By Collection Management Librarian Kathy
Get a jump on your summer reading with these books we think will be hot, hot, hot all summer. Place your hold today!
Fiction
More Than You'll Ever Know by Katie Gutierrez
Publication date: June 7
Why you should try it: Mashing up literary and crime fiction, this is the debut everyone will be talking about.
Description: An evocative drama about a woman caught leading a double life after one husband murders the other, and the true-crime writer who becomes obsessed with telling her story.
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Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
Publication date: June 7
Why you should try it: You may be hearing about Leila Mottley for some time—she is only 19 and Oakland's former Youth Poet Laureate.
Description: Kiara and her brother, Marcus, are scraping by in an East Oakland apartment complex. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison. But while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent. One night, what begins as a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger turns into the job Kiara never imagined wanting but now desperately needs: nightcrawling. Her world breaks open even further when her name surfaces in an investigation that exposes her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.
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Last Summer on State Street by Toya Wolfe
Expected publication date: June 14
Why you should try it: If you loved Three Girls From Bronzeville—And who didn't? It won our Book Madness contest!—try this.
Description: Felicia "Fe Fe" Stevens is living with her vigilantly loving mother and older teenage brother in building 4950 of Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes. It's the summer of 1999, and she—with the devout Precious Brown and Stacia Buchanan, daughter of a Gangster Disciple Queen-Pin—form a tentative trio and, for a brief moment, carve out for themselves a simple life of Double Dutch and innocence. But when Fe Fe welcomes a mysterious new friend, Tonya, into their fold, the dynamics shift, upending the lives of all four girls.
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Night of the Living Rez by Talty Morgan
Expected publication date: July 5
Why you should try it: Both the author and the characters are young, contemporary, Indigenous voices, and we definitely need more of that.
Description: Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the 21st century and what it means to live, survive, and persevere after tragedy.
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Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
Expected publication date: July 12
Why you should try it: If you like your fiction with a good helping of mystery and a side of horror, this novel is perfect.
Description: A marine biologist, Leah left for a routine expedition months earlier, only this time her submarine sank to the sea floor. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows that something is wrong. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home.
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The It Girl by Ruth Ware
Expected publication date: July 12
Why you should try it: If you know Ruth Ware, you know. If you don't, now is a good time to check out this master of the "claustrophobic spine-tingler" (People Magazine).
Description: April Clarke-Cliveden was the first person Hannah Jones met at Oxford. Together, they developed a group of devoted and inseparable friends—Will, Hugh, Ryan, and Emily—during their first term. By the end of the second, April was dead. Now, a decade later, Hannah's world is rocked when a young journalist comes knocking and presents new evidence that the convicted killer, who just died in prison, may have been innocent.
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The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Expected publication date: July 19
Why you should try it: Can Silvia Moreno-Garcia come out with a book every summer? Her horror-tinged historical novels are perfect for long, languid reading days.
Description: A dreamy reimagining of The Island of Doctor Moreau set against the backdrop of 19th-century Mexico.
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The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid
Expected publication date: August 2
Why you should try it: I can think of few better than Mohsin Hamid to write a modern-day, race-conscious Metamorphosis.
Description: Overnight, Anders's skin has turned dark, and the reflection in the mirror seems a stranger to him. At first, he shares his secret only with Oona, an old friend turned new lover. Soon, reports of similar events begin to surface. Across the land, people are awakening in new incarnations, uncertain how their neighbors, friends, and family will greet them.
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Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra
Expected publication date: August 2
Why you should try it: A new Anthony Marra book is cause for celebration, especially when it takes place in 1940s Hollywood.
Description: Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father's arrest. Fifteen years later, on the eve of America's entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart.
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Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Expected publication date: August 30
Why you should try it: Taylor Jenkins Reid is like a rock star...but an author.
Description: Carrie Soto is fierce, and her determination to win at any cost has not made her popular. But by the time she retires from tennis, she is the best player the world has ever seen. She has shattered every record and claimed 20 Grand Slam titles. But six years after her retirement, Carrie finds herself sitting in the stands of the 1994 U.S. Open, watching her record be taken from her by a brutal, stunning player named Nicki Chan. At 37 years old, Carrie makes the monumental decision to come out of retirement and be coached by her father for one last year in an attempt to reclaim her record.
