By Kavita Mistry 
Got your towels and sunscreen ready? How about your summer reading? Here are some books to start the season right: a reflective memoir about relationships and selfhood, a fantasy imagining a world where doors lead to unpredictable fates, an ambitious story of identity in America, and a darkly funny novel set in modern Ukraine. Follow along with upcoming coverage in our digital magazine.
The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex
by Melissa Febos
Jun 3, 2025. 288 pages
Published by Knopf
This memoir tracks a year in which Febos committed to celibacy, breaking the chain of romances and relationships that began in her adolescence and extended into her 30s. Early reviews suggest The Dry Season is a work of astonishing depth, exploring notions of connection, solitude, pleasure, and more. Kaveh Akbar writes, “This is a book about obsession, compulsion, about self and self-lessness, about sex and love and art and faith and the capacity of each to swallow us whole, to obliterate us, make us anew alit with our history instead of engulfed by it. Febos talks back to time as she unravels it, inviting everyone into the conversation from Hadewijch to Hildegard, Foucault to Lorde, St. Augustine to Annie Dillard.”
Meet Me at the Crossroads: A Novel
by Megan Giddings
Jun 3, 2025. 320 pages
Published by Amistad
Megan Giddings’ Meet Me at the Crossroads follows twins Ayanna and Olivia, Black girls living in the Midwest, as they make their way through life split between the worlds of their Catholic mother and their father, who belongs to a religious group formed around one of seven doors to another realm. These doors in the universe of Giddings’ story make for an intriguing and mysterious concept that powers this coming-of-age novel. A starred Publishers Weekly review predicts that “Readers will be enthralled and left with much to ponder.”
The Slip: A Novel
by Lucas Schaefer
Jun 3, 2025. 496 pages
Published by Simon & Schuster
A vast exploration of identity and America anchored by a boxing gym in Austin, Texas, and a teenager who goes missing in the summer of 1998, Lucas Schaefer’s ambitious debut novel has already earned comparisons to the work of John Irving and Gabriel García Márquez. According to Lit Hub, “It’s absolutely bursting with memorable characters and outrageous scenes, and the sentence level writing is nothing short of superb.” A starred review from Kirkus comments, “Schaefer, who’s white, is bold in his approach to issues of Blackness and whiteness, and has invented a truly wild plot in service of exploring them. He is equally fearless in writing about gender and sex. And the solution to the mystery is a trip and a half.”
Endling: A Novel
by Maria Reva
Jun 3, 2025. 352 pages
Published by Doubleday
Maria Reva’s Endling has an absurd setup. Yeva, a scientist, is trying to keep a species of snail from going extinct, working from the beat-up RV she uses as a lab. In the meantime, she and her sisters earn money via “romance tours” geared towards Western men seeking a Ukrainian bride. This weird world meets with the Russian invasion of 2022, and Yeva’s own writing plays a part in what comes to be a thoroughly complex novel with both serious and comic aspects. Kirkus calls it a “wacky picaresque” that “shatters into a metafictional reckoning with the war in Ukraine.”
You can browse more curated upcoming titles for each month using our Books Publishing by Month view.