These Are the Books All Your Friends Are Reading This Summer

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Buy it: $30, amazon.com

Mark Bowden returns to his research of the Vietnam War withHue, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.