Summer is coming. Bring a book.
Whether your summer plans involve basking on the beach or clambering into a hammock, chances are they include a book. Here are ideas for your list: some of the most-talked-about books of the season, some true and fictional crime, and some engrossing nonfiction. Whatever you pick, we hope you enjoy it.
Books getting buzz
“The Plot” by Jean Hanff Korelitz: Writer Jake Bonner’s career has sputtered: After modest success with his first book, he can’t sell his next novel and is teaching at a no-name MFA program. He meets a young, outrageously self-assured writer who is certain the premise of his manuscript is destined to make him famous. So when Jake learns that this plot is up for grabs, he takes it — and finds all the success the other writer predicted for himself years earlier. But someone knows Jake’s secret. (Celadon, 336 pp., out now.)
“The Other Black Girl” by Zakiya Dalila Harris: In this debut novel, Nella is delighted when another Black woman is hired at the publishing house where she works: someone who can commiserate about microaggressions and awkward company seminars about diversity, and help elevate authors who may not otherwise get published. But Hazel — charming, confident and immediately successful in a way that Nella was not — doesn’t turn out to be the ally Nella had hoped for. Is she behind the threatening notes left at Nella’s desk? (Atria, 368 pp., out now.)
“Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship” by Catherine Raven: Raven’s memoir finds her after she’s completed a doctorate in biology, deeply alone in rural Montana — until she is visited by a persistent fox. It’s a real-life friendship that mirrors the one between Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince and his fox, full of tenderness and understanding. (Spiegel & Grau, 304 pp., July 6.)
“Appleseed” by Matt Bell: Three characters from distinct eras — 1700s Ohio, the latter half of the 21st century and a millennium from now — confront their roles in a disordered world (and eventually, an environmental apocalypse) but find traces of hope, too. With its urgent warnings about our ecological future, this novel may not be textbook escapist reading, but it conjures thought-provoking, immersive worlds. (Custom House, 480 pp., July 13.)
“The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois” by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers: In her debut novel, Jeffers, a National Book Award nominee for poetry, traces an African American family from the arrival of its earliest enslaved ancestors. The story shifts perspective, opening with a Greek chorus that guides readers through generations but eventually focusing on Ailey, a teenager in the 1980s who balances her life in the city with annual visits to the family’s ancestral home in Georgia. As Ailey becomes an adult, she uncovers more history, forcing a reckoning with her sense of self and place in the world. (Harper, 816 pp., July 27.)
— Joumana Khatib
Big follow-ups
“The President’s Daughter” by James Patterson and Bill Clinton: After the success of their first political thriller, “The President Is Missing,” Patterson and Clinton have teamed up for another. When the daughter of former President Matthew Keating is kidnapped, he draws on all his experience — as a global leader, parent and Navy SEAL — to bring her home. (Knopf/Little, Brown, 608 pp., due Monday.)
“Dear Senthuran” by Akwaeke Emezi: Think of this as an epistolary memoir from the author of “The Death of Vivek Oji” and “Freshwater”:
In a series of letters to friends, ex-lovers, family members and others, Emezi charts their own creative formation. (Riverhead, 240 pp., due Tuesday.)
“The Maidens” by Alex Michaelides: After a Cambridge student is found dead, Mariana, a grieving psychotherapist in London, is drawn into the murder investigation. The dead woman was one of the Maidens, a group of female students in thrall to a charismatic professor who is Mariana’s prime suspect. This is a bookish thriller with stunning backdrops — Cambridge’s rarefied campus, Aegean seascapes — scattered with clues in Ancient Greek. (Celadon, 352 pp., June 15.)
“A Slow Fire Burning” by Paula Hawkins: Hawkins (“The Girl on the Train,” “Into the Water”) focuses on the murder of a young man on his houseboat in London. Could his killer
be Laura, the off-kilter woman who went home with him and was later seen covered in blood? Miriam, his odd, uncomfortably nosy neighbor on the river who’s trying to play Miss Marple? And what to make of his aunt Carla, with whom he shared a lifetime of grief? The flaws of each character will surprise and perhaps even enchant you — and only a clairvoyant could anticipate the ending. (Riverhead, 320 pp., Aug. 31.)
— Joumana Khatib
Illuminating nonfiction
“The Engagement: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage” by Sasha Issenberg: It’s been six years since the Supreme
Court ruled that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage. Issenberg chronicles the 25 years leading to that moment. He starts in Hawaii, in 1990, when Genora Dancel met Ninia Baehr. Before Issenberg gets us to the courtroom, he writes full mini-biographies of the two women. At more than 900 pages (100 of those being endnotes), this is a comprehensive history. But it conveys social history as the grand drama it really is, full of intimate details, battling personalities, heated court cases, public persuasion. (Pantheon, 928 pp., out now.)
“All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake,” by Tiya Miles: Historian Tiya Miles’ wide-ranging book was inspired by one modest item: a sack passed from mother to daughter. The mother, an enslaved woman named Rose, gave the sack — containing a dress, pecans and a braid of her hair — to her daughter Ashley in 1852. Ashley was 9 and was being sold and separated from her. Tracing that artifact through the generations of Ashley’s family, Miles, a professor at Harvard, writes about “the salvaging of vital things that hold the deep meanings of our lives.” The central story leads her to consider the larger arc of African American women and their crafts throughout history, including in her own family, and the ways they have expressed love, hope and continuance. (Random House, 416 pp., due Tuesday.)
“Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth” by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford:
We’re in a period of reexamining our cherished myths, and in Texas they don’t come more cherished than the Alamo. “Its legends comprise the beating heart of Texas exceptionalism,” the authors write, and they push back against the “Heroic Anglo Narrative” of the past two centuries. Their project includes appreciating the contributions of Mexican Americans to Texas’ early years and emphasizing the importance of slave labor to Texas’ early development. (Mexico wanted to abolish slavery.) In this book for a general audience, the authors credit the historians who have done this work before them. (Penguin Press, 416 pp., due Tuesday.)
“The Plague Year: America in the Time of COVID” by Lawrence Wright:
Wright is best known for his nonfiction, but in spring 2020 he published a novel, “The End of October,” an eerily timed thriller about a pandemic. Now he offers a reallife account of the dizzying year just past. Wright propels the story with dramatic set pieces: an emergency doctor in Wuhan, China, circling in red the curious diagnosis of an “atypical pneumonia” in December 2019; an otherwise healthy lawyer in New Rochelle, New York, waking up in late February with a cough and a low fever, put on a ventilator days later. (“Weeks had passed from the point when containment was possible.”) (Knopf, 336 pp., due Tuesday.)
“The Brilliant Abyss: Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean, and the Looming Threat That Imperils It” by Helen Scales: ”The Brilliant Abyss” is about the vast majority of the ocean that we never see, the watery places so deep you could stack 10 Empire State Buildings in them. But because of technological advances, we’re learning more: about the creatures that live there (worms that are 9 feet long; the “slimehead,” a fish that can live up to 250 years); about the possible beginnings of life itself; and about the surprising ways in which we depend on ecosystems most of us could never visit. (Atlantic Monthly Press, 304 pp., July 6.)
“The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans” by Cynthia Barnett:
Barnett begins this paean to the seashell with a description of how they are made. Long before beachcombers collect them as empty beauties, shells are created as protection by the mollusks living inside them. Like many details in this book, it’s a process that will have you marveling at nature. The seashell might seem a small foundation for a book, but Barnett’s account remarkably spirals out, appropriately, to become a much larger story about the sea, global history, and environmental crises and preservation. (Norton, 432 pp., July 6.)
“The Joy of Sweat: The Strange Science of Perspiration” by Sarah Everts: As summer humidity approaches, some of us might argue with the idea that there is any joy in sweat. But “wouldn’t it be better to find serenity instead of shame in all the sweating that we do?” Everts asks. OK, I’m listening. Everts calls sweat a “fascinating and little understood” secretion, and it’s hard to deny that after she’s done walking us through the history and science of perspiration — including plenty of odd facts, like the woman whose sweat turned red because she was eating (way) too much of a popular corn chip. (Norton, 304 pp., July 13.)
— John Williams
True crime
“What Happened to Paula: On the Death of an American Girl” by Katherine Dykstra: In July 1970, 18-year-old Paula left her home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and never returned. As Dykstra, a journalist, delves into the old case files, she realizes she’ll never solve the crime. “Even if we knew how Paula died,” she writes, “it wouldn’t solve the fundamental problem I’d been circling: To what degree does being a woman implicate one in violence? Maybe this wasn’t a mystery of one woman’s life and why one woman died, but the mystery of why women die.” (Norton, 312 pp., June 15.)
“Couple Found Slain: After a Family Murder” by Mikita Brottman: In 1992, a young man named Brian Bechtold was judged “not criminally responsible” for the murder of his parents, a crime he had never tried to conceal. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, he was sent to a maximum security psychiatric hospital. Though the book does explore Brian’s life before the killings, when he was abused, Brottman’s goal is to shine a light on Brian’s decades in an institution. (Henry Holt, 256 pp., July 6.)
“The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer” by Dean Jobb: Thomas Neill Cream, one of the earliest known serial killers, was a doctor who poisoned his victims in the United States and Britain in the late 19th century. Forensic crime-solving research was still in its infancy; it could be very difficult, if not impossible, to prove that someone had administered poison. In addition, doctors were exalted, and often the last to be considered as murder suspects. (Algonquin, 432 pp., July 13.)
“Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story” by Julie K. Brown: Brown expands on her groundbreaking reporting in The Miami Herald by sharing her journey to expose Jeffrey Epstein’s predation of young women and the plea deal that let him off easy. (Dey Street, 464 pp., July 20.)
— Noor Qasim
Imaginary crime
“Bath Haus” by P.J. Vernon: In this pulse-pounder, Oliver’s decision to cheat on his longtime partner turns out to be exceedingly bad. Someone tries to strangle him at the bathhouse where he goes for anonymous sex, plunging him into a nightmare of lies, stalking and betrayal. (Doubleday, 320 pp., June 15.)
“The Damage” by Caitlin Wahrer: This roller coaster of terror, marked by whipfast twists and turns, follows a small-town Maine lawyer who — several years after her brotherin-law was raped — finds herself drawn back into the case. (Pamela Dorman Books, 400 pp., June 15.)
“Razorblade Tears” by S.A. Cosby: Cosby, who burst onto the scene last summer with a gritty, thrilling debut, “Blacktop Wasteland,” here introduces Ike Randolph, a Black man who’s led a completely clean life since his release from the state penitentiary. When Ike learns that someone has murdered his son Isiah — and Isiah’s white husband, Derek — he joins forces with Derek’s dad, also an ex-con, to find out who killed their boys. (Flatiron, 336 pp., July 6.)
“The Turnout” by Megan Abbott: Abbott — so good at plucking the dark and twisted strands of female friendships and rivalries in books like “You Will Know Me” and “Give Me Your Hand” — fashions this unsettling novel around a ballet academy run by three high-strung former dancers, two of them sisters. (Putnam, 352 pp., Aug. 3.)
— Tina Jordan