20 new books to read in June

Love Elizabeth Gilbert? In the market for a brilliant debut novel? Interested in an account of the Manson murders that you’ve never encountered before? Let’s help you build that summer to-read pile. 

Gilbert’s delicious new novel immerses readers in the bustle of ’40s New York, where 19-year-old Vivian Morris lands after getting kicked out of college. She arrives in the city’s theater scene and meets an endlessly entertaining group of artists. “There’s something about dipping into that world that was so exotic to me,” Gilbert, a New Yorker for 30-plus years, tells EW. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, New York City in the 1940s? I want to write about that!’” (June 4)

Smith’s latest historical novel takes place at the famed Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood, meditating on the joys, traps, and deceptions of the movies as a longtime resident is forced to reflect on his lost cinematic masterpiece. (June 4)

Winslow spans decades in his infectious, empathetic portrait of Knot, a woman whose habits include reading, drinking, and bucking societal norms, and the community that grows and changes around her. Says the author: “The questions that I try to answer in the book through fiction are questions about people I knew when I was a child, that I didn’t get to know a lot about.” (June 4)

Gailey’s inventive debut is part quirky fantasy, part noirish mystery, and part bittersweet family tragedy. Set at the ever-intriguing The Osthorne Academy of Young Mages, this one’s for anyone looking for a book to really surprise them. (June 4)

If you’re in the market for a blackly comic and deeply weird Florida story, you’re in luck: This debut finds aimless Jessa-Lynn taking over her father’s taxidermy business after he kills himself in the shop. But no coming-home is complete without family resentments and secrets boiling to the surface. (June 4)

An award-winning poet, Vuong can already count Marlon James, Celeste Ng, and Emma Straub among the fans of his wrenchingly powerful debut. On Earth is a novel about the power and limits of love, framed around the letter a queer man in his 20s writes to his mother, with whom he emigrated from Vietnam as a child. (June 4)

What does it mean to leave a child behind? Dennis-Benn follows up her acclaimed Jamaica-set debut, Here Comes the Sun, with Patsy, a pained look at the consequences faced by a Jamaican woman who abandons her family — including her young daughter, Tru — for the freedom of New York City, where she can pursue the woman she’s fallen in love with. (June 4)

Crime writer Ellroy made his reputation with the L.A. Quartet, an epic set of four novels that included the 1990 noir that inspired the 1997 film L.A. Confidential. Now Ellroy is at work on a prequel quartet, taking place during World War II. The second book in the series, which follows up 2014’s Perfidia, is another sprawling and satisfyingly hard-boiled historical mystery. “I despise the minimal, I despise the small, the picayune,” the author tells EW. “And that’s why I write these big books.” (June 4)

A misfit MFA student at a thinly veiled New England Ivy (located in “a town named after a godly gesture of gratitude and fate”) is seduced by a group of Heathers-esque classmates — they call one another “Bunny” — whose seeming attempts to foster creativity take a sinister turn. A surreal, darkly funny take on art, power, and female friendships. (June 11)

The mystical and the romantic combine for a love story that also confronts the meaning of life. After his chemistry teacher — and secret lover — Sammy Tampari dies, 16-year-old Conrad attempts to see the man’s mission through: by creating a drug that extends the human life span. (June 11)

In Ginder’s fourth novel, classics professor Sue Ellen Wright goes back to the place where she first found love — the Greek island of Aegina — for a lecturing gig and the perfect summer getaway. But her unfaithful husband and secretive son tag along, setting the stage for an uproarious tale of a family in crisis. (June 11)

The best-selling author’s latest, her most sprawling and intensely personal novel to date, attempts to answer the question “How should a woman be in the world?” It follows two sisters, Jo and Bethie, from their 1950s childhood to the present day, tackling racism, sexual identity, abuse, and how women are shaped — but not defined — by their choices. (June 11)

A mind-bending thriller probing the power of memory as reality starts to (literally) crumble, Recursion was acquired in a huge deal last October: Netflix announced that Shonda Rhimes and Matt Reeves would jointly adapt it — as both a movie and a series. “There are single sentences in the book that could be an entire season of television,” Crouch tells EW. “This isn’t a two-hour movie, but it feels bigger than the small screen, too…. Net­flix is breaking down the boundaries between film and television, and was sort of made for a book like this.” (June 11)

Best known for her award-winning celebrity profiles — among others, she memorably wrote about Gwyneth Paltrow and Bradley Cooper last year — Brodesser-Akner turns to fiction with this stimulating debut. Fleishman follows a father and divorcée who’s forced to face reality, and his past, when his ex-wife disappears. (June 18)

Chung (Forgotten Country) traces generations of female geniuses (both fictional and real-life historical figures) in her fascinating portrait of Katherine, a mathematician looking back at the obstacles she’s faced in her career — as a woman of great ambition and intelligence pushing up against societal norms — and in her personal life, as she learns the truth about her mother and where she came from. (June 18)

American history comes to vivid, engaging life in this tale of two interconnected families (one white, one black) that spans from the 1950s to Barack Obama’s first year as president. The backdrop of events may be familiar (the Vietnam War, racial protests in the ’60s), but the complex, beautifully drawn characters are unique and indelible. (June 18)

What if everything we thought we knew about the Manson murders was wrong? O’Neill spent 20 years wrestling with that question, and Chaos is his final answer. Timed to the 50th anniversary of the Manson murders, it’s a sweeping indictment of the Los Angeles justice system, with cover-ups reaching all the way up to the FBI and CIA. (June 25)

The NPR correspondent and Pop Culture Happy Hour host’s novel explores the budding connection between a young widow and the washed-up former professional baseball player who rents out the apartment in the back of her house. (June 25)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker TV critic singularly traces the medium’s evolution from a variety of angles, in a set of essays which collectively argue that “we are what we watch.” (June 25)

This sprawling debut could be the big family saga of the summer, unfurling the fallout of a long-buried secret and persisting rivalries between four sisters across 50 transformative years. (June 25)