23 Books We Can’t Wait to Read: August 2025

Fiction

Moderation by Elaine Castillo — August 5 (Viking)

“Tender and cutting, engrossing and immediate—Elaine Castillo’s Moderation is a moving meditation on connection, growth, and how, in a world that’s constantly on the verge of ending, one way we move forward is cultivating our own. Castillo’s prose is luminous and lucid, balancing humor and emotion with wicked aplomb. Castillo expertly stretches the possibilities of language; Moderation is infinite.” — Bryan Washington, author of Family Meal

Dwelling by Emily Hunt Kivel — August 5 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

“A gorgeous novel of real estate, real emotions, and real warmth, with original hardware, original prose, and bursting with natural light. These pages are home to all things audacious and inventive, a dream house for the limits of your imagination—Dwelling is a daring, charming miracle.” — Hilary Leichter, author of Terrace Story

Atomic Hearts by Megan Cummins — August 5 (Ballantine Books)

“Brilliant . . . explores the long path to self-fulfillment, how we discover our place in the world, and what we owe to others along the way. . . . Megan Cummins uncovers the troubling, intricate mystery of human connection, how we survive the worst of it, and sometimes don’t. She lays bare how we manage, despite enormous hurdles, to collapse the remote distances between us, and how each of us is a portal to worlds unseen.” — Sarah Blakely-Cartwright, author of Alice Sadie Celine

Ghost Fish by Stuart Pennebaker — August 5 (Little Brown and Company)

“Ghost Fish is a luminous novel of grief, sisterhood, and the necessary magic we need in order to bridge loss and healing. Stuart Pennebaker has written a shimmering, otherworldly exploration of love that persists beyond the boundaries of life and death. A dazzling, original debut that will leave you forever changed.” — Chelsea Bieker, author of Madwoman and Godshot

Extinction Capital of the World by Mariah Rigg — August 5 (Ecco)

“In Extinction Capital of the World, Mariah Rigg traces the contours of contemporary Hawai‘i with exquisite precision and grace. Across these ten stories, she shows how desire anchors us to vanishing landscapes, and how the heart finds its coordinates even as familiar worlds shift beneath our feet. These are breathtakingly beautiful dispatches from the frontlines of an imperiled ecosystem, rendered with astonishing clarity.” — Kimberly King Parsons, National Book Award-nominated author of Black Light and We Were the Universe

The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis — August 5 (Henry Holt & Co)

“Five unusual sisters set a village on edge in this haunting tale of a bewitching madness set in 1700 England. Are the girls a true danger to their neighbors? Will rumor alone put them on the path to destruction? This chilling story can be read as a parable of female empowerment or as a tale of feverish bedevilment overtaking an entire town. Xenobe Purvis has written a book so masterful, you will not be able to look away.” — Laurie Lico Albanese, author of Hester

The Sunflower Boys by Sam Wachman — August 12 (Harper)

“In The Sunflower Boys, Sam Wachman has accomplished an extraordinary feat: he has written a novel full of wit and warmth that takes us deep into the violence, fear and deprivations of war-time Ukraine. Once I began reading about his passionate and eloquent narrator I couldn’t stop. All I wanted was for Artem, and his beloved family, to make it to a place of safety. A gripping and immensely satisfying debut.” — Margot Livesey, New York Times bestselling author of The Road from Belhaven

Loved One by Aisha Muharrar — August 12 (Viking)

“Loved One shimmers with wit even as it explores deep loss. What does it mean to love and lose? How do we undo—and make—each other? Aisha Muharrar asks enduring questions while acknowledging how funny they can be, too. This is a book I will be pressing, urgently, into the hands of my own loved ones.” — Rachel Khong, New York Times bestselling author of Real Americans

What Hunger by Catherine Dang — August 12 (Simon & Schuster)

“Raw, violent, tender, beautiful: Catherine Dang’s coming-of-age horror encapsulates both the savagery and fragility of teenage girlhood, like if Jennifer’s Body was elevated by a rich exploration of grief and a Vietnamese refugee family’s experiences in America after fleeing war. Dang’s darkly playful portrayal of cannibalism is vivid, funny, real—and a perfectly gruesome metaphor for female rage. It builds and boils, and the final twist had me cheering.” — Ashley Winstead, USA Today-bestselling author of Midnight is the Darkest Hour

Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian — August 12 (Little Brown and Company)

“I love novels set in the claustrophobic world of academia. From Albee and Amis to Russo and Jonas, trapping frustrated adults and barely-adults together is always a recipe for exploding characters’ egos and foibles. This novel, which explores the rippling fallout from infidelity in a long-standing faculty marriage, promises to be another addition to the canon.” — Nicola Kraus, author of The Nanny Diaries

The Midnight Shift by Seon-Ran Cheon (Translated by Gene Png) — August 12 (Bloomsbury Publishing)

When four isolated elderly people die back-to-back at the same hospital by jumping out of the sixth-floor window, Su-Yeon doesn't understand why she's the only one at her precinct that seems to care. But her colleagues at the police force dismiss the case as a series of unfortunate suicides due to the patients’ loneliness. But Su-Yeon doesn't have the privilege of looking away: her dearest friend, Grandma Eun-Shim, lives on the sixth floor, and Su-Yeon is terrified that something will happen to her next. The Midnight Shift is a gripping mystery, overflowing with commentary about societal isolation and loneliness, the sharp knife of grief, and the effects of marginalization, perfect for readers of Cursed Bunny, Woman, Eating, and A Certain Hunger.

