27 Books We Can’t Wait to Read: June 2025
Fiction
The Catch by Yrsa Daley-Ward — June 3 (Liveright Publishing Corporation)
“From one of my favorite living writers, The Catch is a slippery shapeshifting delight full of shadows and elastic time, illusions and distorted mirrors. Yrsa's work in this novel is fluorescently dark and winding; brilliant in its investigation of blood, cycles, refractions, and meaning.” — Eloghosa Osunde, author of Vagabonds!
Flashlight by Susan Choi — June 3 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
“In this superbly crafted book, the fraught geopolitics of family life—the official secrets, the acts of espionage, the diplomatic failures—are set against the intimacies, grievances, conflicting memories, and unmet needs of national allegiance. Ferociously smart and full of surprises, Flashlight is thrilling to the last.” — Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood
Season of the Rat by Elizabeth Hall — June 3 (C4g Books)
“The romance of rat life is the romance of Elizabeth Hall’s arresting, rapturous Season of the Rat—a true billetdoux to animals, precarious communities, and reading as a way of being. Who else but Elizabeth Hall could bring such eroticism to ecocriticism or write sentences as lush and libidinous, carved and charmed as these? Hall is a singular noticer: rat laughter, bougainvillea spangles, leather chaps. I want to read with her always. This is a murine-sized masterpiece.” — JoAnna Novak, author of Contradiction Days and I Must Have You
I Can Fix Her by Rae Wilde — June 3 (Clash Books)
“Nightmarish and powerfully unnerving, Rae Wilde's I Can Fix Her is a labyrinthine and profoundly complex portrait of queer relationships, obsession, routine, and destruction. Wilde’s prose is masterfully controlled even when so much of this devastating story feels like a kind of demented stream of consciousness written at the end of the world. One of the most disorienting and upsetting works of queer fiction I've encountered this year.” — Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke
Songs of No Provenance by Lydi Conklin — June 3 (Catapult)
“With emotional precision, an endlessly captivating antiheroine, and surprises at every turn, the radical and profound Songs of No Provenance explores the unruliness of desire, the insatiable need to create, and the truth we owe to ourselves and to those we love. Lydi Conklin is one of my favorite writers and I can’t wait for the world to discover their singular vision.” — Jessamine Chan, author of The School for Good Mothers
A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle — June 3 (Dutton)
“A Language of Limbs is a queer novel in vital, masterful conversation with itself, and Hardcastle’s visceral, propulsive prose inexorably and generously draws the reader into this conversation—about the violence of metamorphosis, the joyful confusion between self and other, and all the ways we strive to create meaning on the spectrum between chance and destiny. This book will stay with you.” — Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, author of Mutual Interest
There Are Reasons For This by Nini Berndt — June 3 (Tin House Books)
“There Are Reasons for This is messy-beautiful, gorgeous, compelling. I was struck by the want depicted here; a specific hurt that comes from finding something kindred only to wind up losing it. Nini Berndt makes lovely work of this bruise-writing, the kind of devastation that leaves you with your fist pressed to your lips, aching hard for everyone involved. This is a queer gut punch of a novel. I adored it.” — Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth
It's Not the End of the World by Jonathan Parks-Ramage — June 3 (Bloomsbury Publishing)
“It's Not the End of the World is both a demented, technicolor romp through end times and a heartbreaking story of love and family. From its terrifying opening to its gut punch conclusion, this grotesque, hilarious, beautiful novel had me in its thrall. Parks-Ramage has written the most imaginative and visceral cli-fi I've read to date.” — Kate Brody, author of Rabbit Hole
Palm Meridian by Grace Flahive — June 10 (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster)
“I defy anyone to read this novel and not wish they too were living in a Floridian lesbian retirement community in 2067 (and that is not a sentence I ever thought I'd write). Palm Meridian is artfully crafted, a love story, a tragedy, a comedy, a meditation on life and death—our own, and that of the planet we are, for now, lucky enough to occupy...” — Laura Kay, author of Wild Things
Foreclosure Gothic by Harris Lahti — June 10 (Astra House)
“Harris Lahti’s writing is a delight, and a thrill. Here’s a young writer who gets it, sharp-witted, smart, a writer with great style and skill. His bleakly comic novel is very real. His anti-hero Vic is contemporary, at first a young man cool and fraught, an actor in the world and in fact on TV. An ambitious man struggling to take care of his wife and son through the years, but like young men today, vexed and astounded by the daily vicissitudes he faces. The world is absurd, he knows it, he lives it. This is one of the best younger writers I see coming, and expect a great literary future for Harris Lahti.” — Lynne Tillman, author of Mothercare
