There’s nothing like a good book in the summertime. Plenty of long days and leisurely vacations mean that summertime is, undoubtedly, reading time. We’ve rounded up all the popular new releases your friends are sure to be reading this summer. These books come highly recommended, and they span the genres. In this list, you’ll find thrillers, literary fiction, and a few engaging non-fiction picks too. These books are can’t-miss powerhouses, stories that will move you, thrill you, and keep you engrossed until the very last page. Add these titles to your reading list, and grab a few friends to start a book club. We have plenty of picks to stock your book club reading list for the next few months—maybe even the next few years. (No pressure, though. Just start with one or two.) So do a little browsing. Find something that speaks to you—whether it’s an author, a cover, or a synopsis—and get to reading. Once you start reading, you’ll also find yourself conversing. You’re almost certain to find that your friends are reading these new titles too. It couldn’t be truer: If there’s one thing better than finishing a great book, it’s reading it with friends.
What We Lose: A Novel by Zinzi Clemmons
Buy it: $22, amazon.com
Book lovers across the country are hungrily devouring this highly anticipated release, the debut novel from Zinzi Clemmons. Through luminous prose, What We Lose delves into the world of one woman, Thandi, who struggles with love, loss, and identity after losing her mother to cancer.
Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang
Buy it: $26, amazon.com
Jenny Zhang’s highly anticipated debut collection casts a shining new light on the immigrant experience in America. Her narrators, Chinese-American daughters of immigrants, illuminate and expound, describing precisely the fleeting feelings of confounding adolescence.
The Reason You’re Alive by Matthew Quick
Buy it: $25.99, amazon.com
The author of The Silver Linings Playbook is back with a vibrant and engaging novel about a Vietnam War vet who wakes up from surgery with a mission. As he tracks down a figure from his past, he grapples with his present, painting a picture of a person—and a country—torn and tumbling, but also hopeful and resilient.
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
Buy it: $27, amazon.com
Critics have called this book addictive, funny, and a sprawling epic. It follows Selin, a Harvard-bound daughter of Turkish immigrants as she navigates her freshman year in the mid-90s. Email, the new form of correspondence taking the decade by storm, opens Selin’s intellectual and emotional worlds, and reveals to readers the mysteries of writing, relationships, and selfhood.
Florence in Ecstasy by Jessie Chaffee
Buy it: $16, amazon.com
A young woman from Boston finds herself in Florence, Italy, searching for meaning and healing in a landscape far from home. She joins a rowing club and becomes entangled in the local life of the city and the people she meets there.
The Dinner Party and Other Stories by Joshua Ferris
Buy it: $26, amazon.com
Don’t have time to dive into a novel? Try short stories instead. Ferris’ first collection offers eleven entertaining stories (some of which you may have already seen in The New Yorker) that are at turns arresting and hilarious. Ferris excavates relationships, interactions, missteps, and misunderstandings to form a collection of work you’ll want to return to again and again.
When the English Fall: A Novel by David Williams
Buy it: $24.95, amazon.com
When civilization collapses, can a Pennsylvania Amish community survive? Earth is utterly transformed after a solar storm, leaving a peaceful community in danger as an external threat encroaches ever more violently.
The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore
Buy it: $26.99, amazon.com
Learn the untold true story of the radium girls, women who worked in the WWI-era radium-dial factories after the Curies’ discovery of the element, and whose perseverance in the face of danger and dire sickness led to unprecedented regulations and research in the field.
Homesick for Another World: Stories by Ottessa Moshfegh
Buy it: $26, amazon.com
Moshfegh has oft been compared to Flannery O’Connor—it’s a bold claim, but we don’t disagree. Both writers have produced short stories that electrify and astound. These stories are clear-eyed and easy to savor. They’re filled with language that mingles beauty and danger with razor-sharp precision.
The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying by Nina Riggs
Buy it: $25, amazon.com
When Nina Riggs was diagnosed with terminal cancer, her life changed in ways she couldn’t imagine. Her memoir, The Bright Hour, examines with humor and heart her life, her legacy, her relationships, and her utterly moving experience of living “with death in the room.”
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
Buy it: $26.99, amazon.com
The New York Times review effuses, "A novel of almost insolent ambition—lush and fantastical, a wild Eden behind a garden gate […] It's part ghost story and part natural history lesson, part romance and part feminist parable.” It’s a transportive 19th-century tale with a winning heroine and a mythical serpent—of course, a must-read this summer.
