The Books Everyone Will Be Talking About This Summer, According to a Books Editor
From buzzy books to beach reads, these are the hottest new releases.
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When it’s time to cool down from the summer heat, find a patch of shade and dive into one of the season’s best books. They pair perfectly with a cold drink and a lazy afternoon, whether you read to beat the heat or love to sit in the sun.
As a books editor, I read way ahead of the publication schedule to find the best upcoming releases. That means I start my summer reading in January to find all the best recommendations for you by the time the weather heats up! These are the books that kept me urgently flipping pages, from historical fiction with a supernatural twist to breezy beach reads.
Some of these books are already buzzy, while others are available for pre-order, with delivery right to your door as soon as they release. Either way, these are the best summer books that are making a splash this season. Throw one in your bag next to your towel and sunscreen and dive in!
Don’t forget to join the GH Book Club for more great recommendations and author interviews.
Neicy and Annie are motherless best friends in small-town Louisiana during the Jim Crow era: Neicy’s mother was murdered, and Annie’s mom abandoned her. While Neicy goes to college and finds increasing wealth and privilege, Annie chases her mother through brothels and bars in this bighearted, sometimes tragic book about longing, queer desire, and chosen family.
(P.S. The book is loved by Oprah and author Ann Patchett, too!)
This sharp satire is a darkly electric look at trauma and motherhood. Natalie is a tradwife influencer, showing off her rustic farmhouse and five children (with a sixth on the way) to millions of followers. The Angry Women online may hate her, but Natalie knows she’s built an empire. Then she wakes up in 1855 and finds that the traditional lifestyle she idealized is much more violent than she imagined—and she may never escape it.
Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. Such were the fates of Henry VIII’s six wives—none more famous than prickly, stubborn, brilliant Anne Boleyn. In this historical fiction with a grotesque twist, Anne wakes up after her execution, headless but alive. Thirsting for revenge, she sews her head back on to take on Tudor London and protect her daughter from the king.
“The only rule of anything in comedy is that you should always be as tasteless as possible,” Sedaris quotes an early teacher of his saying. After four years, the humorist is back with a new book of essays satirizing everything from taking pictures on vacation to listening to music aloud on a crowded train. Easy to read in fits and starts, these essays offer a mix of acerbity and tenderness that finds him confiding in a Duolingo AI, meeting the Pope, and arguing with his husband.
At age 6, Alex and Ana disappeared into the desert and returned with stories of having been abducted by aliens. Bonded by their infamous childhood, sharing their story on talk shows, they drift apart as adults, as Alex questions what they’ve always thought happened. But when a signal from outer space has Earth bracing for contact with extraterrestrials, they must finally face the truth and lies about those days in the desert.
The author of Hamnet returns with a generational family drama set in the aftermath of the Great Hunger in Ireland. Tomás is a mapmaker determined to show the bloody truth of the starvation written on the land. An encounter with a mysterious spring changes his life in this layered literary fiction that follows a family's hardships, weaving together folklore, historical trauma, and the struggles of emigration.
In an expensive Connecticut suburb, Vivian is this close to joining an exclusive women’s club. She only needs a luxury pool, a few more online purchases, and for her daughters to act normally. But after her ad executive husband, Alan, bombs the biggest pitch of his career, he reaches a breaking point and starts living in the backyard. This is a funny, modern look at consumerism, unhappiness, and the suburban nouveau riche.
24-year old Nina survives a plane crash in the Wyoming mountains. While searching for her boyfriend, who was flying the plane, she stumbles into a ghost town in the wilderness. There, she discovers a series of secrets that connect her to a gunslinger from a 1902 pulp novel and a historian trying to preserve the ghost town in 2003, in this triple-timeline story that asks: Who writes history, and what do they have to hide?
The Shipman sisters are as different as can be: a dog walker who is flat broke, an influencer handling a viral catastrophe, and a workaholic PR specialist trying to make partner. They reunite at their New Hampshire beach house for the first time after their mom’s death, only to discover that their dad plans to sell it. Can they untangle their problems and family history in time to save the home?
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