There are so many great books coming out and so little time to keep track of them. Luckily, we’re here to do that for you! Below, our booksellers have highlighted the titles they’re most excited to see hit the shelves. Good luck not adding every single one of these to your cart.
Jump ahead to: May | June | July | August
MAY
Acts of Service
by Lillian Fishman
Lillian Fishman’s debut is a smart and extremely current interrogation of queerness and modern sexual ethics, populated with intriguingly complex characters, all told in an enthralling voice. — Keith M.
All the Lovers in the Night
by Mieko Kawakami (tr. Sam Bett and David Boyd)
Mieko Kawakami is one of the clearest observers of the internal life of women, the sometimes-gross realities of our bodies and the expectations placed on them, and the alienation of modern society that I have ever read. Breasts and Eggs was easily one of my favorite books of 2020 and I'm extremely excited for All the Lovers in the Night, which explores the inner life of a lonely and anxious women in her 30s working as a freelance copy editor in Tokyo. — Emily B.
I Kissed Shara Wheeler
by Casey McQuiston
Beloved queer romance author McQuiston (Red, White & Royal Blue, One Last Stop) has penned their first YA novel. I can’t recommend it enough! Reminiscent of Green’s Paper Towns with a femme romance twist, Chloe is on the hunt for answers when popular girl Shara kisses her and then vanishes. — Madeline S.
Trust
by Hernan Diaz
The follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning debut (In the Distance), Hernan Diaz’s Trust is an extraordinary work confronting wealth, privilege, and power. In a dazzling polyphonic display of storytelling verve, Diaz reckons with the distorting, disrupting effects of affluence and the many ways it silences those without the pay to play. With a timely resonance in our age of money worship and moral bankruptcy, Trust is a new novel as ingeniously composed as it is richly rewarding. — Jeremy G.
Little Rabbit
by Alyssa Songsiridej
Little Rabbit has been compared to Conversations with Friends and Luster, which is an automatic “add to cart” for me. There’s so much promise in the book description: an artist’s colony and a home in the Berkshires, a domineering choreographer, a questionable (“sticky”) affair, questions of agency and love and evisceration. I'm betting this will be a perfect summer read. — Kelsey F.
Book Lovers
by Emily Henry
What were you even doing last summer if you weren't reading Emily Henry's People We Meet on Vacation or Beach Read. (We know that is exactly what lots of you were doing. We have the literal receipts.) This year she's back with the ultimate love story for booklovers. Casey McQuiston (One Last Stop) called this one "Schitt's Creek for book nerds" and no sentence has ever appealed to me more. — Sarah R.
Siren Queen
by Nghi Vo
Nghi Vo shot to the top of my must-read list after last year's stunning Gatsby reimagining, The Chosen and the Beautiful. In Siren Queen, Vo steeps pre-Code Hollywood in dangerous and deadly magic. Starlet hopeful, Luli Wei is beautiful and talented but fame comes with no guaranteed survival and success comes with a steep price. — Sarah R.
Time Shelter
by Georgi Gospodinov (tr. Angela Rodel)
I'm loving the novels that are coming out of former Soviet Bloc nations in Eastern Europe because not only is the storytelling great with clever flashes of humor, but they feature a kind of looking-glass history of the 20th century that helps me better understand my own history in the West, each book a missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle that I assumed I'd never find. In Time Shelter, by award-winning Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov, a chain of dementia clinics open to supply authentic experiences of the past for those who are no longer comfortable in the present, hence the title. Intriguingly, dementia begins spreading like wildfire, perhaps due to anxiety over humanity's future, and the clinics become too popular with people of all ages. I have a feeling this is going to be my favorite book of 2022, and I just can't wait to dig into it! — Jennifer K.
This Time Tomorrow
by Emma Straub
I came to This Time Tomorrow excited for a time-travelling, time-loop story with emotional resonance, and Emma Straub delivered. Reading this book gave me that ever-rarer feeling of obsessive teen excitement, but in a very adult way (I felt myself aggressively underlining poignant observations about the not-quite-disappointments with aging out of potential life paths, staying up all night to finish it, wanting to talk about it on the bus). A perfect novel brimming with speculative tropes rewired for realistic human behavior, gentle love letters to people and places in the past, and thinking about knowing and loving people across all the timelines of your life and theirs. — Michelle C.