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Nonfiction
The World as We Knew It: Dispatches From a Changing Climate edited by Amy Brady & Tajja Isen
Expected publication date: June 14
Why you should try it: Instead of the scientific consequences, discover the personal and communal effects of climate change.
Description: In this riveting anthology, leading literary writers reflect on how climate change has altered their lives, revealing the personal and haunting consequences of this global threat.
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How to Raise an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Expected publication date: June 14
Why you should try it: It's Ibram X. Kendi!
Description: Like most parents or parents-to-be, Ibram X. Kendi felt the reflex to not talk to his child about racism, which he feared would stain her innocence and steal away her joy. But research and experience changed his mind, and he realized that raising his child to be antiracist would actually protect his child, and preserve her innocence and joy.
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Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange
Expected publication date: June 14
Why you should try it: Don't mind the lighthearted title (besides, we always met at the food court), this is actually a deep dive into the architecture and design of an American institution.
Description: Conventional wisdom holds that the mall is dead. But what was the mall, really? And have rumors of its demise been greatly exaggerated? Alexandra Lange turns her sharp eye to a subject we only think we know. She chronicles postwar architects' and merchants' invention of the mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent.
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Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives & on the Health of Our Nation by Linda Villarosa
Expected publication date: June 14
Why you should try it: Race disparities in health care were glaringly brought to light during the pandemic. Read this book to understand the long history of medical racism.
Description: Linda Villarosa lays bare the forces in the American health care system and in American society that cause Black people to "live sicker and die quicker" compared to their white counterparts. Study after study of medical settings show worse treatment and outcomes for Black patients. Black people live in dirtier, more polluted communities due to environmental racism and neglect from all levels of government. And, most powerfully, Villarosa describes the new understanding that coping with the daily scourge of racism ages Black people prematurely.
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An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong
Expected publication date: June 21
Why you should try it: Publishers Weekly calls this "science writing at its best" and Kirkus Book Review says it is "ingenious."
Description: The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world. Science journalist Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us.
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Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels & Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe
Expected publication date: July 12
Why you should try it: New nonfiction from the author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing—say no more!
Description: Rogues brings together a dozen of Keefe's most celebrated articles from The New Yorker. As he says in his preface, "They reflect on some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial."
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The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays by CJ Hauser
Expected publication date: July 12
Why you should try it: If you're tired of trying to live up to the stories of happiness you've been told, let Hauser help you embrace the unexpected and create your own stories.
Description: Ten days after calling off her wedding, CJ Hauser went on an expedition to Texas to study the whooping crane. After a week of wading through the gulf, she realized she'd almost signed up to live someone else's life. In this intimate memoir, Hauser releases herself from traditional narratives of happiness and goes looking for ways of living that leave room for the unexpected, making plenty of mistakes along the way.
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Crying in the Bathroom: A Memoir by Erika L. Sánchez
Expected publication date: July 12
Why you should try it: It's a memoir by the author of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter. Enough said.
Description: Growing up as the daughter of Mexican immigrants in Chicago in the 90s, Erika Sánchez was a self-described pariah, misfit, and disappointment—a foul-mouthed, melancholic rabble-rouser who painted her nails black but also loved comedy. Twenty-five years later, she's now an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, but she's still got an irrepressible laugh, an acerbic wit, and singular powers of perception about the world around her.
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The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality & Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher
Expected publication date: August 2
Why you should try it: For anyone who wants to better understand the inequalities that COVID-19 exposed.
Description: Having spent a ground-breaking career studying the racialization, policing, and criminalization of HIV, Dr. Thrasher has come to understand a deeper truth at the heart of our society: that there are vast inequalities in who is able to survive viruses and that the ways in which viruses spread, kill, and take their toll are much more dependent on social structures than they are on biology alone.
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Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice & the Future of America's Overdose Crisis by Beth Macy
Expected publication date: August 16
Why you should try it: Macy arguably wrote the definitive account of the opioid crisis, Dopesick. This is her follow-up.
Description: Distilling this massive, unprecedented national health crisis down to its character-driven emotional core as only she can, Beth Macy takes us into the country's hardest-hit places to witness the devastating personal costs that one-third of America's families are now being forced to shoulder.
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About Kathy
Kathy is a Collection Management Librarian who loves reading, sharing, and talking about books. Her missions in life are to: create communities of readers, convince folks that her official title should be "Book Pusher," and refute that "disco" is a dirty word.