Isadora: A Novel by Amelia Gray
Buy it: $27, amazon.com
Amelia Gray’s debut novel offers readers a glittering, imaginative glimpse into the life of the captivating, early-20th-century dancer Isadora Duncan, a life that was, at turns, artistic, eccentric, tragic, and a magnet for gossip.
Idaho by Emily Ruskovich
Buy it: $27, amazon.com
Idaho is O. Henry Prize-winning author Emily Ruskovich’s debut novel. It’s the story of Ann and Wade, a couple living in northern Idaho, whose life together is the result of a splintering disaster that left Wade’s first wife, Jenny, in prison. Told from multiple perspectives, this books delves into their converging lives, and Ann’s imagination comes alive as she attempts to understand her husband’s past.
A Separation by Katie Kitamura
Buy it: $25, amazon.com
This novel begins with a separation. A husband and wife diverge, beginning new lives and starting over. That process is arrested when the husband goes missing in Greece and the woman from whom he’s separated goes to find him.
Into the Water by Paula Hawkins
Buy it: $28, amazon.com
When we say all your friends are reading this novel this summer, we mean all your friends are reading it. As the follow-up to the best-selling, film-adapted The Girl on the Train, Hawkins’ new book, Into the Water, promises the same style of thrilling, pulse-pounding mystery.
Hue, 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden
Buy it: $30, amazon.com
Mark Bowden returns to his research of the Vietnam War with Hue, 1968, his first book of the kind since Black Hawk Down. Immerse yourself in multiple perspectives of the war’s dramatic and tragic Battle of Hue, a pivotal moment in the conflict.
Modern Gods by Nick Laird
Buy it: $27, amazon.com
Novelist and poet Nick Laird makes another stunning foray into the novel form with Modern Gods, a story about Irish sisters Liz and Alison whose very different lives interweave, withdraw, and struggle against the past.
The Signal Flame: A Novel by Andrew Krivak
Buy it: $26, amazon.com
Andrew Krivak’s 2011 book The Sojurn was a National Book Award Finalist, and he’s out with a moving follow-up this year. Set in Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains and beginning at Easter in 1972, this is the story of one family waiting—waiting for news of their youngest son, who is thought to be missing in action in Vietnam.
Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan
Buy it: $26, amazon.com
The reader becomes the detective in this mysterious volume, a story about a bookshop, a suicide, and the store clerk who must unravel the mystery dealt her—while also navigating the painful childhood memories that arise in the meantime.
The Wonder by Emma Donoghue
Buy it: $27, amazon.com
From the author of Room comes a thrilling novel about faith, belief, and the sinister side of mystery. It’s about the people surrounding eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell, and the girl herself, the wonder whom people flock to behold, who hasn’t eaten in months because she believes she is living off manna from heaven.
What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky: Stories by Lesley Nneka Arimah
Buy it: $26, amazon.com
Arimah’s debut short story collection will captivate you, move you, and make you think. Don’t miss “Who Will Greet You at Home” (a critical favorite published in The New Yorker ), “Wild,” or “The Future Looks Good.” Once you pick it up, we have a feeling you won’t be able to put down this volume until you've read it cover to cover.
Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays by Durga Chew-Bose
Buy it: $15, amazon.com
Dive into this clever and moving collection of essays by writer and critic Durga Chew-Bose. These essays examine artistic growth and creative expression spurred on and inspired by female authors. With spot-on prose and sparkling poetic sensibilities to spare, you'll find that the only downside is the length of the collection. (You'll wish it were much longer.)
We Shall Not All Sleep by Estep Nagy
Buy it: $26, amazon.com
Read this novel to be transported to Seven Island. Two families inhabit Seven Island: the Hillsingers and the Quicks. Problems occupy both the adults and the children as they traverse the island, which is teeming with troubles they make and must navigate themselves.
Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin
Buy it: $27, amazon.com
Much like the titular flaneuse, this book is difficult to pin down. It’s part cultural criticism and part memoir. It traverses the globe, all the while examining the cities in which the writer, Elkin, has lived and delving into the lives of historical figures such as the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn and the writer Jean Rhys, who have also inhabited those cities.
Trajectory: Stories by Richard Russo
Buy it: $25.95, amazon.com
Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Russo returns with a collection of compact stories that are panoramic in scope, stories of conflict, cons, and complications that artfully span season and geography. For more Russo, read his novels Everybody’s Fool and Empire Falls.
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti
Buy it: $27, amazon.com
Richard Russo describes the plot of this book as “A father-daughter road trip you won’t soon forget.” The father in question, Samuel Hawley, lives on the run and raises his teenage daughter, Loo, along the way. Finally stopping in her late mother’s hometown, Loo starts searching for clues to the mother she never got to meet.
