New Fiction To Read This Summer

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.

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.

A spellbinding and heartwarming Japanese bestseller about a young woman who inherits a stationery store from her late grandmother and becomes the trusted scribe of the town. Set to the rhythm of the four seasons and the Japanese rituals and festivities that come with them, Tsubaki Stationery Store is a charming story about the importance of community and the reconciliatory power of the written word.

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.

Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less, showcases his wit, sophistication, and deep knowledge of focaccia in this tale of a young man who takes an unspecified job with a charismatic elderly Baronessa at her crumbling villa in the Tuscan hills. Villa Coco is a dazzling, sun-soaked ode to life itself, a meditation on how seriously we ought to take ourselves, and a bawdy Mediterranean ballad about becoming who we’ve always wanted to be.

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.

Five lives. Five stories. Four will live — one will die. Who will it be? In this slow-burn masterpiece of psychological fiction, the choice is all yours … An incredibly original novel that breaks the fourth wall and asks the reader to be judge, jury, and executioner, Five looks at some of the most complicated issues of contemporary life: Motherhood, disability, addiction. Every stranger has a story. And in Ilona Bannister’s skillful hands, five people’s stories come together to create an unforgettable novel.

The daughter of a powerful tycoon escapes to a glamorous artists’ retreat — where dark secrets and dangerous temptations await — in this gripping Prohibition-era novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Salt to the Sea. Set in the fading splendor of 1920s Detroit and inspired by real, long-buried events, A Fortune of Sand is a glittering, gothic page-turner about power, control, and the price women pay when they demand to be seen.

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).

In a remote corner of the South African bush, two sisters reunite to bury a family secret once and for all, but when they’re stranded among the wild animals, they find a predator far more dangerous waiting for them in the shadows …

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.

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).

Sandwich meets The Wedding People in this irresistible comedy of manners as three generations of a family — a snail scientist, a soon-to-be divorcee, her teenage daughter, a hapless con man, and their feckless patriarch — descend on a ritzy Lake Michigan vacation island. In a story that is as sneakily wise as it is absurdly funny, Ryan Effgen’s debut shows how sometimes the people who bring out your worst — your family — can also be the ones to bring you out of your shell.

When a young woman, a golf prodigy, kills a caddy with a stray ball at the country club, the investigation of this freak accident reveals a dark and shocking tale of secret affairs and predatory men, and suddenly a teenager is on trial in this spellbinding novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Midwives and The Flight Attendant.

An addictive, unpredictable, darkly hilarious collection of stories from Danny McBride — the beloved creator and star of The Righteous Gemstones and Eastbound & Down. Hilarious, razor-sharp, unexpectedly emotional, and full of wild twists and turns, the stories in Thrilling Tales of Modern Men are like nothing else. And yet they have one thing in common — each probes the fragile masculinity that has become an inescapable part of modern American culture. In this audacious and unforgettable debut collection, McBride redefines the tale of the modern man.

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 Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls returns with a spellbinding page-turner about a crime in a small town that exposes long-held secrets and betrayals among a group of lifelong friends. Under the Falls is at once a propulsive thriller, a gut-wrenching portrait of a tight-knit rural community undone by the sins of its past, and an unflinchingly honest depiction of how porous the line between right and wrong, good versus evil, can become. This is a stunning, deeply empathetic novel, one that takes Russo’s penchant for character-driven drama to thrilling new heights.

In this subversively funny first novel, the bestselling author of Fresh Off the Boat delivers a portrait of a haunted manchild and his messy search for love, with hilarious and insightful takes on sex, dating, food, culture, intimacy, and masculinity along the way. Sharply comic but with hidden depths, Come Undone is about how we run from love and how it hunts us down.

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.

When an astronaut is lost in space, his wife relives their epic love as she attempts to unravel what truly happened to him, in this sweeping love story set against the backdrop of the 1960s Space Race, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Story of Eva Fuentes.

A year in the life of a family as they strike out into the unknown (aka Vermont), leaving all the comforts of home behind — a rollicking, lyrical novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, the bestselling author of North Woods and one of America’s greatest living writers. Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.

A spellbinding story collection from Booker Prize finalist Ruth Ozeki, about the lives we almost lived, the people we can’t quite forget, and the stories that shape us long after the last page is turned. With her distinctive blend of wit, warmth, and deep humanity, Ozeki brings us eleven richly imagined stories of characters standing at life’s thresholds — grappling with faded ideals, evolving identities, and the inevitable compromises that shape a life.

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.

A hypnotic debut about the pivotal summer that shatters the delicate balance between three best friends. The rituals of girlhood — gossip, selfies, sleepovers, and videogames — become threads in a delicate, volatile web of intimacy, in which everything feels achingly fleeting and permanently etched. Bold, vulnerable, and sharply observant, Girl’s Girl is a sundrenched and dewy snapshot of modern girl culture set in the blaze of one suburban Midwest summer.

The first ever collection of short stories from the New York Times bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of The Friend. Moving from the momentous to the mundane, Nunez maintains her expert balance between gravity and levity while probing the philosophical questions that illuminate her work.

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.

From the bestselling author of the Japanese sensation The Full Moon Coffee Shop, this charming and heartfelt standalone novel brings more lost souls to the enchanted café — where they might find some help from the cats who run it.

A richly drawn, captivating, and endlessly amusing novel of love and subterfuge between a lady’s maid and her clandestine lover, set in the country estates of nineteenth-century England. A deliciously funny, gorgeously detailed, utterly enthralling novel, A Perfect Hand is a glorious novel of class, gender, and England on the cusp of enormous change.

From a New York Times bestselling author comes a darkly funny, gripping thrill ride that defies all expectations — a story of feverish obsession, new motherhood, and a fractious friendship pushed to the edge.

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.