Translating Myself and Others
by Jhumpa Lahiri
To write in any language is a remarkable thing; to somehow put pen to paper and commit to words and storytelling in more than one language is extraordinary. In this essay collection, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri's reflects on her identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages, reveling in the joy (and puzzle) of words and the personal metamorphosis that takes place when interpreting them. — Sarah R.
You Have a Friend in 10A
by Maggie Shipstead
Sparkling, devastating short stories, from the author of the Booker-shortlisted Great Circle? Sign me up. The Publisher's Weekly starred review sweetens the pot: "Shipstead demonstrates a remarkable ability to interlace the events of ordinary life with a mythological sense of preordained destruction." I'm so excited to find out the specific ways Maggie Shipstead ruins me for other collections. — Michelle C.
You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty
by Akwaeke Emezi
Five years after surviving a car accident that took her husband's life, Feyi is navigating the path from grief back to love when it takes an unexpected turn. Fans of Emezi’s previous work might find this foray into romance to be an unexpected turn as well, but they’ll be delighted with the result, which is vibrant, tangled, immersive, and verrry sexy. — Tove H.
Either/Or
by Elif Batuman
Reader, the sound I made when this sequel (GASP) to The Idiot was annouced! Either/Or picks up Selin's story right where we left her — on the heels of a very odd summer and heading into her sophomore year at Harvard trying to make sense of it. Batuman is in true form, bringing a delightful mix of biting humor, doubt, self-importance, a blurring of life and art, and introspection to her protagonist and her peers. — Sarah R.
Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World
by Barry Lopez
I love Barry Lopez. A thoughtful observer of the natural world, an environmentalist, humanitarian, and spiritualist ahead of his time, Lopez gifted us with over 50 years of writing and grace. I am both excited for this posthumous collection and terribly sad because I know it's my last chance to read something he has written for the first time. — Emily B.
Sleepwalk
by Dan Chaon
A love child of Mad Max: Fury Road and Cosmatos's Mandy with a peppering of The Last of Us, Sleepwalk is fast-paced chaos and the epitome of what I affectionately refer to as dystopian trucker fiction. Trust me, that's a compliment. Chaon's blending of hallucinatory storytelling and commentary on the human condition is truly masterful. — Stacy Wayne D.
Don’t miss our event with Dan Chaon on June 14.
Happy-go-lucky
by David Sedaris
What a relief it is to have a new David Sedaris collection! Oh sure, much of this book is devoted to the fear and inconveniences of the pandemic, but there’s also many descriptions of encountering awful people all over the world, and that’s a real source of comfort. — Keith M.
Don’t miss our event with David Sedaris on June 4.
JUNE
Cult Classic
by Sloane Crosley
Running into multiple exes in unlikely settings is my most rational irrational fear — it feels so implausible, but it keeps happening. I'm so excited to read Sloane Crosley's Cult Classic, which takes that destabilizing experience and mixes it with, among other things, a start-up realizing its lofty and poorly-thought-out goals of changing the world. I've been anxiously awaiting this literary, speculatively-edged rom-com-thriller for months, but you don't have to take my extremely personal resonance at face value. Listen to Raven Leilani, author of Luster: "Crosley captures the brutal mirror of past love, the slow creep of ambivalence into dread, and the sense that a detour can easily become a life." — Michelle C.
Don’t miss our event with Sloane Crosley on June 14.
Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land
by Taylor Brorby
This is one of those rare books where every word is perfect, the storytelling is precisely paced and, while fractal, never feels broken or out-of-step. Environmentalist Brorby ties the destruction of his beloved North Dakota home to the destruction of queer bodies, weaving his coming-out tale seamlessly into the story of coal and oil mining in the American Prairie. The effect is devastating and beautiful, and the book left me in breathless tears at the very end as Brorby literally puts his body on the line to protect one of the most unique and beautiful landscapes in the world. — Deana R.
Nuclear Family
by Joseph Han
Joseph Han’s novel explores the Korean diaspora as a Hawaiian family is disrupted first by a false ballistic missile alarm, and then by the ghost of an ancestor. This is one of those debuts that presents a completely fresh and already-assured voice. — Keith M.
