These Are the Books All Your Friends Are Reading This Summer

By Caroline Rogers
KOICHI SAITO/Getty Images
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.
Start Slideshow

1 of 41

What We Lose: A Novel by Zinzi Clemmons

amazon.com

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.

Advertisement
Advertisement

2 of 41

Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang

amazon.com

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.

3 of 41

The Reason You’re Alive by Matthew Quick

amazon.com

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.

Advertisement

4 of 41

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

amazon.com

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.

5 of 41

Florence in Ecstasy by Jessie Chaffee

amazon.com

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.

6 of 41

The Dinner Party and Other Stories by Joshua Ferris

amazon.com

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.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

7 of 41

When the English Fall: A Novel by David Williams

amazon.com

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.

8 of 41

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore

amazon.com

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.

9 of 41

Homesick for Another World: Stories by Ottessa Moshfegh

amazon.com

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.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

10 of 41

The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying by Nina Riggs

amazon.com

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.”

11 of 41

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

amazon.com

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.

12 of 41

Isadora: A Novel by Amelia Gray

amazon.com

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.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

13 of 41

Idaho by Emily Ruskovich

amazon.com

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.

14 of 41

A Separation by Katie Kitamura

amazon.com

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.

15 of 41

Into the Water by Paula Hawkins

amazon.com

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.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

16 of 41

Hue, 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden

amazon.com

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.

17 of 41

Modern Gods by Nick Laird

amazon.com

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.

18 of 41

The Signal Flame: A Novel by Andrew Krivak

amazon.com

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.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

19 of 41

Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan

amazon.com

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.

20 of 41

The Wonder by Emma Donoghue

amazon.com

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.

21 of 41

What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky: Stories by Lesley Nneka Arimah

amazon.com

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.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

22 of 41

Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays by Durga Chew-Bose

amazon.com

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.)

23 of 41

We Shall Not All Sleep by Estep Nagy

amazon.com

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.

24 of 41

Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin

amazon.com

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.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

25 of 41

Trajectory: Stories by Richard Russo

amazon.com

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.

26 of 41

The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti

amazon.com

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.

27 of 41

A Field Guide to the North American Family by Garth Risk Hallberg

amazon.com

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.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

28 of 41

The Futures by Anna Pitoniak

amazon.com

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.

29 of 41

The Gypsy Moth Summer by Julia Fierro

amazon.com

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.

30 of 41

The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories by Penelope Lively

amazon.com

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.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

31 of 41

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster

amazon.com

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.

32 of 41

Do Not Become Alarmed by Maile Meloy

amazon.com

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.

33 of 41

Flesh and Bone and Water by Luiza Sauma

amazon.com

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.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

34 of 41

Magpie Murders: A Novel by Anthony Horowitz

amazon.com

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.

35 of 41

The Chalk Artist by Allegra Goodman

amazon.com

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.

36 of 41

Exit West: A Novel by Mohsin Hamid

amazon.com

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.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

37 of 41

The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish

amazon.com

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.