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Beach reads, anyone? We can only hope. No matter what the COVID-19 crisis does to our habitual summer pleasures, it still can't deny us the pleasure of a good, escapist book. And this summer is packed with an overabundance of amazing books—fiction from some of our most beloved novelists, memoirs from inspiring women, and a dose of pure fantasy for those of us (all of us?) who can't make it to Capri.
All Adults Here by Emma Straub (May 4)
Emma Straub’s All Adults Here is a book that delights in deeply felt and rapidly shifting interpersonal dynamics. There’s a wry wink in the title; being grown up is no guarantee that you have it figured out. Ensconced in their upstate New York bubble, the Strick family is the perfect showcase: Matriarch Astrid questions her parenting—and life choices; her daughter Porter is venturing into motherhood solo, but dipping back into bad romantic habits; son Elliot’s perfect-looking life props up a perpetually dissatisfied outlook. The only one sure of her priorities might be Astrid’s teenage granddaughter Cecelia, sent to live with her grandmother after a queasy high-school confrontation. “That was the problem with being part of a family: Everyone could mean well and it could still be a disaster,” Astrid muses. Yet this warm, optimistic novel argues that one should keep trying, regardless. All Adults Here affirms the value of community and family, no matter the strife that may rise up within them. - Estelle Tang
Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld (May 19)
Former president Bill Clinton revealed in his 2016 Democratic National Convention speech that he proposed to Hillary Rodham three times before she finally agreed. The second time, the budding Arkansas politician—aware of Rodham’s own rising star—told her: “I really want you to marry me, but you shouldn’t do it.” In Curtis Sittenfeld’s new political fantasy, Rodham, she doesn’t. The rest is (alternate) history. According to Sittenfeld’s triumphant feminist reinvention, a heartbroken Rodham foresakes “glorious sex” and intellectual vibing with Clinton over his repeated infidelity, choosing instead her own ambition (and sanity). The female bard of presidential adjacents, Sittenfeld based 2008’s American Wife on a thinly-veiled Laura Bush, but she is far less coy in Rodham, not bothering to change names; splashing a sepia-hued young Hillary on the cover. While American Wife hewed closer to the truth, Rodham dives headlong into escapism, reimagining the presidential election results of the past three decades: Donald Trump appears in an unexpected capacity; Clinton is demoted to tech billionaire, and Rodham, untethered from Arkansas and her First Lady fate, is free to go forth and conquer on her own. “How could I live in the world not being the person Bill Clinton loved the most?” Sittenfeld’s Hillary wonders after their wrenching split. It turns out: quite well. - Michelle Ruiz
Stray: A Memoir by Stephanie Danler (May 19)
After the resounding success of her debut novel, Sweetbitter, author Stephanie Danler wrote a 2016 essay for Vogue about her father’s drug addiction; in her new memoir Stray, she expands upon the story. From a cottage perched above Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon, she recounts a turbulent childhood at the hands of parents who were addicts, and the lasting impact on her adult life. Against a backdrop of geographic beauty—the cliffs of California’s Palos Verdes Estates with her mother, the glacier lakes of Rocky Mountain National Park with her father, a pilgrimage on foot across Spain in the aftermath of her divorce—Danler captures both the tragedy of inherited trauma, and the remarkably human ability to amount to something far greater than the sum of our own wrongdoings and the misfortunes we’ve suffered. - Jenna Adrian-Diaz
These Women by Ivy Pochoda
Ivy Pochoda spins a narrative set in the West Adams section of Los Angeles around five very different women who inadvertently attract the attention of a serial killer. This time-traveling novel expertly tells the stories of women whose lives have been deemed expendable, from a young dancer nicknamed Jujubee to an oft-underestimated vice cop to a mother whose daughter’s murder remains unsolved. Pochoda turns grief, suffering and loss into art, crafting a literary thriller that is no less compelling for its deep emotional resonance. - Emma Specter
A Burning by Megha Majumdar (June 2)
At the start of Megha Majumdar’s A Burning, Jivan, an ambitious young girl from the slums of Benghal, comments on a provocative post while idly scrolling through her Facebook feed. A few nights later, the police are at her door, accusing her of a terrorist attack; with little delay, she’s transplanted to a jail, where she attempts to piece together how she ended up there. So begins this transporting mystery, which combines fast-paced plotting with the kind of atmospheric detail one might find in the work of Jhumpa Lahiri or Daniyal Mueenuddin. The story skips from Jivan’s perspective to that of her former P.E. teacher and a sweet-natured, illiterate local named Lovely. It’s an unconventional thriller, but a highly compelling read nonetheless. - Chloe Schama
Dolls! Dolls! Dolls! Deep Inside Valley of the Dolls by Stephen Rebello (June 2)
