New Novels to Read This Summer

The latest in this best-selling mystery series about Easy Rawlins centers on a missing-persons case that takes the beloved private detective deep into his own past. Easy’s lost love asks for help finding her ex-husband — a forensic accountant who got mixed up in trouble — prompting a torrent of memories.

Mulholland Books, June 4

This novel, from the author of “Night of the Living Rez,” is told from the perspective of a man who was expelled from Maine’s Penobscot Reservation when he was a young adult, and must decide how much of his history to reveal to his daughter.

Tin House, June 4

Godwin, by Joseph O’Neill

This globe-trotting romp from the author of “Netherland” chronicles a man’s quest to find a mysterious soccer prodigy in West Africa and the unraveling of his workplace back in Pittsburgh.

Pantheon, June 4

Roanhorse is one of several Indigenous writers reshaping American science fiction and fantasy. The final installment in her Between Earth and Sky series, this novel follows the ultimate fates of the people of Meridian.

S & S/Saga Press, June 4

Set during Nigeria’s civil war, this novel follows a man who is conscripted to fight for the Biafran army after embarking on a search for his missing brother.

Hogarth, June 4

Diamond Newberry is the only Black person in Swift River, a New England mill town in decline. When her mother decides to start filing the paperwork to declare her missing father officially dead, Diamond uncovers a lineage of Black women she didn’t know existed.

Simon & Schuster, June 4

Alternating between the ’90s, the present day and scenes from a screenplay, Tremblay’s latest follows the Hollywood remake of “Horror Movie,” a cult-favorite art house film with a cursed history. Tragedy struck the original shoot, and just a handful of scenes ever made it to the public, yet the only surviving cast member is hellbent on reliving his very dark past.

William Morrow, June 11

The promise of Liberty, Calif., is a Black utopia, but when Jasmyn and King move their young family there, they discover a place whose citizens are more interested in luxury wellness than social justice.

Knopf, June 11

Swan Song, by Elin Hilderbrand

The final novel in Hilderbrand’s beloved Nantucket series is here. The Richardsons caused a stir on the island when they purchased a $22-million beach house, started hosting Gatsby-ish parties and campaigned to join the old-money Field & Oar club. But when the couple’s home burns down and their personal assistant disappears, the police chief Ed Kapenash must put his retirement plans on hold and find the missing girl.

Little, Brown, June 11

Shifting between 1992 and 2022, Finger chronicles the life of Artie, a gay copywriter who meets his partner, Abe, at the height of the AIDS crisis. Thirty years later, Abe has passed away, and his ex-wife and daughter — the people closest to Artie — move to the West Coast. After an accident, Artie unexpectedly finds a group of kindred spirits at a local L.G.B.T.Q. senior center.

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, June 18

From the author of “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” this is a new historical novel with an artistic bent, following a family of Murano glassblowers starting in 1400s Venice.

Viking, June 18

Emezi’s novel takes readers into the underworld of Lagos, where sex, power and corruption intersect. After Kalu breaks up with his longtime partner, he crosses paths with two sex workers at an party hosted by his best friend, turning all of their lives upside down.

Riverhead, June 18

After decades of instability, Julia Ames finally feels in control of her life. But after she bumps into an estranged friend at the grocery store, her 20-something son announces plans to marry his pregnant girlfriend and her teenage daughter starts acting out in increasingly worrisome ways, Julia reflects upon her life’s pivotal moments, including her own mother’s ambivalence and its ripple effects.

Doubleday, June 18

Sandwich, by Catherine Newman

Rocky is middle-aged, grappling with the intensities of perimenopause and “sandwiched” between her young adult children and ailing parents. Each chapter of this novel covers a day at her idyllic but aging house on Cape Cod, tracing her family’s revelations during a moment of transition.

Harper, June 18

Bear, by Julia Phillips

Two sisters work service jobs on a wealthy tourist island off the coast of Washington. When a bear swims across the channel and arrives in their backyard, the sisters take it as a sign to change their lives.

Hogarth, June 25

Shanghai, by Joseph Kanon

In the mid-1930s, many Jewish refugees fled Germany for Shanghai, where they didn’t need an entry visa. One of them, Daniel Lohr, reconnects there with his uncle Nathan, a gangster who works in nightlife. Now embroiled in some murky business dealings, Daniel finds Leah — a fellow émigré with whom he had an affair — involved with one of the lawless city’s top intelligence officers. As the world careens toward global conflict, Daniel works to keep his loved ones safe.

Scribner, June 25

JULY

The Cliffs, by J. Courtney Sullivan

Upon returning to her Maine hometown, Jane, an archivist, learns that the crumbling Victorian mansion she loved as a teenager is now a cookie-cutter McMansion owned by Genevieve, a wealthy summer resident from Boston. Believing the house to be haunted, Genevieve hires Jane to research the house’s history, revealing ghosts of a different kind.