The Once and Future Me by Melissa Pace — August 19 (Henry Holt and Co)

“A truly spectacular psychological thriller about memory and identity that will absolutely blow your mind. With twists, turns and a premise to die for — stop what you’re doing now and read this book!” — Matthew Blake, International bestselling author of Anna O

Dominion by Addie E. Citchens — August 19 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

“This is one hell of a novel. Dominion is about two women who see what they want to see, until they no longer can. The storytelling is layered and beautiful and ugly at the same time, and beneath the story there is the other story about small communities and secrets and powers and how feeling like you have to live up to unspoken expectations can destroy you and everyone around you from the inside out. It captures church community and the South and the gulf between the haves and have-nots with precision and keen observations. This novel will grab you in the gut and hold you there. It’s absolutely outstanding. Once I entered this world I didn’t want to leave.” — Roxane Gay, author of Opinions

Black Cherokee by Antonio Michael Downing — August 19 (Simon & Schuster)

Betty meets Queenie in this courageous coming-of-age story about a Black girl fighting for recognition in a South Carolina Cherokee community that refuses to accept her ancestry as legitimate. With dazzling language, keen insight, and an unforgettable voice, Black Cherokee is an astonishing novel from an emerging literary talent.

Sweetener by Marissa Higgins — August 19 (Catapult)

“Queerness is joyful and beautiful, but it’s also unspeakably annoying and absurd. Higgins understands this dichotomy perfectly and in her sophomore novel, she playfully and painfully paints her characters dancing and wallowing through the demon hellscape that is lesbian existence in the 2020s. Hilarious, provocative, surprisingly moving.” —Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl

We Loved to Run by Stephanie Reents — August 25 (Hogarth)

“Reents has written a new kind of campus novel: a funny, inventive, warmhearted portrait of a college cross country team that begins as an insightful exploration of human competitiveness and becomes a moving ode to surviving trauma through female friendship and collective action. This novel is a wild, brave run through the dark, and the ending might stir you to tears.” — Eric Puchner, New York Times bestselling author of Dream State

Hothouse Bloom by Austyn Wohlers — August 26 (Hub City Press)

“With its euphonious investigation of the ever-shifting borderline between the existential and the mystical, Hothouse Bloom immediately establishes Austyn Wohlers as a vital and extraordinary wellspring of the divine. Akin in turns to Redonnet, Lispector, and Tarkovsky, hers is the rare kind of debut that resets the bar for the field at large, convalescing fervent depth and resolve where it's gone missing underneath the wearying veneer of our everyday.” — Blake Butler, author of Molly

Three Parties by Ziyad Saadi — August 26 (Hamish Hamilton)

“Three Parties is such a powerful, funny, brilliantly plotted novel, as beautiful on the line level as it is emotionally complex. With an expert eye, Ziyad Saadi interrogates our often futile attempts to present ourselves to the world on our own terms. This is a subtle, subversive book, full of characters I won’t soon forget, and marking the debut of a sharp, necessary voice in contemporary literature.” — Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise

Non-Fiction & Poetry

Dead Girl Cameo: A Love Song in Poems by m. mick powell — August 5 (One World)

“Dead Girl Cameo is not only an interrogation of the way society and celebrity culture fails girls, particularly those who are Black and queer; it is also a generous imagining of the lives that are possible when girlhood is protected and tended to.” — Brittany Rogers, author of Good Dress

Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama by Alexis Okeowo — August 5 (Henry Holt & Co)

“Outsiders like to define Alabama through oppositions—reality vs. myth, dire poverty vs. reckless wealth, violence vs. natural beauty, and Blacks vs. whites. Alexis Okeowo turns these oppositions into gripping complications, tracking the collective histories and individual lives of Creek Indians, Latinos, whites, African Americans, and West Africans, and combining a reporter’s acuity with a storyteller’s empathy.” — Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland and Constructing a Nervous System

Trying by Chloé Caldwell — August 5 (Graywolf Press)

“Chloé Caldwell does what she wants—in life and on the page. This makes her writing deceptively casual: she is never precious and yet every word lands exactly as it’s meant to. She is never dogmatic and yet her books are brilliant feminist critiques. In Trying, Caldwell shows—in the most hilarious, heartbreaking ways—how our culture drives women bat-shit crazy and then pretends this insanity is healthy adulthood. What a relief to watch a woman become truly sane: wild, free, spontaneous, slutty, unapologetic, fully alive. I came away from this book wondering what our lives could become if we stop trying so hard just to be okay.” — Hannah Tennant-Moore, author of Wreck and Order

Greyhound by Joanna Pocock – August 12 (Soft Skull)

“Pocock reveals a complicated American landscape from the shabby seats of Greyhound buses and through a pinhole of grief as she retraces her past and a country’s past and finds suffering and redemption in both. She is at the mercy of the communities and the country she encounters, which, like the nation itself, is also gripped in its own reckoning. Like Denis Johnson’s Angels and Jonathan Raban’s Bad Land, Greyhound finds truth and decency in the unglamourous and shows how the United States has perhaps always been on unstable soil.” — Kerri Arsenault, author of Mill Town

A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews — August 25 (Bloomsbury Publishing)

“Why do I write? Miriam Toews's response to this impossible-to-answer prompt gives way to a haunting, tragi-comic, and incredibly moving inquiry into the landscapes and the people that define us; the parts of life that make no sense; and the things that, against all odds, keep us alive. A Truce That Is Not Peace is essential reading, a smart and wise companion for turbulent times.” — Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise and The Third Hotel