In Dolls! Dolls! Dolls! (Penguin Books), Stephen Rebello chronicles the she said, she said hoopla surrounding Jacqueline Susann’s bawdy, tawdry novel Valley of the Dolls and its subsequent adaptation to the big screen. Rebello tells of Susann’s failings as a screen and stage actress—a star never born, she grasped for fame via an unexpected literary career. From her schemes to get the Dolls manuscript into the right hands to the all-press-is-good-press-marketing of the book to the literary critics’s staunch denunciation and the media frenzy surrounding the flop film, Dolls! Dolls! Dolls! leaves no stone unturned. With great detail and heavy research, the book is as heady and colorful as the pulsating Pucci prints Susann so famously wore. It’s everything you could have ever possibly wanted to know about the book history loved to hate. - Lilah Ramzi
Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan (June 2)
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Set in Hong Kong just prior to the protests, Naoise Dolan’s novel, Exciting Times, is narrated by Ava, a 22-year-old ESL teacher split between two mind-bending relationships. There’s Julian, a foppish and emotionally withholding Oxford-educated banker; and then there’s Edith, a stunning Hong Kong native with whom life is like a never-ending slumber party. With its abundant ironies, off-kilter romantic geometries, and fashionably generic title, Exciting Times should satisfy many a Sally Rooney stan. In fact, Rooney’s enthusiasm was pivotal to Dolan’s publication. “This is how Dublin works,” Dolan told Vogue earlier this year. “There’s no one my age who doesn’t have three degrees of separation from Sally.” - Lauren Mechling
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett (June 2)
Like her acclaimed debut novel The Mothers, Brit Bennett's sophomore effort begins with an indelible event in a teenager's life. At the age of 16, the identical twin Vignes sisters run away from home (1950s Mallard, Louisiana), escaping memories of a violent tragedy. So how is it that Desiree ends up back in Mallard with her young daughter, and Stella, passing as white, lives out in California? Bennett made her name with a 2014 essay about the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown called "I Don’t Know What to Do With Good White People," cataloguing the dangers of being seen while black. Here, in her sensitive, elegant prose, she evokes both the strife of racism, and what it does to a person even if they can evade some of its elements. - Estelle Tang
Our Time is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America by Stacey Abrams (June 9)
As the first African-American female major-party gubernatorial nominee of the United States, Stacey Abrams knows a little something about breaking barriers. Now, the former Congresswoman (and rumored vice-presidential pick) has authored a blazing and frequently moving condemnation of how the right to vote is under attack in America, particularly for people of color. In Our Time is Now, Abrams advocates for the importance of voter protections in helping to craft the narrative of American politics, relating her own experience running as the Democratic nominee in Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial election and encouraging readers to take up the fight of democracy in their daily lives. - Emma Specter
Rebel Chef: In Search of What Matters by Dominique Crenn (June 9)
The French-born, San Francisco-based superstar chef Dominique Crenn has long inspired a degree of hero-worship—and enigmatic fascination. She never went to culinary school, left her home in Brittany on the West Coast of France in her mid-twenties to establish herself on her own in San Francisco, and has risen to the top of her profession without pandering to the male-dominated food-world establishment. (When awarded San Pellegrino’s best female chef honor a few years ago, she coolly dismissed it as sexist.) In her winning new memoir, she describes a culinarily idyllic French childhood, marred only by feelings of alienation for being adopted (and discovering she liked girls). Her professional path through the kitchens of San Francisco in the ‘80s and ‘90s (with a detour to a luxury hotel in Indonesia), reminds you how much unrelenting work is involved in establishing a chef’s career. The memoir ends on a somber note—with the recent news of Crenn’s breast cancer diagnosis—but also a determination to fight on. At this anxious moment for restaurants, Rebel Chef is a reminder that we need pugnacious, entrepreneurial figures like Crenn now more than ever. - Taylor Antrim
Broken People by Sam Lansky (June 9)
Can people really change? That’s the question at the heart of TIME West Coast editor Sam Lansky’s Broken People, and it’s one that feels especially relevant as many of us turn inward during this confusing period of self-isolation. In the novel, a young, depressed gay man (who bears the same first name as Lansky) seeks out a much-vaunted, weekend-long ayahuasca trip under the watchful gaze of a shaman to cure his malaise. The protagonist’s journey is a bittersweet and delightfully circuitous one, reminding us of the inconveniently true maxim that in order to heal, you first have to make some semblance of peace with yourself. - Emma Specter
Nothing Can Hurt You by Nicola Maye Goldberg (June 23)
