Summer, for a lot of us, is peak reading season. Those extra hours of sunlight mean more time to sneak in just one more chapter, whether you’re stretched out in the grass, relaxing on the beach or a balcony, or hiding from the heat indoors.
To help you make the most of the season, we’ve rounded up 35 new titles, sorted by genre. From bestsellers-in-the-making to sharply observed literary fiction to non-fiction that spans crime, history and memoir, this list is your guide to the most anticipated forthcoming releases.
Books we’re reading and loving this week: Globe readers share their picks
I want to read…
… about a journey
Lone Wolf: Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wildness, Adam Weymouth (Knopf, June) Once on the brink of extinction, wolves effectively reintroduced themselves to Europe, their numbers having increased 19-fold since their 1965 nadir. For this follow-up to Kings of the Yukon, the British journalist and author walked 1,000 miles from Slovenia to Italy in 2022 in the odds-defying pawsteps of a wolf named Slavc (whose perspective sometimes leads the narrative) during what was at the time Europe’s hottest summer on record.
Water Borne: A 1,200-Mile Paddleboarding Pilgrimage, Dan Rubinstein (ECW, June) In 2023, the journalist and adventurer undertook a 1,200-mile round-trip odyssey from Ottawa through Montreal, New York, the Erie Canal and Toronto on an inflatable stand-up paddleboard. His aim? A “pilgrimage” to confront environmental disconnection in the region, and an exploration of water’s therapeutic powers.
A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck, Sophie Elmhirst (Riverhead, July) This true story (a winner of the recently inaugurated Nero Book Awards) about the ordeal of a British couple who threw off the stultifying bonds of suburbia to sail around the world has distinctly biblical overtones. After a dying sperm whale sank their radio-less boat somewhere north of Ecuador, they drifted, near death, for 118 days on a makeshift raft until their dramatic rescue by Korean fishermen.
… something buzzy
Flashlight, Susan Choi (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June) The National Book Award winner’s latest novel is a decades-spanning, plot-twisting family drama based around the mysterious disappearance of the father of a young girl, after the latter is found unconscious on the beach. What began life as a short story in The New Yorker eventually grew into the opposite, with the final page-count ringing in at 464 pages.
The Catch, Yrsa Daley-Ward (Liveright, June) From Shakespeare to Cronenberg, twins have always offered rich territory for storytelling. They continue to do that in this tense, surreal debut novel about 30-year-old twin sisters, separated by adoption but reunited when one becomes convinced she has found their birth mother alive. The British writer, actor and erstwhile Beyoncé collaborator previously made waves with a lyrical memoir, The Terrible.
The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex, Melissa Febos (Hamish Hamilton, June) Febos is known for her elegant, feisty, no-holds-barred series of memoirs (the first, Whip Smart, detailed her experiences as a heroin-addicted college student and professional dominatrix in New York). This time, the queer author chronicles a life-changing year of purposeful celibacy after two decades of non-stop, at times devastating, relationships.
Atmosphere, Taylor Jenkins Reid (Doubleday, June) Reid became a powerhouse in contemporary fiction through a series of female protagonists – among them rock stars (Daisy Jones & The Six), surfers (Malibu Rising) and Hollywood actresses (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo) – whose high-stakes professional lives inevitably clash with private realities. The latest in that pantheon is Joan Goodwin, an astrophysics professor who navigates sexism and unthinkable disaster after being asked to join NASA’s 1980s space shuttle program.
… a coming-of-age novel
Great Black Hope, Rob Franklin (Summit, June) “Smart” and “scintillating” are descriptors being thrown at this debut, which ping-pongs between New York and Atlanta as it follows the story of a queer, Stanford-graduated son of wealthy Black parents. In the wake of his best friend’s death and his own arrest for cocaine possession, the protagonist spirals into grief, guilt and social dislocation.
Dark Like Under, Alice Chadwick (Biblioasis, June) This 80s-set debut garnered praise in the author’s native United Kingdom after its launch earlier this year (the Times Literary Supplement called it “a novel of wonder as much as of pain”). Set over 24 hours, it explores reactions to the death of a beloved teacher at an elite grammar school while, far in the background, labour unrest proliferates and Thatcher commands the retaking of the Falklands.
The Road to Goderich, Linda McQuaig (Dundurn, June) Known for her journalism and books about the distribution of power and wealth, McQuaig’s first work of fiction (inspired by the 1982 film The Return of Martin Guerre and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace) takes place in Upper Canada on the eve of the 1837 rebellions. Callandra, the wife of a dour clergyman, begins an affair with a carpenter who later assumes her husband’s identity after his death in the backwoods.
The Damagers, Rob Benvie (Knopf, June) “Manson sets up camp at Walden Pond” might have been the elevator pitch for this fourth novel by Benvie – who was previously a musician with bands the Dears and Thrush Hermit. It follows two sisters who in 1952 flee their burning farmhouse and join a secluded, hedonistic group in the Adirondacks led by a radical spiritual leader who conscripts one of them to codify his teachings into testament form.
