Whether you’re on the beach or in a hammock or at the park, there’s nothing like settling in with a great book on a beautiful summer day. Here are 10 suggestions for your reading pleasure.
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Pantheon, May 2): Adjei-Brenyah’s first novel—after his impressive story collection, Friday Black (2018)—is a brilliant satire in which convicted murderers take part in gladiatorial competitions, fighting to the death for a chance to get out of prison. Our starred review said, “Imagine The Hunger Games refashioned into a rowdy, profane, and indignant blues shout at full blast.”
The Ferryman by Justin Cronin (Ballantine, May 2): From the author of the Passage Trilogy, another long, engaging work of dystopian fiction, this one set on an island called Prospera that’s something of a paradise…except that of course it’s not. “It’s a hefty book that moves with astounding quickness—yet another excellent offering from an author with a boundless imagination and talent to spare,” according to our starred review.
The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese (Grove, May 2): Fourteen years after Verghese’s bestselling fiction debut, Cutting for Stone, our starred review of his new novel exults, “By God, he’s done it again”—this time following three generations of an Indian family beginning in 1900. The book provides “the exquisite, uniquely literary delight of all the pieces falling into place in a way one really did not see coming.”
Bad Summer People by Emma Rosenblum (Flatiron, May 23): If you want to read a beach book set at the beach, Rosenblum will take you to Fire Island, where the characters are “so readable and so terrible,” according to our starred review. “They think highly of themselves but consistently have the worst impulses, and, as the book wears on, it becomes delightfully clear that they are incapable of resisting.”
An Island Princess Starts a Scandal by Adriana Herrera (Canary Street Press, May 30): A Venezuelan lesbian in belle epoque Paris hopes to become “thoroughly debauched” before returning home to marry a rich man. Our starred review said, “Empowering and exhilarating.”
Good Night, Irene by Luis Alberto Urrea (Little, Brown, May 30): Here Urrea has taken inspiration from his mother’s World War II experience working with the Red Cross’ Clubmobile Corps, a group of women who brought food and company to GIs in the European theater. “Top-shelf historical fiction delivered with wit and empathy,” according to our starred review.
The Five-Star Weekend by Elin Hilderbrand (Little, Brown, June 13): The Queen of Summer Reads invites you to a weekend house party on Nantucket (where else?) that doesn’t go as planned. “The people in her book may screw up, but Hilderbrand always gets it right,” says our starred review.
Mrs. S by K. Patrick (Europa, June 20): Our starred review says: “Dark academia meets forbidden love as an English boarding school matron falls in love with the headmaster’s wife.” Who needs to say more?
Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday, July 18): Whitehead introduced Ray Carney, a furniture salesman and sometime fence, in Harlem Shuffle (2021) and now picks his story up in the 1970s. Our starred review calls the book an “accomplished, streamlined, and darkly funny comedy of manners.…Not just crime fiction at its craftiest, but shrewdly rendered social history.”
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (Riverhead, Aug. 8): After Deacon King Kong, my favorite summer book of 2020, McBride returns with what our starred review calls “another boisterous hymn to community, mercy, and karmic justice,” this time set among the Black and Jewish communities of Pottstown, Pennsylvania.
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
