From Nantucket’s cottages to Malibu’s beaches, from urban parks to Midwestern hammocks: it’s time to pick a spot and hunker down with summer’s most ideal companions: books. This season’s new fiction and nonfiction illuminate our manic world while offering riveting escapes.
Stellar fiction dominates across genres—consider Veronica Roth’s futuristic world-building; Maggie O’Farrell’s new historical novel; Douglas Stuart’s queer working-class epic; the final act in Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed Harlem trilogy; David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s thriller set on a Lakota reservation; superb story collections from Ruth Ozeki and Sigrid Nunez; and Paul Yoon’s Odyssey-inspired fable.
Nonfiction is a similar embarrassment of riches, among them David Epstein’s counterintuitive theory of creativity; Ada Ferrer’s memoir about her Cuban immigrant family; the neurobiology of fatherhood from researcher Darby Saxbe, PhD; Pamela Colloff’s outlandish true-crime set (where else?) in Florida; and Pulitzer-Prize laureate Jill Lepore’s study of democracy in an age of disinformation.
Here are the best new books to read this summer, including several titles you can read now and the works arriving over the next few months.
The bestselling author of The Help, Kathryn Stockett serves up a yarn set in the Mississippi Delta during the Depression, when tea was sweet, cafés were segregated, and a fourth of the state’s private property had been repossessed. In the college town of Oxford three lives converge: Meg, a child raised in an orphanage; twenty-four-year-old Birdie, “churchy and chinless,” soliciting a handout from a sister who’s married up; and Charlie, a young woman with a horrific secret. Come for the sisterhood, stay for allusions to William Faulkner and Donna Tartt.
An Oprah Book Club pick, Douglas Stuart’s new novel is both a dissection of a troubled family and an eulogy for dying folkways in the Hebrides islands. It’s 1996: John-Calum (“Cal”) Macleod, a 22