The dead-girl whodunnit gets a twist in Nicola Maye Goldberg’s Nothing Can Hurt You. Like a gothic Olive Kitteridge mixed with Gillian Flynn, this literary mystery unfolds in chapters that aren’t quite standalone, but bear greater resemblances to linked short stories than to sequential installations. It can be disorienting to reset each time a chapter ends, and then a new one begins with a previously unknown set of individuals. And Goldberg is a skilled and deft creator of character—I would have happily lingered with some of the figures she dispatches once their chapters have concluded. But the cumulative effect of this book is masterful, a small-scale renovation of a seemingly exhausted genre. - Chloe Schama
Friends and Strangers: A Novel by J. Courtney Sullivan (June 30)
J. Courtney Sullivan’s Friends and Strangers tells the story of beautiful, disaffected Elizabeth, transplanted from Brooklyn to a sleepy college town so her husband can pursue his dream of creating … a solar powered grill. Elizabeth regards this project with the same degree of skepticism that you probably do upon reading the prior sentence, but suppresses her disdain for the sake of relative domestic harmony. Then a sweetly naive college student named Sam comes into her life to babysit Elizabeth’s infant son, and her energies find another outlet as the awkward but endearing friendship blossoms between them. Like Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, this book pokes at the sometimes troubling relationship between caregivers and mothers, and what starts out as a sweet and straightforward story evolves into something more nuanced and complex. - Chloe Schama
Want: A Novel by Lynn Steger Strong (July 7)
Oh the struggles of yesterday, they seem so quaint, don’t they? Well, not really in Lynn Steger Strong’s Want, a visceral account of a worn-out teacher struggling to survive in 20-teens New York City. Enticed by the promise of a vibrant, intellectual life, Elizabeth pursued a PhD and encouraged her husband to quit his lucrative job in finance to chase his own more grounded ambitions. (He’s a carpenter at heart.) Want is an account of how such aspirations collide with the pressures of a world in which opportunity is increasingly closed off. Juxtaposed against Elizabeth’s whirring anxieties is her complex but romantic remembrance of a childhood friend. Steger Strong’s novel is about a certain kind of despair, but also about how we construct the narratives of how we got to where we’ve arrived, and how letting go parts of that story can lead to newfound hope. - Chloe Schama
Sex and Vanity by Kevin Kwan (July 14)
If you were among the millions who turned Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians trilogy into a mega best-seller, then you will rejoice at his latest, Sex and Vanity, which unfolds with the author’s signature, winking wit about the .001%. (Each character is introduced with their abbreviated CV, footnoted for those without a complete taxonomy of elite, global private schools and universities.) This time the story starts in sun-soaked Capri, where a sweetly naive (but gorgeous, of course) Brown undergrad attends the gilded nuptials of her ultra-glam childhood baby-sitter. Jetting from East Hampton to Fifth Avenue, the book is a voyeuristic cruise into the playgrounds of the uber rich. Kwan’s books don’t go deep—the characters are caricatures more than rounded beings—but that’s hardly the point. They skate along the glittering surface, allowing their readers to bask in the reflected glow. - Chloe Schama
Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow (July 14)
Listening to Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow’s podcast, Call Your Girlfriend, is like dropping in on a master-class on long-distance, platonic intimacy. The two friends have been exemplars for the kind of female friendships many of us strive for—and they’ve coined much of the parlance of modern, millennial friendship along the way: “shine theory,” “lady web.” But as the two women discuss in their lively, conversational new book, the bond between them was not always Gossip Girl viewing parties and private jokes about denim skirts. Big Friendship is an anatomy of the way one particular friendship works, but it is also an argument for taking all amicable relationships more seriously, for understanding them in the terms we usually reserve for romance (the authors share their “meet cute” and discuss the “spark” and “chemistry” between them), and for appreciating the sometimes difficult and time-consuming work it takes to maintain these friendship. As Friedman and Sow point out, we expect our friendships to be resilient and forgiving, to step to the side when other priorities (work, family) arise. This is understandable, of course. But perhaps, this book suggests, it is not something we should accept if we want to sustain the bolster and bulwark that a solid friendship can provide. - Chloe Schama
The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donohue (July 21)
Moved up from its original publication date for obvious reasons, Emma Donoghue’s historical novel is set in Ireland during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Following a thirty-year-old maternity ward nurse as she does her best to maintain order as the world crumbles around her, the book is an evocative, and almost eerily timely work, conjuring what the author no doubt thought was distant history with potent immediacy. Donoghue is the author of the stunning best-seller Room, which told the story of a kidnapped mother raising her child in their one-room prison, and she conjures some of the same claustrophobic force here, recounting each gripping and terrifying moment. - Chloe Schama
Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir by Natasha Tretheway (July 28)
Natasha Tretheway’s memoir is predicated on a brutal act, but there is nothing sensational about the way it reads. This memoir-cum-true-crime story from the two-time Poet Laureate and Pulitzer winner is a narrative about how her mother was murdered by her ex-stepfather, but it is also a coming-of-age story for a young artist. The books takes its name from the street where the murder took place, and the writing itself has an emotional groundedness. This book may have been written by one of our most celebrated poets, but its lyricism is tethered to the author’s lived and deeply felt experience. - Chloe Schama
The Weekend by Charlotte Wood (August 4)
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Who would have guessed that a chamber piece would feel like the most unreachable fantasy? Our current moment adds a alluring element to the latest from beloved Australian novelist Charlotte Wood, whose sixth novel, The Weekend, sees three friends in their seventies embark on a rich but difficult task: cleaning out their late friend Sylvie's house. Jude, Wendy, and Adele's dynamic, compressed by the dual crucibles of close quarters and grief, stretches and threatens to break as they uncover unknown things about each other. Wood's brand of social observation, honed in family drama Animal People and dystopian pre-#MeToo tale The Natural Way of Things, is in evidence here—spare and unrelenting. But it also allows us to acknowledge exactly why we tolerate such tensions: It means we are there with, and for, each other. - Estelle Tang
Luster: A Novel by Raven Leilani (August 4)
Edie, the narrator of Luster, is a disaffected twenty-something under-achiever whiling away her desk-job hours by engaging in inappropriate online flirtations and spending her after-hours trying to figure out how to be an artist. The online crush turns into a full-on affair with an older man, semi-sanctioned by his wife, with whom he has an open relationship. Edie visits their bleak suburban house, uninvited—as one does when one is courting a married man—and, through a slightly dubious sequence of events, ends up moving in. The slightly soap opera set-up belies the cleverness of this book, which is narrated with fresh and wry jadedness, Edie’s every disappointment rendered with a comic twist. (“Based on his liberal use of the semicolon, I just assumed this date would go well.”) Edie’s life is a mess, her past is filled with sorrow, she’s wasting her precious youth, and yet, reading about it all is a whole lot of fun. - Chloe Schama
Tender Is the Flesh by Augustina Bazterrica, translated by Sarah Moses (August 4)
Do you have the, um, appetite for a dystopian novel about a society built on cannibalism? Wait, wait! Maybe you do. I read this chilling and pointedly political novel from Argentina (where it won a prestigious literary award) in a single sitting, and then handed the galley off to a friend who promptly did the same. (He texted me his review: “I tore through that cannibalism book in two nights. Fun twist at the end.”) A global epidemic has killed all the planet’s animals, leaving humanity to feast on its own for meat. Industrialized plants are set up for this purpose, with a class of humans raised solely as food. Our protagonist, Marcos, is management at one such plant, but he’s wracked with ethical guilt, refuses to eat this so-called “special meat,” and even falls into an unsettling love affair with a woman intended for slaughter. The novel is horrific, yes, but fascinatingly provocative (and Orwellian) in the way it exposes the lengths society will go to deform language and avoid moral truths. - Taylor Antrim
Migrations(August 4)
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Charlotte McConaghy’s Migrations follows loner Franny Stone as she sets out with a ragtag crew of fishermen from the wild coast of Greenland. Her ostensible mission is to track the migratory pattern of the arctic tern, a species believed to be on the brink of extinction. But the book is as much a mystery as an odyssey. Just what is this rogue scientist seeking, and who, or what, is she trying to escape? Amid the arctic waters, Franny recalls a fiery romance with a biologist professor, a man who held for her the promise of “the end of loneliness.” One senses, in this suspenseful, atmospheric book, that it did not quite turn out like that. - Chloe Schama
Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh (August 11)
This curiosity of a novel continues the fascinating and never-predictable career of Ottessa Moshfegh. If her last novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation resonated in its depiction of contemporary ennui, Death in Her Hands is more of an experiment, recalling the noir-ish stylings of her breakout, Eileen. It’s a meta-detective story of a kind, starring a widow in her 70s who lives alone in the woods and, while walking her dog, comes across a note announcing a murder. But has a murder taken place? Vesta Gul, as she is enigmatically named (is that a pun?), certainly thinks so, and in ultra-unreliable-narrator fashion starts filling in the details of the crime, many of which seem to come from her own life. Moshfegh is a novelist I will follow pretty much anywhere, even if this story’s winding path raised as many questions as it answered. - Taylor Antrim