Don't miss our event with Joseph Han on June 21.
Virology
by Joseph Osmundson
I thought another book about viruses was the last thing I wanted to read right now, but it turns out I was so wrong. Osmundson is a virologist and his approach to the science behind the world's most bountiful organisms is rigorous, but Virology is about so much more than microbiology. Using the framework of queer theory, Osmundson explores love, society, collective responsibility, systems of power, and every other aspect of our daily lives that viruses touch. — Emily B.
The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym
by Paula Byrne
Like Jane Austen's writings, the novels of Barbara Pym enfold the reader with the tidiness of the society they portray, yet challenge with their rich psychological characterizations and the social issues that add tension to the plot. Now I get to read about the woman behind the books as she attended Oxford in the thirties, lived in Germany when the Nazis came to power, and worked on her own as a woman in wartime London. As Paula Byrne made liberal use of Pym's diaries for this volume, there are sure to be plenty of witty and perceptive anecdotes, so this promises to be a fun and fascinating biography! — Jennifer K.
Ghost Lover
by Lisa Taddeo
I am such a big fan of Lisa Taddeo’s previous books, Three Women and Animal, but before she published either she won multiple Pushcart Prizes for her short stories. Now we finally have a collection of her masterful short fiction. — Keith M.
Boys, Beasts & Men
by Sam J. Miller
Heartbreaking, world-shattering, and too timely for words, Boys, Beasts, & Men is a locked treasure chest fetched from the bottom of a forbidden lake. The voices for these stories were so brilliantly chosen that you'll have a hard time not connecting with each and every character. No skips. — Stacy Wayne D.
Don’t miss our event with Sam J. Miller on June 27.
Hurricane Girl
by Marcy Dermansky
The protagonist in Marcy Dermansky's comedy/horror Hurricane Girl is on the run from catastrophe, and on the hunt for love, a swimming pool, and someone or something to stop the bleeding in her head. Kevin Wilson (Nothing to See Here) outdid any blurb I could write for this book by saying: "Dermansky nails the sensation of being alive, of navigating a world so strange that it’s almost a dream, of trying, again and again, to anchor yourself to a moment, to assure yourself that you exist, to withstand anything and somehow keep living." I mean, COME ON! — Sarah R.
Lapvona
by Ottessa Moshfegh
Are you ready to be captivated and unsettled? Ottessa Moshfegh has gathered a deserved following for stunning writing that resists comfort. Lapvona is a foray into fantasy set in a medieval village, and I'm expecting a beautiful, gross novel that will take over my mind for weeks. — Michelle C.
Learning to Talk
by Hilary Mantel
I am devoted to Hilary Mantel, not just for the Wolf Hall trilogy, but also for her short fiction like The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Her new collection is, if not autobiographical, heavily inspired by her youth in the English Midlands, and I cannot wait devote myself to these stories. — Keith M.
The Final Strife
by Saara El-Arifi
I cannot overstate how excited I am for this book! The world-building, plot, and character representation all sound incredible. Not to mention it's queer, it's enemies-to-lovers, and it's fantasy with roots in mythology, basically all of my favorite things. Sylah, Anoor, and Hassa all come from different walks of life, but their paths will become inseparably intertwined. I have a feeling this will be the debut of the summer, if not the year! — Charlotte S.
Vera Kelly: Lost and Found
by Rosalie Knecht
I am a huge fan of the two previous books in Rosalie Knecht’s Vera Kelly series. As sad as I was to hear that this will be the final book, I am so looking forward to learning what Vera, now an established private investigator in Brooklyn in the early seventies, uncovers. — Keith M.
Thrust
by Lidia Yuknavitch
Lidia Yuknavitch is one of the most exciting writers working today, so anytime a new book of hers comes out, it’s cause for celebration. This one promises to be just as compelling and complex as her previous works. Rebecca Makkai called it, “Daring, dazzling, and earth-splitting, this is a book to take in wide-eyed.” Sign me up. — Kelsey F.
Don’t miss our event with Lidia Yuknavitch on June 23.