… a memoir
How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir, Molly Jong-Fast (Viking, June) The Vanity Fair special correspondent and political commentator chronicles her recent annus horribilis, 2023, during which her husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and both her stepfather and mother (the renowned Erica Jong, author of Fear of Flying) faced institutionalization because of dementia. Along the way, Jong-Fast delves into her complicated relationship with her mother: a figure whom she worshipped growing up, but whose alcoholism and narcissism created obstacles to true connection.
Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan (PublicAffairs, June) Two exiled Russian journalists – Soldatov was placed on Russia’s federal wanted list for his reporting on the invasion of Ukraine – tell the story of Vladimir Putin’s continuing campaign to isolate Russia from the West. Using a highly personal lens, they reconnect with ex-colleagues from the newspaper Izvestia who were once on the front lines of the ideological battle over Russia’s future but eventually capitulated to Putin’s ideology.
Dobryd, Ann Charney (Baraka Books, June) When it was first published in 1973, Charney’s autobiographical novel about her and her mother’s escape from Nazi-occupied Poland was compared to The Diary of Anne Frank for its powerful exploration of the effects of war. But the book was better received overseas than in Charney’s adopted Canada – one of its heroes being a Red Army soldier proved a complicating factor – and it eventually fell out of print until this revival by a Quebec publisher.
The Möbius Book, Catherine Lacey (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June) Admittedly, only half of this book by the author of the much-lauded Biography of X is a memoir; the other half (printed upside down) is a novella. Lacey uses this recursive structure to explore grief, faith and identity, blurring the lines between fiction and lived experience.
… a bit of history
A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children, Haley Cohen Gilliland (Avid Reader, July) This book follows the inspiring story of Argentina’s Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo during the country’s violent military dictatorship in the seventies and eighties. Through a combination of activism, stubbornness and groundbreaking genetic testing, the women uncovered the identities and whereabouts of children stolen by the regime (to be raised in ideologically “appropriate” families) or placed in detention centres.
Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations, Sam Kean (Little, Brown, July) Some traditional archeologists look upon the emerging field of “experimental archeology” with disdain, seeing theatre rather than science in efforts to recreate ancient Egyptian bread, million-year-old tools or Viking beer. Begging to differ, Kean combines fiction and non-fiction, and visits with the field’s eccentric practitioners to take readers on a sensory, global tour of the lives of our ancient forebears.
A History of Photography in Canada, Volume 1: Anticipation to Participation, 1839–1918, Martha Langford (MQUP, July) Covering the decades between 1839 and 1918, this first in a planned three-volume history draws from an impressively broad variety of sources – newspaper and war photography, landscapes, still lifes, portraits, advertising – to build a vivid picture of a nation in the making. Langford, a Montreal-based curator and art historian, writes that the two-pronged question guiding her research was, “What did Canadians know about photography and when did they know it?”
Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History, Moudhy Al-Rashid (WW Norton, August) Mesopotamia produced many key firsts, including the wheel and the world’s first writing system, cuneiform, which Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians and other ancient groups used to memorialize everything from wars to beer receipts. Al-Rashid here distills the sprawling history of the region into eight artifacts – among them a clay drum, some school tablets and a brick – found in the 1920s within a palace built two millennia ago for Ennigaldi-Nanna, a high priestess who served the Babylonian moon god.
King of Kings, The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation, Scott Anderson (Signal, August) From corrupt Iranian officials to Jimmy Carter, there’s plenty of blame to be shared in this thorough history of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Anderson, author of the excellent Lawrence in Arabia, explores one of the 20th century’s most pivotal events, which resulted in the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.
… some true crime
Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, Caroline Fraser (Penguin, June) The Pulitzer Prize winner (for her 2017 book about Laura Ingalls Wilder) looks at the surge of serial killings in the Pacific Northwest between the 1970s and the 1980s through the lens of the “lead-crime hypothesis.” It posits that atrocities committed by the Zodiac, Boxcar and Happy Face killers and their ilk weren’t the result of copycat-ism or the area’s ample wilderness, but a sharp rise in toxins emanating from an abundance of industrial smelters.
Anatomy of a Cover-Up: The Truth about the RCMP and the Nova Scotia Massacres, Paul Palango (Random House, June) Palango wrote this follow-up to 22 Murders, about the 2020 Nova Scotia attacks, in the wake of the conclusion of the public inquiry into what remains one of the deadliest criminal incidents in Canadian history. A long-time critic of the RCMP, Palango accuses our national police force “and its enablers in government and the justice system” of dishonesty about what happened before and after the massacres and promises to finally reveal the truth.
An Accidental Villain: A Soldier’s Tale of War, Deceit and Exile, Linden MacIntyre (Random House, August) The ex-CBC journo’s latest work of non-fiction follows the dramatic and complex life of a relatively obscure figure, Sir Hugh Tudor, a decorated First World War hero who, at Churchill’s request, led British police forces during the Irish War of Independence. During the war, he countered terrorism with unmitigated brutality and state-perpetrated homicide before eventually relocating to Newfoundland.