Venice Peach by Jessamyn Violet — June 10 (Maudlin House)
“Sex drugs and rock n’ roll is only the beginning here. Add astrology, robot politicos, witchcraft, sleazy podcasts, aquatic creatures, telepathy and a kaleidoscope of beach-dwelling misfits to get a sense of the satirical carnivalesque future world that's so fun and compelling to inhabit in Venice Peach.” — Duncan Birmingham, author of The Cult in My Garage
Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin — June 10 (S&S/Summit Books)
“It’s thrilling to see any author today aiming for the big stuff all at once: death, race, sex, class, addiction. It’s beyond thrilling—incandescent, even—when a writer like Rob Franklin comes along with the formal virtuosity to carry those lofty conceptual ambitions. Franklin’s prose is eminently readable, frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and full of sentences I want to cut out and glue to my forehead. This book is so smart, so moving, so earned; as soon as I finished, I started reading it again.” — Kaveh Akbar, New York Times bestselling author of Martyr!
Work Nights by Erica Peplin — June 17 (Gallery Books)
“I read this book in one sitting, shut it, and immediately said to myself 'yeah, this one will ruin the bisexuals.' Work Nights takes us on an unapologetic romp through all the worst and best places in New York City, makes gay people sit at desks under fluorescent lighting, and points us toward all the right decisions people can make and has them turn left. This novel is like accidentally taking too much adderall, going on a first date, and then trying to recount it to your lesbian best friend the next day but seeing it all as if you were looking through a gay fish-eye lens. Unpleasant, exhilarating and i’d earnestly do it all again — even though Jane would never call me back.” — Haley Jakobson, author of Old Enough
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness by Irene Solà — June 17 (Graywolf Press)
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness is an audacious and entrancing novel in which the lines between the dead and the living, past and present, story and history are blurred. In it, Irene Solà draws on oral tradition as well as art, literature, and fairy tales to tell a completely new kind of story.
These Heathens by Mia McKenzie — June 17 (Random House)
“A one-of-a-kind, urgently needed novel about choosing the life you want to lead . . . Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement and Atlanta’s queer Black community, Mia McKenzie vividly depicts how Black women create circles of trust, freedom, and autonomy with one another.” — Leila Mottley, author of Nightcrawling and The Girls Who Grew Big
Girls Girls Girls by Shoshana Von Blanckensee — June 17 (G.P. Putnam Son’s)
“An immersive and emotional debut teeming with heart, angst, love, and self-discovery. This is a queer, touching, and charming book that makes you feel at home in 1990s San Francisco through the eyes of a messy and endearing lesbian.” — Emily Austin, author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead and We Could Be Rats
The Tiny Things are Heavier by Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo — June 24 (Bloomsbury Publishing)
“The Tiny Things are Heavier is a brave, winning novel of contemporary migration, with all the collisions and losses, the transformations and conflicts it brings. Okonkwo's writing is confident, lush, embodied, and a joy to read. In her carefully-rendered and specific world, we touch, and are moved by, the universal.” — Sarah Thankam Mathews, National Book Award-nominated author of All This Could Be Different
The Girls Who Grew Big by Leila Mottley — June 24 (Knopf)
“The Girls Who Grew Big is a novel about teen pregnancy that brilliantly upends every reductive trope and platitude on the subject. With impeccable and breathtaking prose, Mottley takes us into the treacherous terrain where girlhood and womanhood collide, and where families and friendships fracture, and the lines between them blur. Simone, Adela, Emory and The Girls live out loud and are flawed, tender, and absolutely unforgettable. Mottley continues to show us the power and beauty of her pen!” — Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Fresh, Green Life by Sebastian Castillo — June 24 (Soft Skull)
“Exposing the thin lines between discipline and vanity, rigor and pretension, discourse and isolation, Fresh, Green Life is a surreal, compulsively readable portrait of a disenchanted scholar. Castillo writes with humor and humility, masterfully endearing his fictional counterpart to the reader as his hero seeks the ‘delicious nonsense’ of his school days and a reason to break his yearlong vow of silence. Fresh, Green Life is a disarming, absorbing, and singular novel.” — Emily Adrian, author of Seduction Theory
Non-Fiction & Poetry
Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story by Erica Stern — June 3 (Barrelhouse Inc.)