A Field Guide to the North American Family by Garth Risk Hallberg
Buy it: $22, amazon.com
Recently re-released in a newly illustrated form, Hallberg’s novella predates City on Fire, his acclaimed 2015 release chronicling New York lives during the 1970s. Composed of 63 entries, Field Guide illustrates the lives of two fictional families.
The Futures by Anna Pitoniak
Buy it: $26, amazon.com
Evan and Julia embark on the life they’d imagined in New York—Evan at a hedge fund and Julia at a nonprofit—but with the financial crisis of 2008 looming, the couple’s lives and hopes begin to diverge.
The Gypsy Moth Summer by Julia Fierro
Buy it: $26.99, amazon.com
During the summer of 1992, gypsy moths invade Avalon Island, a community in which old families meet new, insiders and outsiders collide, and relationships begin to blossom. However, all is not well, as sinister forces are also at work on the island.
The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories by Penelope Lively
Buy it: $25, amazon.com
Booker Prize winner Penelope Lively has crafted a captivating collection of stories that is packed with immersive detail and is, unquestionably, supremely entertaining. Read more of Lively’s work in The Photograph and How It All Began.
4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster
Buy it: $32.50, amazon.com
On March 3, 1947, Archibald Isaac Ferguson is born. This novel follows the four paths of his life, four fictional, parallel roads down which the four versions of Ferguson travel. They are four different-but-identical Fergusons, all coming of age, learning, leaping, stumbling — and all falling in love with one Amy Schneiderman.
Do Not Become Alarmed by Maile Meloy
Buy it: $27, amazon.com
Need a recommendation? Ask Ann Patchett. She calls this book "smart and thrilling and impossible to put down...the book that every reader longs for.” This book begins with two families on a holiday cruise. The fun of the cruise soon disintegrates, spiraling into disaster, and moving farther and farther from safety as the pages turn.
Flesh and Bone and Water by Luiza Sauma
Buy it: $26, amazon.com
This novel follows Andre, a Brazilian teenager, and the movements of his life from Rio de Janeiro to the Amazon and, eventually, to London. The complexities of memory across time and place haunt Andre as he matures, leading to a collision that will break open truths he has long kept hidden.
Magpie Murders: A Novel by Anthony Horowitz
Buy it: $27.99, amazon.com
This puzzling, thrill-inducing whodunit will impress even the most discerning of mystery readers. It tells the tale of a manuscript and its real-life complications when Susan Ryeland, an editor reading the latest draft from her very challenging and ever-successful client, Alan Conway, comes to believe his work is not all fiction.
The Chalk Artist by Allegra Goodman
Buy it: $27, amazon.com
Love and art come to life in this new novel by National Book Award finalist Allegra Goodman. Read the synopsis, and you’ll be hooked immediately.
Exit West: A Novel by Mohsin Hamid
Buy it: $26, amazon.com
Amid a dangerous and fractured landscape, Nadia and Saeed meet and fall in love. To escape the rubble of their home, they find a door that will take them away. They step through the threshold and into a new world, a world that will challenge them in ways they could never anticipate.
The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish
Buy it: $28, amazon.com
This story spans centuries as it tells two tales—one of a scribe in 1660s London and the other of a researcher in the present day attempting to identify a mysterious scribe of long ago. Fans of historical fiction will find much to love in this complex, deeply interwoven novel about books and the people behind them.
The Impossible Fortress by Jason Rekulak
Buy it: $24, amazon.com
Dip into the 1980s—and the advent of the computer era—with this funny ode to the decade as seen through the eyes of fourteen-year-old Billy Marvin.
Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan by Elaine M. Hayes
Buy it: $27.99, amazon.com
Read Hayes' latest to learn about the life of Sarah Vaughan, the jazz singer and Queen of Bebop who was also a pivotal figure in the beginnings of both the 20th-century Civil Rights Movement and Women’s Rights Movement.
The Leavers: A Novel by Lisa Ko
Buy it: $25.95, amazon.com
Lisa Ko’s debut novel has already left its mark. A powerful story of a missing mother and an adopted son, this novel grapples with separation, assimilation, and the ever-shifting question of belonging in worlds where the ground is shifting constantly underfoot.
The Last Neanderthal by Claire Cameron
Buy it: $26, amazon.com
The two women at the heart of this novel are separated by many, many years. One is part of the last family of neanderthals, the other is an archaeologist in present day. Both struggle with the experiences of motherhood and womanhood in worlds where diverging expectations abound.
