from the precarious splendors of the Belle Époque to the devastation of the Holocaust.
Atria, July 14
Social Science
Aging Out
by Lucy Schiller
Schiller is still in her 30s, but the experience of caring for her grandmother during the Covid pandemic gave her firsthand knowledge of what it’s like to be old in America. Her first book is an exploration of aging’s often harsh realities — care homes, Medicare, solitude, financial precarity, looming mortality — leavened by personal history and humor.
Flatiron, July 14
Historical Fiction
Cool Machine
by Colson Whitehead
The final book in Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy recalls 1980s New York, where excess and scarcity weigh on the city and its people with equal force. The furniture dealer Ray Carney returns for this three-part narrative, first for a risky heist at one of Manhattan’s most extravagant venues. We then head into the East Village to hunt for a missing relic, before getting drawn again into the underworld as Carney tries to rescue his dead cousin’s son.
Doubleday, July 21
Mystery
The Mortons
by Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld
Jessica is a Morton, which means a couple of things: She’s the elite of the elite at her prestigious college … and she’s been training all her life to be an assassin. That’s because the Mortons are a longstanding crime family, trafficking in murder and manipulation. At 20, Jessica is a prodigy, ruthless and efficient. But when a curious mission sets off a chain of unexpected events, Jessica realizes her family may be more tortured than she realized.
Pamela Dorman Books, July 21
Romantasy
A Forsaken Prophecy
by Stacey McEwan
This sequel to “A Forbidden Alchemy,” one of our favorite hidden gems of last year, drops readers back into a raging civil war between the magically gifted, privileged Artisans and the exploited, working class Craftsmen. Nina, an earth magician, and Patrick, a rebel leader and the last living alchemist, must grapple with the cost of Nina’s recent betrayal and the irresistible pull of their connection as they set off on a quest that could end the war.
Saga Press, July 21
Western
Yellow Pine
by Claire Vaye Watkins
The third novel by the author of “Gold Fame Citrus” and “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness” is narrated by Rose, a divorced and grieving mother living mostly alone in a remote stretch of desert on the California-Nevada border. In this tale of climate collapse and green energy disillusionment, Rose hopes against hope that the love of her life will finally commit to her — while also lamenting the destruction of the planet generally, and a 5,000-acre endangered tortoise habitat in the particular.
Riverhead, July 21
History
Country of Lords
by Kim Phillips-Fein
As America, gearing up for its 250th birthday, celebrates the promises of liberty and equality enshrined in its founding documents, Phillips-Fein examines a less glorious “shadow tradition” embodied by an influential roster of “natural aristocrats,” social Darwinists, technocrats and proponents of race-based intelligence — passionate believers in “the necessity, inevitability and desirability of extreme inequality.”
Norton, July 21
Historical Fantasy
Fishbone Cinderella
by Elizabeth Lim
Inspired by Chinese folklore, Lim’s multigenerational novel follows Marigold, a medical student in 1980s San Francisco whose mother, Helen, has an inconvenient habit of vanishing; one day soon, Marigold worries, she may disappear for good. To understand this strange power and save her mom, she must untangle a web of secrets that extends to her mother’s childhood in 1940s China, and the Japanese invasion that changed the course of Helen’s life.
Del Rey, July 28
Memoir
All That’s Unseen
by Emilee Hackney
In this debut memoir, Hackney, an eighth-generation Appalachian, recounts her journey from the rugged hollers of rural coal-country Virginia to Harvard University — a destination that seems all the more unlikely given her engagement, while still in high school, to a member of a local Pentecostal church who imposes a severe form of “domestic discipline” that requires her near-total submission.
Penguin Press, July 28
History
Liberation Summer
by Micki McElya
This lively history chronicles second-wave feminism through a novel lens: the politics of beauty. Assembling a diverse cast of activists, McElya considers some of the movement’s key events — including protests against the Miss America pageant and the staging of the first Miss Black America contest in 1968 — to highlight the ambitions, conflicts and contradictions among women who, while fighting for equality, continued to be judged, and to judge one another, according to conventional standards of beauty.
Avid Reader Press, July 28
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