… something about the lobster industry
The Lobster Trap: The Global Fight for a Seafood on the Brink, Greg Mercer (McClelland & Stewart, August) Mercer, a native of Darlings Island, N.B., and an investigative journalist at The Globe, travelled the world to detail the evolution of lobstering, from a small-scale enterprise whose harvest was once mostly consumed by the poor, to a multibillion-dollar industry so lucrative that lobster fishermen have been known to carry guns on their boats and burn down the vessels of Indigenous rivals.
… a novel in translation
The Brittle Age, Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa, June) In her native Italy, Di Pietrantonio’s spare, trenchant prose is often compared to that of Elena Ferrante, an avowed fan of her work. (The two also share the translator Ann Goldstein.) Her latest novel, based on real events, is about a woman grappling with the 20-year-old murder of two girls, and attempted murder of her friend, on land owned by her father. One reviewer from the Italian newspaper Il Mattino called it “both a thriller and an absorbing exploration of evolving Italian values.”
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, Irene Solà, translated by Mara Faye Lethem (Graywolf, June) The Catalan writer’s first novel, When I Sing, Mountains Dance, made waves in the indie book world. This one – involving folklore, witchcraft, horror and Faustian bargains – takes place over a single day in the Catalonian mountains where a very old woman on her deathbed unleashes the ghosts and stories of women who lived in the house over the course of four centuries.
The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen, Shokoofeh Azar (Europa, June) Azar’s work as a journalist led to her arrest and imprisonment by the Iranian regime on multiple occasions, including a three-month stint in solitary confinement. In 2010, she sought refuge in Australia, where she produced her first novel, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, which was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize. Like its predecessor, this big, ambitious novel involves trees and magical realism as it tells the decades-spanning story of a Zoroastrian family devastated by Iran’s Islamic Revolution.
The Rarest Fruit, Gaëlle Bélem, translated by Hildegarde Serle (Europa, June) Bélem, whose first novel was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, is one of the most prominent writers to hail from the tiny, culturally diverse island of Réunion (a bit like the Hawaii of France, it’s located east of Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean). In this one, she focuses on the real-life figure of Edmond Albius, a Creole boy born into slavery who launched the global vanilla industry through his discovery, at the age of 12, of the orchid-pollinating process.
… some essays
Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything, edited by Zahra Ebrahim, John Lorinc, Dylan Reid and Leslie Woo (Coach House, June) This anthology of (mostly) brief essays celebrates what’s now known as “messy urbanism” – the serendipitous, unplanned ways people shape urban environments, from graffiti to street vending. Appropriately polyphonic, its diverse contributors include urban planners, artists, physicians and geographers.
Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, Yoko Tawada (New Directions, June) Known for her cross-cultural, genre-defying books composed in both Japanese and German, (to wit: one of her novels follows three generations of memoir-writing polar bears) Tawada’s first book written in English is an extended essay on the creative possibilities of “exophony”: the condition of existing, in a good way, outside one’s mother tongue.
The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains, Pria Anand (Washington Square, June) “Every diagnosis, I have learned, hinges on a story,” writes Anand, a neurologist based in Boston. In the acknowledged spirit of the late Oliver Sacks, she brings us more tales from the wondrously strange land of the human brain through a weaving-together of case studies, fables, poetry and personal reminiscence.
… something funny, or funny-peculiar
Endling, Maria Reva (Knopf, June) I was surprised this book was billed as Reva’s first novel, but it turns out the Ukrainian-Canadian author’s dark, razor-sharp Good Citizens Need Not Fear was that other beast, a novel-in-stories. Her latest, a meta- and auto-fictional novel set in 2022 Ukraine, concerns a snail conservationist who dates Western men to raise money for her research. The narrative, upended by Russia’s invasion of the country, features interjections from Reva herself.
Audition, Pip Adam (Strange Light, June) Not to be confused with Katie Kitamura’s recent book of the same title, this unabashedly weird novel follows three giants who must keep talking or risk continuing to grow and fill the spaceship they’ve been exiled to from Earth. It also serves as an indictment of the modern prison system.
Julius Julius, Aurora Stewart de Peña (Strange Light, June) Based on her own time in the trenches of the advertising world, de Peña’s satire is built from the intertwined narratives of three employees at the world’s oldest agency. We later learn the company got its start in Pompeii when the book’s titular, double-named founder came up with a unique way of promoting local brothels.
So Far Gone, Jess Walter (Harper, June) When his grandchildren are kidnapped by a militia associated with the apocalyptic Christian sect his recovering-addict son-in-law is part of, retired environmental journalist Rhys Kinnick – who’s been living off-grid in Washington State ever since he punched said son-in-law in the face a few years back – embarks on a madcap quest through a divided America and, at one point, to a music festival in the B.C. woods.
