New Literary Fiction To Read This Summer

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.

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.

A musical prodigy and his mother spend years searching for each other in this beautiful novel of hope, perseverance, and love. An evocative exploration of a mother’s love and a son’s yearning, Little Wonder takes us on an extraordinary journey through a modern Beijing that pulses with the music of humanity and its impossible — and impossibly brave — hopes. As every musician knows: You start in one key. You wander to other keys, strange and distant places. But in the end, you always come back home.

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.

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.

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 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.

From the bestselling author of Everything Inside comes a vivid, timely story, moving from Haiti to Brooklyn to Miami, of a woman whose sense of self and family are called into question when she gets caught in a random act of violence on a sunny Florida day. Dèy celebrates the complexity of life in a brave and striking novel that is one of Danticat’s most powerful and deeply affecting works yet, told with a signature “unfaltering voice and evocative beauty” (The Boston Globe).

From the acclaimed author of the “wild, gorgeous” (San Francisco Chronicle) Marlena comes a novel about a young woman looking for a father and finding herself — a vivid, uncompromising exploration of sex, money, power, and art. A gripping novel about ambition, parents, children, and all the ways women still pay for men’s mistakes, Famous Men traces one woman’s journey to the truth of where she comes from, what she’s capable of, and how she might start again.

A sweeping novel about friendship, love, and the lifelong pursuit of art from Dave Eggers, the award-winning, bestselling author of The Circle, A Hologram for the King, and The Eyes & the Impossible. The novel is a wild and beautiful examination of the rules and market forces of the art world, but chiefly it’s about two friends who believe they can change that world, and bring new meaning to it, if only they can start their own movement, dodge charlatans, remain open-eyed and open-hearted, avoid going mad, avoid dying young of rare cancers, stay true to their ideals, and never tire of beauty. Not easy, but not impossible, either.

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.

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 beloved, award-winning author of the culture-changing hits Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends comes her most powerful and page-turning novel yet: The tale of a mother and daughter traveling together after the collapse of a marriage and the dissolution of their traditional family structure. Warm, funny, and poetic, this novel is an ode to imagination and possibility in dark times.

An epic debut novel that follows one family across four centuries, from France to Acadia to the bayous of Southern Louisiana — a poignant examination of belonging, place, and how individual acts of moral compromise contribute to cycles of injustice and destruction.

In the latest novel from “our most significant rising writer of the American West” (Vulture), a woman searches for a way to reclaim the miracle of life in a world seemingly hellbent on doom. As furious, bawdy, searching, and searingly original as ever, in Yellow Pine Watkins blazes a trail toward a radically reimagined vision of a good life in a ravaged time.

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.

Before you are anything, you are a daughter. Told in incandescent prose, Cay Kim’s exquisite debut novel is a portrait of a brilliant young woman growing up between cultures, and a love letter to girlhood, family, and the great dreams we hold for ourselves, no matter where we’re from.

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.

From a literary master, a novel of ghosts and history and family legacy, of the unexpected acts of care that shine light into our dark. A funny, warm and clear-eyed take on where we are now, Glyph is about what our imaginations are for and how, in a broken, brutal and divided time, we rekindle care, solidarity, resistance and openness. This anti-war novel, Ali Smith’s most soulful, playful and vital yet, is a work of lightness that goes deep to counter the forces currently flattening the modern world.

New York City, East Village, 1984. A young woman with the power to see the ghosts of her friends is haunted by the one who refuses to return — a dazzling, big-hearted debut of friendship and community during a time of devastation and defiance. With pathos and humor, empathy and an edge, Natalie Adler freshly reimagines the past for a new generation, reclaiming the spirit of resistance and determination that would become one of the era’s defining legacies.

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.

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.

The Wedding People meets The Celebrants in this hilarious and profound novel about a recently engaged gay man second guessing marriage, and his cousin’s chaotic Texas wedding weekend with old friends and unexpected strangers that will help guide him to the truth, from the beloved author of The Old Place. Like any good wedding, We Are Gathered Here Today is funny, heartfelt, and full of surprises. Like any terrible wedding, it’s something you’ll never forget.