Books We Can't Wait to Read in July
Fiction
MUST I GO by Yiyun Li — July 2 (Penguin Random House)
Lilia Liska has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children, and seen the arrival of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair.
Burn Our Bodies Down by Rory Power — July 7 (Penguin Random House)
New from YA author of the New York Times bestseller Wilder Girls comes a new thriller full of twists about a girl whose past has always been a mystery until she decides to return to her mother's hometown where history has a tendency to repeat itself.
WANT by Lynn Steger Strong — July 7 (Henry Holt)
In Want, Lynn Steger Strong explores the subtle violences enacted on a certain type of woman when she dares to want things—and all the various violences in which she implicates herself as she tries to survive.
COOL FOR AMERICA: STORIES by Andrew Martin — July 7 (MacMillan)
The collection is bookended by the misadventures of Leslie, a young woman (first introduced in Early Work) who moves from New York to Missoula, Montana to try to draw herself out of a lingering depression, and, over the course of the book, gains painful insight into herself through a series of intense friendships and relationships. Running throughout Cool for America is the characters’ yearning for transcendence through art: the hope that, maybe, the perfect, or even just the good-enough sentence, can finally make things right.
WELL-BEHAVED INDIAN WOMEN by Saumya Dave — July 14 (Penguin Random House)
Simran Mehta has always felt harshly judged by her mother, Nandini, especially when it comes to her little “writing hobby.” Nandini Mehta has strived to create an easy life for her children in America. Mimi Kadakia failed her daughter, Nandini, in ways she’ll never be able to fix—or forget. From a compelling new voice in women’s fiction comes a mother-daughter story about three generations of women who struggle to define themselves as they pursue their dreams.
UTOPIA AVENUE by David Mitchell — July 14 (Penguin Random House)
David Mitchell’s kaleidoscopic novel tells the unexpurgated story of Utopia Avenue’s turbulent life and times; of fame’s Faustian pact and stardom’s wobbly ladder; of the families we choose and the ones we don’t; of voices in the head, and the truths and lies they whisper; of music, madness, and idealism. Can we really change the world, or does the world change us?
THE PULL OF THE STARS by Emma Donoghue— July 21 (Pan Macmillan)
In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia’s regimented world step two outsiders — Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumoured Rebel on the run from the police , and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney.
In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other’s lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.
AFTERLAND by Lauren Beukes— July 28 (Mulholland Books)
Twelve-year-old Miles is one of the last boys alive, and his mother, Cole, will protect him at all costs. On the run after a horrific act of violence-and pursued by Cole’s own ruthless sister, Billie — all Cole wants is to raise her kid somewhere he won’t be preyed on as a reproductive resource or a sex object or a stand-in son. Someplace like home.
To get there, Cole and Miles must journey across a changed America in disguise as mother and daughter. From a military base in Seattle to a luxury bunker, from an anarchist commune in Salt Lake City to a roaming cult that’s all too ready to see Miles as the answer to their prayers, the two race to stay ahead at every step . . . even as Billie and her sinister crew draw closer.
Nonfiction
BIG FRIENDSHIP: HOW WE KEEP EACH OTHER CLOSE by Aminatou Sow, Ann Friedman — July 7 (Simon and Schuster)
Now two friends, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, tell the story of their equally messy and life-affirming Big Friendship in this honest and hilarious book that chronicles their first decade in one another’s lives. As the hosts of the hit podcast Call Your Girlfriend, they’ve become known for frank and intimate conversations. In this book, they bring that energy to their own friendship—its joys and its pitfalls.
NOTES ON A SILENCING by Lacy Crawford— July 7 (Little Brown)
When the elite St. Paul's School recently came under state investigation after extensive reports of sexual abuse on campus, Lacy Crawford thought she'd put behind her the assault she'd suffered at St. Paul's decades before, when she was fifteen. Still, when detectives asked for victims to come forward, she sent a note.
Her criminal case file reopened, she saw for the first time evidence that corroborated her memories. Here were depictions of the naïve, hard-working girl she'd been, a chorister and debater, the daughter of a priest; of the two senior athletes who assaulted her and were allowed to graduate with awards; and of the faculty, doctors, and priests who had known about Crawford's assault and gone to great lengths to bury it.
AUSTEN YEARS: A MEMOIR IN FIVE NOVELS by Rachel Cohen — July 21 (Macmillan)
In the turbulent period around the birth of her first child and the death of her father, Rachel Cohen turned to Jane Austen to make sense of her new reality. For Cohen, simultaneously grief-stricken and buoyed by the birth of her daughter, reading Austen became her refuge and her ballast. She was able to reckon with difficult questions about mourning, memorializing, living in a household, paying attention to the world, reading, writing, and imagining through Austen’s novels.
MEMORIAL DRIVE by Natasha Trethewey — July 28 (Harper Collins)
A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy.
Poetry
IN THE DARK, SOFT EARTH by Frank Watson
Vignette verses explore the workings of love, nature, spirituality, and dreams with sprinklings of tarot symbolism and jazzy blues. Together these verses contemplate the subtle underpinnings of a soft earth.
YOU WERE NEVER BROKEN: POEMS TO SAVE YOUR LIFE by Jeff Foster
Amid these verses, Foster provides his signature direct teachings on meditation, the great value of stillness and silence, and what it means to surrender completely to the beauty of the present moment. For Foster, the winding path to self-acceptance started with nonjudgmental observation of the thoughts that plagued him—and here he shares his world-renowned expertise on how to begin your own journey.
THE UNORDERING OF DAYS by Jessica Palmer
In The Unordering of Days, Jessica Palmer pushes through grief to explore the language of rejection. With explosive honesty, she works to reconcile the heart and the mind, moving from silence to agency as she confronts the consequences of interrupting an undisturbed life. Integrating physics and faith, Appalachia and the cosmos, Palmer's brief collection of poems embraces a universe that is beautiful in its ambiguity. Terrifying in its loneliness. And wondrous in its bewilderment.