Knopf, July 2

In 1975, a teenager goes missing from the Adirondack summer camp her family owns, forcing a working-class community to confront its long-held class issues while an industrial dynasty grapples with its toll on a region.

Riverhead, July 2

In Butte, Mont., during the 1890s, two forbidden lovers, Tom and Polly, skip town with a stolen horse and $600 in cash. But Polly’s religious-zealot husband is intent on tracking them down, and soon, the couple find themselves outrunning a manhunt in a brutal Western winter.

Doubleday, July 9

Brodesser-Akner, a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, follows a wealthy family grappling with the aftershocks of its patriarch’s kidnapping 40 years earlier: Carl, the target, has been privately seeking closure while his wife tries to tend to his emotional needs. Their now-grown children have suffered in different ways — and that’s all before they realize the family fortune has dwindled to almost nothing.

Random House, July 9

The latest in Harkness’s best-selling All Souls series, this novel picks up with Diana, a scholar-witch, and Matthew, a vampire geneticist, who must reckon with how to build a future for their young twins. Along the way, Diana confronts her own family history and caliber of magic.

Ballantine, July 16

The author of the blockbuster Magicians trilogy returns with an epic set in Arthurian legend. After the death of King Arthur, a young knight named Collum joins the Round Table’s lesser-known players to restore Camelot to its former glory, find Excalibur and unravel the mysteries that led to the king’s demise.

Viking, July 16

Tolly Driver — a kid full of promise whose life changed one summer night in 1989 — is writing a memoir about his murderous youth and thirst for revenge. Riffing on 1980s slasher tropes with an antihero protagonist, Jones explores friendship, nostalgia and life in small-town Texas.

S & S/Saga Press, July 16

Set in the universe of BRZRKR, Reeves’s comic series, this sci-fi novel traces a warrior’s 1,000-year journey to understand — and shed — his immortality.

Del Rey, July 23

Liars, by Sarah Manguso

When Jane, a writer, meets a multimedia artist named John, she feels immediate relief; they have the same ambition to focus on their creative work and share the same idea of happiness. But once they have children, Jane finds herself stymied by the responsibilities of motherhood and John’s own work, which leads the family to hopscotch around the country. This novel traces the decline of their marriage, and Jane’s emergence from this crucible of domestic pressure.

Hogarth, July 23

Pearl, by Siân Hughes

Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, “Pearl” follows an English woman in the decades following her mother’s disappearance. As she reckons with its effects on her adolescence and experience of motherhood, she finds comfort in a 14th-century poem.

Knopf, July 30

August

In this locked-room thriller, six divers enter a hyperbaric chamber to explore the depths of the ocean. But when one diver is found dead, and a second unconscious shortly after, those who remain — now aware there’s either a lethal human or substance among them — must survive the four days it’ll take to return to the surface.

Atria/Emily Bestler Books, Aug. 6

Hum, by Helen Phillips

After A.I. claims her job, May signs up to participate in an experiment that will render her face unrecognizable to surveillance cameras. To help jolt her family from their addiction to devices, she books a tech-free getaway inside a local botanical garden. When her children’s safety is threatened, she must join forces with one of the unknowable robots who live among mankind.

S & S/Mary Sue Rucci Books, Aug. 6

Theo, who dreams of becoming a sommelier, and Kit, a pastry chef, end up on the same European food and wine tour four years after their devastating breakup. As they travel by bus across Italy, France and Spain, they compete to see who can rack up more sexual conquests, as if to prove just how much they’ve moved on — if they’ve moved on at all.

St. Martin’s Griffin, Aug. 6

An unknown Mexican actress, Vera Larios, rockets to stardom when she’s cast as Salome — the biblical Jewish princess — in a Golden Age Hollywood blockbuster, inspiring the jealousy of a castmate. The story of Salome is braided in with this tale, creating a narrative that comments on ambition, race and patriarchy.

Del Rey, Aug. 6

Burn, by Peter Heller

Two childhood friends, Jess and Storey, return from an off-grid hunting trip to discover a dystopian reality where their home state of Maine has fallen to violent secessionists at odds with the U.S. military.

Knopf, Aug. 13

Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, this magical realist romp takes place in the landlocked Ukrainian city of Lviv as sea gulls and starfish mysteriously appear, hippies and ex-K.G.B. agents mourn Jimi Hendrix and young lovers try to forge a future together.

HarperVia, Aug. 13

This new novel is a narrative in three parts: the rags-to-riches story of a publisher in 1840 London, the impending baptism of a Yazidi 10-year-old in 2014 Turkey and the life-changing epiphany of a hydrologist in 2018 London. Shafak unites her characters using the Epic of Gilgamesh and a single drop of water.

Knopf, Aug. 20