New Book Club Stories To Read This Summer

A gripping novel about two trailblazing women on opposite sides of the law — a prosecutor and a madam — who team up to bring down notorious Mob boss Lucky Luciano in 1930s New York, from the New York Times bestselling authors of the million-copy bestseller The Personal Librarian.

A romantic, life-affirming memoir about a young woman’s solo honeymoon to Europe after her fiancé’s sudden death weeks before their wedding, and the community of hope and wonder she built along the way. The result is a beautiful exploration of what it means to choose life in the face of unimaginable pain. The Solo Honeymoon shines a light on the joy of love, the depths of grief, and all the beauty there is in the world.

In her first-ever sequel, Liane Moriarty examines the complexities of modern women’s lives, shining light on shame and family secrets with wit and compassion. Whether you’ve read Big Little Lies or not, this is the perfect novel for longtime fans and new readers alike. “Equal parts juicy, gripping, and impossible to put down … I loved diving back into the lives of these unforgettable characters” (Freida McFadden, bestselling author of The Housemaid).

When your life flashes before your eyes, where would you stop? No one can change the past, but the Midnight Train can take you there. The chance to re-live the moments that meant most. To see what kind of person you really were … A magical, time-traveling love story, from the world of The Midnight Library.

An irresistible delight, this hilarious and heartwarming essay collection gathers essential tales about growing up in the South, the pitfalls of date night, and why no one should ever tell a Black girl how to Black Girl.

The award-winning, bestselling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait returns with a soaring historical novel set in Ireland in the years before and after the Great Hunger. Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away. As spellbinding and varied as the landscape that inspired it, Land is, above all, a story of survival, for our times and for all time.

Pulitzer Prize-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Strout’s new novel tells the story of a chance incident that sparks a powerful realization in a beloved teacher’s life — a poignant meditation on loneliness, friendship, parenthood, and the importance of truth in a capsizing world.

An ambitious young woman insinuates herself into a tight-knit social set, shaking up friendships and marriages in a small seaside town. A frothy novel of love, money, sex, and friendship, from the New York Times bestselling author of Pineapple Street (“Laugh-out-loud-good.” –Harper’s Bazaar).

A radically vulnerable and virtuosic inquiry into the pursuit of freedom and the interminable nature of struggle, from the award-winning author of What We Lose. In elegiac prose, Clemmons trains her discerning eye on American institutions and mythologies, probing the bounds of liberation and autonomy to interrogate our most enduring quest — the relentless pursuit of freedom for all.

A gripping collection of propulsive, psychologically suspenseful stories by the legendary Joyce Carol Oates “who is surely on any shortlist of America’s greatest living writers” (The New York Times Magazine). Suspenseful and psychologically astute, Oates’s short stories enthrall and captivate as they dissect her character’s deepest fears — revealing our own in turn. These new stories blazingly evoke life at its most vivid and perilous, when fate and free will intersect, and one ominous encounter or bad choice can be the difference between an ordinary day and the point of no return.

What happens when one knock at your door sends your entire world into chaos? When a stranger becomes a lifeline? When the reality you’ve meticulously curated seems to be a mirage? The Revelation of Dionne Daphne is at once a deeply moving and provocatively gripping novel that shows when you dig deep enough into the shadows of your life, light can be revealed. It’s a novel of broken lovers, a fractured family, and distant friendships all making their way back to one another.

The search for a notorious vigilante exposes the secrets among three generations of women in this propulsive novel of female resistance and rage, sweeping from contemporary L.A. to gritty 1970s New York.

A tender, moving, and insightful account of queer motherhood and an interrogation of life on the margins of American culture as a self-described “ugly” woman. Interlacing cultural history and analysis with memoir, Ugly is a probing investigation into cultural norms and the formation of our aesthetic sense of self. By sharing the history of her troubled self-image, Fairyington invites us to go rogue, to invent a new language and logic to overthrow all the ways that women have been cultivated to hate themselves.

A spellbinding exploration of American masculinity and family dynamics as seen through the confused eyes of a prepubescent child of immigrants, A Tender Age joins the rich tradition of the American bildungsroman. Devastating in its emotional precision, A Tender Age captures a family and community in striking distance of the American dream, and a young person on the precipice of adult knowledge, looking at his own culpability and looking away — then thinking about it for the rest of his life.

A young widow returns to her late father’s New England estate, only to be drawn into the hunt for the rumored pirate treasure that consumed his life, in this thrilling and moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Husbands & Lovers. A timeless story of love and atonement, When You Loved Me maps both a centuries-old treasure hunt and the intimate territory of the human heart, weaving together past and present as only Beatriz Williams can.

Jesse del Ruth has been abandoned. Thirty years into their relationship, Jesse witnesses his husband, Norman, get out of bed late one night, walk into their Joshua Tree backyard, step into a strange beam of life and … disappear. How could Norman desert him after a lifetime together? Where did he go? Will he ever return? Jesse knew they were both feeling stuck, but was their rut so deep that Norman’s only option was to leave Jesse behind? In Take Me With You, Steven Rowley brings his resonant wit and emotional insight to an epic love story — an exploration of the forces that draw two people into the same orbit and the gravity that threatens to pull them apart.

From the New York Times bestselling author of What’s Mine and Yours, a rich, panoramic exploration of friendship, class, new motherhood, and independence. Weaving between Brooklyn brownstones and the glittering beaches of southern France, Take What You Can is a dazzling novel exploring what it means to be a mother when you have none, a sister without blood ties, and a woman in pursuit of the life she wants. With her signature sharply observed prose, Naima Coster illustrates how to be — and to stay — someone’s person through all phases of life.

Set across Texas and spanning four generations, The Book of Chuck is a gimlet-eyed investigation into birthright and belonging through the story of one family in which certain members have clairvoyant powers. An extraordinary new novel about family, legacy, and an inherited curse, from National Book Award-nominated author LaToya Watkins.

In this emotional and laugh-out-loud coming-of-age memoir, the co-creator of Hulu’s brilliant Pen15 grapples with the reappearance of her estranged father — and whether it’s possible to reconnect before it’s too late. Written in intimately beautiful prose, The Sane One is a tragicomic memoir of growing up, falling apart, getting older, and trying to come back together while there’s still time.

A dark, provocative, adrenaline-rush of a novel about a graduate student who murders bad men and justifies it in the name of feminism, by a bold new voice in fiction.