Rogues
by Patrick Radden Keefe
Patrick Radden Keefe has been on an incredible run with Say Nothing and Empire of Pain. He follows those astounding books with a collection of his superb pieces from The New Yorker. This is a wealth of great writing that exposes some very bad actors. — Keith M.
Invisible Things
by Mat Johnson
I think Mat Johnson is a genius. Everything he writes is compelling and funny, thoroughly imagined, often idiosyncratic, and lovingly rendered. Any books that play in the realm of speculative fiction are easy wins for me, and Invisible Things, with its mission to Jupiter and a secret civilization living somewhere named “New Roanoke,” seems sure to hit all of my sweet spots. I can’t wait for this one. — Kelsey F.
JULY
Life Ceremony
by Sayaka Murata (tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori)
God, I love Sayaka Murata. Her writing traverses this line between evil and joy that feels happily deranged. I still remember that thrilling “what the heck did I just read” feeling when I finished Earthlings, so to say I’m excited for this book would be an understatement: I’m rabid for it and its sure-to-be delightfully-strange stories. — Kelsey F.
Night of the Living Rez
by Morgan Talty
This debut story collection from Tin House (one of my favorite publishers) has been blurbed by Tommy Orange (one of my favorite writers), who compared it to Jesus’ Son (one of my favorite story collections), so to say I’m all in would be an understatement. The stories, about Native people living on a Penobscot reservation in Maine, have been called “searing” and “darkly funny” and “brutal, raw, and beautiful.” I couldn’t be more excited. — Kelsey F.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
by Gabrielle Zevin
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is an epic, examining a friendship over the course of 30 years through a meteorically successful video game collaboration. I'm so curious about how young relationships, careers, ideals, and dreams weather and change under these circumstances, and I'm so excited for Gabrielle Zevin (who wrote the bookseller-beloved The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry) to share this book with us. (Also: Have you seen this cover? I'm in love.) — Michelle C.
Fire Season
by Leyna Krow
There’s been an exciting trend of a more diverse group of writers approaching and reassessing stories of the American “old West,” offering a vastly greater empathy than is found in formulaic tales. Leyna Krow’s Fire Season, featuring a misfit group of opportunists in the aftermath of a devastating fire, promises to be a great addition. — Keith M.
Gods of Want
by K. Ming Chang
K. Ming Chang’s debut, Bestiary, was so wonderfully intimate and heartbreaking, and it sounds like this collection of stories will be no different. Gods of Want even messes with the surreal (ghost-cousins? secretive widows? aunts stealing kisses and a daughter named “dog”? yes, absolutely yes). I’ve already blocked off a few evenings to devote to this collection. — Kelsey F.
Our Wives Under the Sea
by Julia Armfield
The bottom of the ocean is equal parts terrifying and fascinating, and I'm hooked by the premise of Our Wives Under the Sea: a marine biologist is trapped in a submarine on the ocean floor, returns changed, and her wife searches for answers about what happened. I love a literary, human novel buoyed with elements of sci-fi and horror (maybe the best genres to represent the visceral mysteries of being a human). This tender portrait of a marriage facing difficult challenges is getting comparisons to Carmen Maria Machado and Helen Oyeyemi, which feels like the highest praise. — Michelle C.
Bad Thoughts
by Nada Alic
Nada Alic’s debut collection is full of wild and hilarious stories about women whose quests for self-knowledge push them well past the strictures of societal norms. I can’t wait to see what they find. — Keith M.
Just Like Home
by Sarah Gailey
I admit it, Sarah Gailey totally got me with her excellent Twitter promo for this book. Her voice is so strong that I was thoroughly hooked and at the edge of my seat over a series of tweets! A traumatized protagonist, a horrible house, a terrible mother, a monster under the bed, and a gift for gothic thriller readers. — Sarah R.
The Half Life of Valery K
by Natasha Pulley
I said of Pulley's last novel, The Kingdoms, that she has "an uncanny ability to make me feel some kind of way about the concept of time." This remains true. She is a drop-anything-I'm-halfway-through-and-pick-up-her-latest-right-away kind of author for me. The Half Life of Valery K promises more of everything I love about her writing: well-researched historical fiction with a surreal or fantastic twist, queer romance, and big questions about time and fate. This time we're headed off to Cold War Soviet Russia. See you there. — Sarah R.
