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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.