The best books to cool down with in July

At a bougie yacht club, a young woman takes a summer gig as a chambermaid while she studies for her EMT exam — and slowly loses her mind as she cleans up after the rich. It's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, but with fewer pills and more boats. (July 6)

This short-story collection, which traces a man's life through the lens of the different times he's been called the N-word, comes together as a harrowing portrait of race relations in America, as beautiful as it is urgent. (July 6)

Fraught with class tension, Samira Sedira's delicious page-turner follows the unlikely friendship of two families in a remote French town. (July 6)

The debut author traces his rise from a rural childhood to being director of reporting at GQ China in Beijing, and reflects on the family with whom he has increasingly little in common. (July 6)

A devilishly au courant satire that skewers white privilege and colonialism. The novel's wives live in Namibia — on compounds of varying degrees of luxury — and send their children to the prestigious Windhoek International School. As everyone's dirty laundry gets hung out to dry, it's hard to remember why we'd want it clean. (July 13)

Remy and Alicia are obsessed with Jen in Beth Morgan's darkly funny novel. When Jen invites them on a trip to the Hamptons, the infatuation turns violent. (July 13)

The follow-up to his Booker Prize-shortlisted The Runaways, Sunjeev Sahota's new novel follows characters across generations and continents (from Punjab to rural England) and is equally heart-wrenching. (July 13)

The best-selling romance novelist does it again, this time with a delicious tale of an advertising executive and the movie star he casts in his new campaign. (July 13)

Asha and Cyrus fall madly in love, get married, invent a social media platform that reinvents rituals for modern life, get rich and successful — and then discover it all crumbling down, in this satirical skewering of the startup world. (July 13)

The narrator of Rachel Yoder's electric debut novel — which is already slated for an adaptation starring Amy Adams — asks the age-old question: Am I struggling with new motherhood, or am I turning into a dog? (July 20)

A stream-of-consciousness novel centered on a young woman working as a translator at the Hague and attempting to navigate a complicated relationship with an older man. Fans of sparse millennial tales: Run, don't walk. (July 20)

Against the backdrop of an intern spending the summer at a wealthy couple's beach house, Hermione Hoby explores the pitfalls of a class-obsessed New York City. (July 20)

EW alum Jessica Goodman's first thriller, They Wish They Were Us, is headed to the big screen (starring Halsey), and her next follows two sisters on a high school cross-country team who become suspects when a teammate goes on a run… and never returns. (July 27)

After crashing onto the Trump-exposé scene with 2018's Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff turns his poison pen on the final days of the presidency. And, reader, they sound chaotic. (July 27)