AUGUST
The Last White Man
by Mohsin Hamid
The author of Exit West is back with a lyrical and empathic tale about identity and possibility. I don’t need to hear anything else — I’m in. — Keith M.
The Honeys
by Ryan La Sala
Midsommar meets The Heathers in this kaleidoscopic YA horror from queer author Ryan La Sala. Enchanting and noxious all at once, The Honeys is the sticky-sweet summer scare you didn't know you needed. Quite frankly, when it comes to queer YA fiction, La Sala just gets it. — Stacy Wayne D.
Bonsai
by Alejandro Zambra (tr. Megan McDowell)
A metafictional love story from Zambra? Translated by Megan McDowell? With this cover? This book, which The New Yorker described as “stories within stories” and the New York Times Book Review called “taut and full of verve” is guaranteed to hit all of my sweet spots. Yes, please, and thank you. — Kelsey F.
The Wild Hunt
by Emma Seckel
I want to tell you verbatim all the excellent sentences our friends at Tin House used to get us excited about this book but I can't because I was too busy eagerly preordering it during the conversation to write them all down. (They were entirely right: it is extremely good.) An isolated island, a mysterious call home, an excess of wandering souls, and an overdue reckoning with the past. Don't miss this debut. — Sarah R.
I’m Glad My Mom Died
by Jennette McCurdy
A hard-to-stomach yet profoundly reassuring sentiment to anyone with an abusive or unsafe relationship with their parent(s). Many of us have been forced to excuse our parents' wrongdoings simply because they're our parents. In truth they are more, if not most, capable of hurting us, often in deeply profound ways. Jennette expertly picks this idea apart and opens up a door some of us can't open ourselves. — Stacy Wayne D.
Paul
by Daisy LaFarge
Set fittingly within the Pyrenees, this lush and vertiginous debut novel from UK poet Daisy Lafarge reads as a kind of parable on the insidious nature of misogynistic abuse, particularly as it plays out in romantic relationships. Much like LaFarge's poetry, however, Paul is a wonderfully polyvalent text, in which meaning proliferates across a variety of sources — from the lives of saints to transformation myths to the (truly cursed) travel diaries of Paul Gauguin. The result is a completely immersive book that rewards the reader despite its disturbing premise, in which a tableau of refusals, reckonings, and creative escapes undertaken by women throughout the ages steals the show. — Alexa W.
Witches
by Brenda Lozano (tr. Heather Cleary)
If this book cover hasn’t sold you on Witches yet, what if I told you that author Catherine Lacey described this book as “a story of the world’s repeated failure to control feminine power and the sheer magic of language itself.”? Or what if I mentioned the two parallel narratives, how the worlds of two women collide and clash, or how, even on the sentence level (as translated by Heather Cleary), this one astounds? I’ve been looking forward to Witches all year. — Kelsey F.
Raising Lazarus
by Beth Macy
Beth Macy’s Dopesick was an immensely important book about the opioid crisis. Her follow-up book shows ordinary people working to halt the crisis and recover. That’s an extremely difficult task, and there are still many obstacles in the way, as this clear-eyed account will show. — Keith M.
A Venom Dark and Sweet,
by Judy I. Lin
I promptly fell in love with the dreamy cover of A Magic Steeped in Poison, and the story itself. Ning's strength and determination are perfectly balanced with her vulnerability and grief. Plus, this duology has one of the most unique magic systems I've seen. Luckily for me and many other YA fantasy fans, we won't be waiting years for the sequel, A Venom Dark and Sweet, a miracle! We'll rejoin Ning on her journey and see how her tea magic abilities grow, along with discovering Kang's true intentions. — Charlotte S.
Haven
by Emma Donoghue
If Emma Donoghue writes it, I read it. Her new book follows three men who get in a boat to leave the sinful world behind. They land on a barren island… and now you have to read it, too, right? — Lucinda G.
Afterlives
by Abdulrazak Gurnah
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Abdulrazak Gurnah, a writer who most Americans (myself included) had never heard of. The American publication of Afterlives is a great opportunity to correct that and introduce ourselves to this gifted writer. — Keith M.