“With a beautifully innovative blend of memoir and fiction, Erica Stern is a steady guide through her own harrowing journey while also capturing the feelings of exile so many of us encounter as we enter new motherhood.” — Teresa Wong, author of Dear Scarlet
I'll Tell You When I'm Home: A Memoir by Hala Alyan — June 3 (Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster)
“A roaring cyclone of memory and imagination and harrowing tribulation. Surrogacy as metaphor for exile. Exile not as a dream for a better life, but as concession, a begrudging necessity. Gaza, San Miguel, Beirut, New York, Damascus—traveling with Alyan’s prose is a thrill. I'll Tell You When I'm Home feels as rich and supersaturated as contemporary consciousness itself—I can’t stop talking about it.” — Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
Clam Down: A Metamorphosis by Anelise Chen — June 3 (One World)
“A modern love story embedded within a metafictional review of animal-metamorphosis tales placed within a cautionary environmental fable enclosed by an immigrant family’s saga. Anelise Chen disarmingly walks the reader through this blooming, elaborate, emotional game of shells.” — Eugene Lim, author of Search History
The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex by Melissa Febos — June 3 (Knopf)
“Melissa Febos is a writer of singular wisdom and compassion, and The Dry Season is an utterly consuming and deeply generous book—an illuminating exploration of solitude and partnership, intimacy and manipulation, the stories we tell ourselves about the choices we make and how we might unlearn those stories to see ourselves more clearly. Reading this book, I felt an ecstatic, nerve-tingling gratitude, like it was written just for me—finding such crisp, incisive language for emotional knots I’ve felt caught inside for years—but part of the joy of this feeling was knowing how many people will feel the same way: that this book was written just for them.” — Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters
Dyke Delusions: Essays & Observations by Samantha Mann — June 3 (Read Furiously)
“A collection of smart, funny, clear-eyed essays on girlhood, motherhood, violence, and desire, Dyke Delusions is both a bullhorn and a balm for queer women like me-those of us still figuring out the language of our lives, grappling with our pasts and forging our own paths forward, learning to tell our truths aloud. Reading this book is like hanging out with a hilarious friend-one who’s not only telling her own story, in all its gory and glorious detail, but somehow telling yours too.” — Melissa Faliveno, author of Tomboyland
Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told by Jeremy Atherton Lin — June 3 (Little Brown and Company)
“Deep House is that rare and beautiful book—equally illuminating and pleasurable. I loved its luminous transcription of queer life, its incisive and intimate legal history of gay marriage in the U.S., its transcendently sexy and propulsive love story, and its portrait of social change that promises not the fantasy of permanent liberty, but that more ephemeral reward: joy. It is exactly the book we need right now.” — Melissa Febos, author of The Dry Season and Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism
Agrippina the Younger by Diana Arterian — June 15 (Curbstone Press)
"In exquisitely braided prose and verse, Diana Arterian gives us an enthralling study of the often maligned and more often overlooked Agrippina the Younger. Necessarily suspicious and critical of official narratives, Arterian dares to “pluck the thread” of time-worn accounts passed down to us from patriarchy. In this stunningly lyrical book—rigorously researched and rigorously imagined—we hear history as lies but also lyre: an instrument, in Arterian’s hands, attentively tuned and pitch perfect with song.” — Brandon Som, author of Tripas: Poems
The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey — June 17 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
“Catherine Lacey’s The Möbius Book is a brilliantly innovative memoir-cum-novel that unsettles and enthralls. When a relationship abruptly shatters, Lacey is left grappling with profound questions about intimacy, safety, and meaning. How well can we ever truly know another person? Can we ever fully know ourselves? As Lacey navigates a winding path of loss and self-discovery, she meditates on spirituality, the illusion of safety, the nature of art, and the transformative power of rupture; the result is a meditation of startling immediacy and depth.” ― Meghan O'Rourke, author of The Invisible Kingdom
