By Kavita Mistry
Whether you’re planning for a vacation, a staycation, or just enjoying the warm days ahead, we’re here to help you map out your summer reading. Splash into the summer spirit with absorbing beach reads, stories that evoke the season, and books for letting your mind relax and unfurl. And don’t worry, unlike in a certain AI-generated summer reading list, these are all real books we chose ourselves that actually exist (or will soon). Plus, these titles have been recently featured or are scheduled to be featured in our digital magazine, so you can peruse our reviews and “beyond the book” articles along with them.
The Original: A Novel
by Nell Stevens
Jul 1, 2025. 320 pages
Published by W.W. Norton & Company
History. Intrigue. Art forgery. Hidden identity. A long-lost relative who may or may not be who he says he is. Stevens’ novel, having earned comparisons to the work of Sarah Waters and Daphne du Maurier, blends all the ingredients of a tantalizing book to get thoroughly lost in, whether on vacation or in your own backyard. Kirkus calls it “A slippery, captivating tale that doubles as a portrait of a complicated, indelibly queer past.”
Hot Girls with Balls: A Novel
by Benedict Nguyen
Jul 1, 2025. 288 pages
Published by Catapult
Volleyball may be the quintessential summer sport, and in this debut offering from Nguyễn it appears (albeit in an indoor format) as a central part of a contemporary world slightly different from our own, one in which people might connect over SpaceTime or discuss the COVIS pandemic on Flitter. Those who enjoy wacky worldbuilding and social satire can relax on the beach with this story of two Asian American trans women negotiating their positions in a men’s pro volleyball league, internet fame, and a romantic relationship with each other.
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
by V. E. Schwab
Jun 10, 2025. 544 pages
Published by Tor Books
The latest from Schwab, beloved author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, is another novel spanning eras and featuring immortality within an enticing tale. In Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, Schwab spins stories of three vampires living at different points in time. Publishers Weekly calls it a “haunting and worthwhile story about cruelty, grace, love, and what it means to live forever.”
The Creation of Half-Broken People: A Novel
by Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
Paperback Apr 2025. 384 pages
Published by House of Anansi Press
An intriguing novel of Gothic inspiration and proportions released as a paperback original, this title is a summer book club dream. With elements of the colonial history of Zimbabwe built into its elaborate literary tapestry, The Creation of Half-Broken People is an inviting read for those seeking something complex to discuss or reflect on. We’re hosting an Ask the Author session with Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu in our community forum on June 4th — please join us!
Hot Air: A Novel
by Marcy Dermansky
Hardcover Mar 2025. 208 pages
Published by Knopf
You know how it is when you’re just trying to have a nice evening, only to see your plans derailed by a billionaire crashing into your pool in a hot air balloon? Hey, fiction doesn’t have to be entirely relatable to be good and thoroughly entertaining. A quick, quirky read that will envelop you in the lives of the uber-rich, Dermansky’s Hot Air is a character-driven meditation on class differences, friendship, and more. Reviewer Jillian Bell writes, “Though the book’s plot, especially its wacky beginning, makes it feel like a romp, it also has deep emotional resonance.”
The Antidote: A Novel
by Karen Russell
Hardcover Mar 2025. 432 pages
Published by Knopf
If you haven’t yet gotten around to Russell’s impressive Dust Bowl epic, now may be the ideal time to settle down with it. In the novel, a prairie witch takes away the unpleasant memories of people living in a small Nebraska town, while the local sheriff seeks to cover up the murders of several local women to secure reelection for himself. Beneath these central dramas pulses the history of the mass murdered and displaced Pawnee people who once lived on the land where the town is situated. A moving “land lost acknowledgment” follows the text, penned with James Riding In, a Pawnee historian who helped Russell with her research into the lives and deaths of the Pawnee victims of ethnic cleansing. It acknowledges this genocide as well as surviving Pawnee people and culture.
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Hardcover Mar 2025. 400 pages
Published by Flatiron Books
Summer is a great time to drift into an immersive nonfiction account, and those craving a read that’s also informative and topical will find what they’re looking for with Sarah Wynn-Williams’ reflections on working for Facebook (and her many criticisms of the company). Reviewer Kim Kovacs notes, “There have been plenty of articles about Facebook’s corporate culture and its questionable business practices over the years. But here, everything comes from Wynn-Williams’ own experiences and observations; we’re not so much reading about a corporation as about a woman trying to function within its constraints.”
Theory & Practice: A Novel
by Michelle de Kretser
Hardcover Feb 2025. 192 pages
Published by Catapult
Lightly historical, shorter than 200 pages, rife with literary references, and full of discomfiting turns, Michelle de Kretser’s latest novel, which follows a young woman writing a graduate thesis on Virginia Woolf in the 1980s, is the perfect summer read for packing up and taking with you wherever you’re headed, consuming in small bites, occasionally putting down, mulling over, and returning to later on. Fans of literary podcasts looking for road trip listening material can check out David Naimon’s recent interview with de Kretser about the book on Between the Covers.
Three Days in June: A Novel
by Anne Tyler
Hardcover Feb 2025. 176 pages
Published by Knopf
Tyler’s latest offering was released back in dreary February. Now, readers who haven’t yet savored it can kick back with it at a more appropriate time of year. Our First Impressions reviewers loved this short novel with all the hallmarks of Tyler’s usual exquisite character work. It follows Gail Baines, a woman who has an exceptionally bad day and then must contend with all the social pressures of her daughter’s impending wedding.
Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis
by Tao Leigh Goffe
Hardcover Jan 2025. 384 pages
Published by Doubleday
“There are unborn worlds of scientific possibility from multiple traditions with answers, strategies, and solutions for tackling the climate crisis,” writes Goffe in Dark Laboratory. If you’re looking to read about the climate crisis this summer, you’re spoiled for choice, but Goffe’s book is unique in its personal, imaginative, and wide-lens historical approach. As reviewer Michelle Anya Anjirbag explains, “Goffe invites readers to recognize that the current ecological conditions are the result of a lack of imagination, not the inevitable path of history running its course.”
Rental House: A Novel
by Weike Wang
Hardcover Dec 2024. 224 pages
Published by Riverhead Books
Skip dealing with pesky trip-related tensions yourself and follow Keru and Nate on vacation in Cape Cod and the Catskills, getting glimpses into their family backgrounds and complicated marriage. Reviewer Rebecca Foster comments, “it is very clever how Wang examines the matters of race, class, ambition, and parenthood through the lens of vacations. Like a two-act play, the framework is simple and concise, yet so revealing about contemporary American society.”