Thrilling thrillers, Dirtbag memoirs, and all the in-depth literary fiction not to be missed this month.
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Midsommar, in the traditional Swedish sense, means green fields and flower crowns and perhaps ritual murder (at least on screen). Midsummer, if you’re lucky, only brings a fresh stack of delicious books and six more hazy, hammock-y weeks to read at your leisure before Labor Day.
Below, six fresh releases to see you through the peak of the season. (And if six isn’t enough, click here for our June roundup.)
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Sam and Sadie meet as two lonely children in Los Angeles, and then years later on a train platform in Boston. This is not a love story though, or at least not a traditional romance: What brings them together are video games, and if you don’t know a Switch console from a hole in the floor (or more importantly, don’t care) , Tomorrow is still a remarkably absorbing portrait of friendship, identity and the urge to create something beautiful, whether on the page or in pixels. (Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson also play a part.) Zevin (The Storied Life of AJ Fikry) clearly knows his way around an RPG, but it’s the analog intimacy of Dumani’s wise and sensitive storytelling that sticks out.
Any Other Family by Eleanor Brown
Five parents, four children, one birth mother: This is the improbable math in Brown’s latest domestic news (The Weird Sisters). Brianna was only 14 when she gave birth to her first daughter, followed soon after by a set of twins; several years later another girl arrived, and all ended up in single open adoptions. The decision to create something of a loose collective—and bring everyone together over the course of two weeks at a luxury vacation home in the mountains of Colorado—highlights the wide disparity in age, experience, and styles. of attachment in this ironic. clear depiction of the gifts and pitfalls that come with the chosen family.
Things We Do in the Dark by Jennifer Hillier
“There’s a time and a place for erect nipples, but the back of a Seattle police car is definitely not it.” So begins Cose, a four-turn, backflip thriller that actually turns out to be as much a slow character study as a whodunit. See the article : Brad Pietz is named General Manager of LEARFIELD’s LA Tech Sports Properties. That’s not to say the story isn’t propulsive from that opening line: Paris Peralta is in custody because her famous TV comedian husband is dead and she—scared, brown-skinned, nearly 30 years her junior—has been found disoriented and holding the straight razor that killed him. Murder, stolen identities and rampant sexual abuse are just the beginning of Dark-ness, but Filipino-Canadian Hillier (Jar of Hearts, Little Secrets) writes with an acute relatability that makes the pages fly.
Fellowship Point by Alice Elliott Dark
In every long, lazy summer, at least one great heavyweight novel must fall. This year’s nominee is Fellowship, the result of nearly 20 years of work by Alice Elliott Dark (In the Gloaming, Think of England). Its protagonists are the product of an even more unhurried time: Agnes and Polly, eighty-year-old best friends and neighbors whose connection is decades old in their coastal town in Maine, but whose lives and choices are otherwise wildly divergent. To see also : Bill Schubart: Will artificial intelligence improve life or just make business more profitable?. You might need wrist braces to push through a brick of a book that clocks in at nearly 600 pages in hardcover, but Dark’s lively, generous prose is worth the weight.
Other Names for Love by Taymour Soomro
Fahad, 16, hoped to spend the summer with his mother in London; instead, his father drags him to the family’s place in rural Pakistan to teach him how to be a man. To see also : “Hammerin ‘Hank” Goldberg dies at 82: sports media legend has helped bring the game to the masses. There, he meets a local boy named Ali, in what proves to be both a sexual and emotional awakening (called Call Me By Your Other Name). Trained as a lawyer – he holds degrees from Cambridge and Stanford – Soonro has already drawn glowing praise from star-lit contemporaries such as Rumaan Alam and Alexander Chee for his vividly drawn dream debut, a coming-of-age idyll firmly rooted in culture . and customs of its environment of the homeland, but universal in the depth of the feeling it evokes.
Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional by Isaac Fitzgerald
You may know him as a regular Today Show contributor, or the author of the best-selling children’s book How to Be a Pirate. It turns out that Isaac Fitzgerald contains a multitude in this frank and engaging memoir: severely lapsed Catholic, lifelong bachelor, lover of well-inked tattoos. He’s also had almost every odd job on both sides of the law (barback, international helper, sushi chef, porn star) and the tales of childhood deprivation, internment privilege and youth vision-seeking recounted here they find it bittersweet. spot between dirtbag and sublime.
