20 new books to read in July

Aren’t things supposed to slow down in the summer? Don’t tell the publishing world, because July is dense with some of the year’s most anticipated books. Here are the 20 you should have on your radar.

The nuanced novelization of the college admissions scandal you never knew you needed, Holsinger’s accidentally timely novel follows a wealthy community of parents and kids who turn on each other as they jockey for spots in an exclusive new school. Comparisons to any real-world events are strictly coincidental…although we have two actresses in mind if they ever make the movie. (July 2)

The contemporary literary horror master returns with a collection sure to send chills up your spine. Yeah, we’re aways from Halloween, but who says spooky season can’t start a little early? (July 2)

If you’re going to pick up one short-story collection this summer, might we suggest Maggie Brown? The reliably profound Orner, a National Book Critics’ Cricle finalist, interlocks bite-sized tales that capture life-definining moments. (July 2)

This darkly funny book vies to answer the age-old question “Just how huge is our collective appetite for tales of male novelists behaving badly?” Dermansky (Twins) uproariously follows a Great Literary Man as he’s seduced by his college pupil — and her recently divorced mother — against the backdrop of a wealthy Connecticut enclave. (July 2)

The best-selling author and comic book writer is set to make a literary statement with Wanderers, a Station Eleven-esque panorama of a post-apocalyptic America. (July 2)

A sort of Big Little Lies in a Texas power suit, Baker offers a crackling exposé of working motherhood, corporate malfeasance, and female friendship in the era of #MeToo. At a Nike-esque athletic apparel company in Dallas, five women — from sleek blond attorneys in the C-suite to the cleaning lady executives hardly deign to notice emptying their trash cans — are drawn together by the sudden death of their philandering boss. (July 2)

In Phillips’ eerie new novel, a mother of two slips down an existential rabbit hole when she confronts an intruder in her home, only to find her grip on reality and parenthood loosening, fast. (July 9)

Set in expansive Appalachian Ohio, young Helen finds herself living “off the land,” alone, after her boyfriend skips off, and forced to make due with a 20-acre plot. She finds a makeshift family, of sorts, in neighbors expecting their first child. But as the years go by, their utopia is gradually upended. (July 9)

Taddeo spent eight years reporting this groundbreaking book, moving across the country and back again in her staggeringly intimate foray into the sexual lives and desires of three “ordinary” women. Tragedy and despair lurk in each of their stories, but Taddeo’s dynamic writing brings them all to breathtaking life. (July 9)

Whitehead won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for his previous novel, The Underground Railroad. In The Nickel Boys, he returns to another pivotal, painful setting in American history: a reform school for boys in the Jim Crow-era South. The book should further cement Whitehead as one of his generation’s best. (July 16)

The Star Trek actor recounts his childhood in an American concentration camp during World War II in this stark, moving graphic memoir. (July 16)

Sci-fi favorites El-Mohtar and Gladstone write alternating sections of this time-travel romance, centered on two agents on opposite sides of a vicious war who find themselves impossibly drawn to each other. Already optioned for TV, Time War intimately operates within an immersive space opera. (July 16)

Since The Wedding Date first hit shelves almost a year and a half ago, Jasmine Guillory has become one of romance’s brightest new voices. Her second book, The Proposal, was selected for Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine book club in February and spent more than a month on the New York Times’ best-seller list. Now readers are invited to The Wedding Party, which introduces Maddie and Theo — best friends of Date’s heroine, Alexa. When we meet the pair, they hate each other; after a one-night stand, sparks fly. Their fling continues, but each agrees to an expiration date: Alexa’s wedding. (July 16)

Crime fiction superstar Laura Lippman, fresh off her best-seller Sunburn (one of EW’s favorite crime novels of 2018), goes back in time with her eerie latest, tracking an aspiring reporter in ’66 Baltimore who’s investigating a murder that gets at the heart of the city’s broken race relations. (July 23)

Stradal first bubbled to the surface in 2015 with his beloved, best-selling debut, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, and his second novel has similar selling points: complex female characters, sudden tragedies, culinary descriptions that awaken all your senses. “I like to see how Midwesterners stand up to conflict,” says the author, 43, who lives in Los Angeles but hails from hardy Minnesotan stock. “That’s something I’ve been intrigued by since I was a kid.” (July 23)

The reliably hilarious Stibbe (Paradise Lodge) may have outdone herself with this witty, ’80s-England-set exploration of one woman’s struggles in early adulthood. Cheerful just won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, the only U.K. literary award for comic literature, so dig into this one expecting a very good time. (July 23)

The Pulitzer Prize winner’s first standalone novel in a decade heads to Martha’s Vineyard, where three colleges buddies now in their 60s reflect on the passage of time, the shadow of war, and the one who got away. (July 30)

Two siblings who live on the remote Wolf Island are forced to face tragedies of the past, and pains of the present, when they encounter a strange figure who seems awfully familiar. (July 30)

Jackson has been establishing herself as a master of domestic suspense for years, and her hyped latest should do little to change that. A carefree neighborhood evening of games, gossip, and wine gradually evolves into something much more sinister, as engineered by a woman harboring unsettling secrets. (July 30)

Jesmyn Ward is among those singing the praises of this thrilling novel, which follows a young black woman in Harlem as she searches for her missing twin sister, and gradually learns about the many local women who’ve disappeared and been killed, and the authorities’ indifference to it all. (July 30)