Books We Can’t Wait to Read: June 2023
June brings new selections of fiction and nonfiction, including the long-awaited novel from Lorrie Moore! Get your bookshelves ready for these exciting new titles.
Fiction
The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller — June 6 (Tin House)
The Memory of Animals is an ambitious, deeply imagined work of survival and suspense, grief and hope, consequences and connectedness that asks what truly defines us—and to what lengths we will go to rescue ourselves and those we love.
The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende— June 6 (Vintage Espanol)
Intertwining past and present, The Wind Knows My Name tells the tale of these two unforgettable characters, both in search of family and home. It is both a testament to the sacrifices that parents make and a love letter to the children who survive the most unfathomable dangers--and never stop dreaming.
The Whispers by Ashley Audrain— June 6 (Pamela Dorman Books)
The Whipsers is a novel about what happens when we put our needs ahead of our children's. Exploring the quiet sacrifices of motherhood, the intuitions that we silence, the complexities of our closest friendships, and the danger of envy, this is a novel about the reverberations of life's most difficult decisions.
August Blue by Deborah Levy — June 6 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
A dazzling portrait of melancholy and metamorphosis, Deborah Levy's August Blue uncovers the ways in which we attempt to revise our oldest stories and make ourselves anew.
The Forbidden Territory Of A Terrifying Woman by Molly Lynch — June 13 (Catapult)
Fates and Furies meets Melancholia in this ominous and absorbing debut novel about marriage and motherhood in a time of ecological collapse, as mothers around the world begin to mysteriously vanish from their homes
Maybe This Is What I Deserve by Tucker Leighty-Phillips — June 20 (Split Lip Press)
Tucker Leighty-Phillips builds a series of mythologies; of childhood, of Appalachia, of seeing the world through the 3D glasses of poverty. Using the logic of childhood across kids and adults alike, Leighty-Phillips builds a world filled with wonder and tells a new story of working-class, rural living.
Holding Pattern by Jenny Xie— June 20 (Riverhead Books)
Brilliantly observant, tender, and warm, Holding Pattern is a hopeful novel about immigration and belonging, mother-daughter relationships, and the many ways we learn to hold each other.
The Glow by Jessie Gaynor— June 20 (Random House)
A desperate young publicist tries to save her career by turning the charismatic leader of a grungy retreat center into the hot new self-care brand. Sparklingly plotted, deliciously deadpan, and irresistibly entertaining, The Glow is a razor-sharp sendup of an industry built on the peculiar intersection of money and wellness, where health is a commodity and self-care a luxury.
The Only One Left by Riley Sager— June 20 (Dutton)
The Hope family murders shocked the Maine coast one bloody night in 1929. While most people assume seventeen-year-old Lenora was responsible, the police were never able to prove it. Other than her denial after the killings, she has never spoken publicly about that night, nor has she set foot outside Hope's End, the cliffside mansion where the massacre occurred. It's now 1983, and home-health aide Kit McDeere arrives at a decaying Hope's End to care for Lenora after her previous nurse fled in the middle of the night. In her seventies and confined to a wheelchair, Lenora was rendered mute by a series of strokes and can only communicate with Kit by tapping out sentences on an old typewriter. One night, Lenora uses it to make a tantalizing offer--I want to tell you everything. Bestselling author Riley Sager returns with a Gothic chiller about a young caregiver assigned to work for a woman accused of a Lizzie Borden-like massacre decades earlier.
The Quiet Tenant by Clemence Michallon— June 20 (Knopf Publishing Group)
Aidan Thomas is a hard-working family man and a somewhat beloved figure in the small upstate New York town where he lives. He's the kind of man who always lends a hand and has a good word for everyone. But Aidan has a dark secret he's been keeping from everyone in town and those closest to him. He's a kidnapper and serial killer. Aidan has murdered eight women and there's a ninth he has earmarked for death: Rachel, imprisoned in a backyard shed, fearing for her life. Told through the perspectives of Rachel, his daughter Cecilia, and his love interest Emily, The Quiet Tenant explores the psychological impact of Aidan's crimes on the women in his life--and the bonds between those women that give them the strength to fight back. Both a searing thriller and an astute study of trauma, survival, and the dynamics of power, The Quiet Tenant is an electrifying debut thriller by a major talent.
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore — June 20 (Knopf Publishing Group)
Lorrie Moore's first novel since A Gate at the Stairs--a daring, meditative exploration of love and death, passion and grief, and what it means to be haunted by the past, both by history and the human heart.
Banyan Moon by Thao Thai— June 27 (Mariner Books)
A sweeping, evocative debut novel following three generations of Vietnamese American women reeling from the death of their matriarch, revealing the family's inherited burdens, buried secrets, and unlikely love stories.
The Apartment by Ana Menendez — June 27 (Counterpoint LLC)
Examining exile, homesickness, and displacement, The Apartment asks what--in our violent and lonely century--do we owe one another? If alone we are powerless before sorrow and isolation, it is through community and the sharing of our stories that we may survive and persevere.
The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue— June 27 (Knopf Publishing Group)
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it's love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.
When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred's glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.
Nonfiction
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Pageboy by Elliot Page— June 6 (Flatiron Books)
The Oscar-nominated star who captivated the world with his performance in Juno finally shares his story in a groundbreaking and inspiring memoir about love, family, fame -- and stepping into who we truly are with strength, joy and connection.
Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America's Revolutions by Mattie Kahn— June 13 (Viking)
Young and Restless recounts one of the most foundational and underappreciated forces in moments of American revolution: teenage girls. From the American Revolution itself to the Civil Rights Movement to nuclear disarmament protests and the women's liberation movement, through Black Lives Matter and school strikes for climate, Mattie Kahn uncovers how girls have leveraged their unique strengths, from fandom to intimate friendships, to organize and lay serious political groundwork for movements that often sidelined them. Their stories illuminate how much we owe to girls throughout the generations, what skills young women use to mobilize and find their voices, and, crucially, what we can all stand to learn from them.
Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration by Alejandra Oliva— June 20 (Astra House)
In this powerful and deeply felt polemic memoir, Alejandra Oliva, a Mexican-American translator and immigrant justice activist, offers a chronological document of her experience interpreting at the US-Mexico border, and of the people she has encountered along the way.
The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel— June 27 (Viking House)
In this spellbinding portrait of obsession and flawed genius, Michael Finkle brings us into Breitwieser's strange world--unlike most thieves, he never stole for money, keeping all his treasures in a single room where he could admire them. Stéphane Breitwieser carried out more than two hundred heists over nearly eight years--in museums and cathedrals all over Europe-- along with his girlfriend who worked as his lookout. This is a riveting story of art, crime, love, and an insatiable hunger to possess beauty at any cost.
