16 novels we're excited for this summer
Sun's out, fun's out! EW's 2022 Summer Preview has dozens of exclusive looks at the most anticipated TV shows, movies, books, and music of entertainment's hottest season. Continue to visit ew.com throughout the week for more previews of what you'll be watching, reading, and listening to in the months to come.
For some, it's strictly the season of SPF and Summer Fridays. But for dedicated book lovers, the weeks between May and September are golden for another reason: the rush of great new fiction. Whether you choose to stay cool indoors or stuff them all in a sandy tote bag and go, these 16 novels promise sweet escape.
<i>This Time Tomorrow</i> by Emma Straub
The queen of the contemporary smart-lit summer set (see: The Vacationers, Modern Lovers, All Adults Here) pulls a sort of reverse 13 Going On 30 in her latest, about a Manhattan private-school admissions officer on the cusp of 40 who wakes up in another world — specifically, the morning of her 16th birthday, circa 1996. (May 17)
<i>The Cherry Robbers</i> by Sarai Walker
Six doomed sisters, all heiresses to an early 20th-century firearms fortune: What do they have to do with a reclusive lesbian painter in modern-day New Mexico? The latest from Walker — whose first novel Dietland became an unexpected smash, and then a TV series — is already earning comparisons to The Virgin Suicides for its singularly unlucky siblings and gothic mystery. (May 17)
<i>Either/Or</i> by Elif Batuman
Batuman, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, returns to the scene of her lauded 2017 debut The Idiot — a mordantly witty continuation of first-gen Harvard student Selin and her mid-'90s misadventures in sex, self-actualization, and studying abroad. (May 24)
<i>The Latecomer</i> by Jean Hanff Korelitz
The author of literary page-turners like Admission and You Should Have Known — which went on to become the high-trash Nicole Kidman limited series The Undoing in 2020 — plunges into family dysfunction with her latest; the sprawling tale of a set of wealthy, troubled triplets birthed in the earliest days of IVF. (May 31)
<i>An Olive Grove in Ends</i> by Moses McKenzie
Written when its author was just 23, this vivid, urgent debut — set in a predominately Jamaican neighborhood in Bristol, England — grapples with fate and circumstance as it follows Sayon, an ambitious young dreamer whose turn to drug-dealing comes with brutal consequences. (May 31)
<i>Tracy Flick Can't Win</i> by Tom Perotta
Sequels are perhaps a dish best served cold; at least that's the hope for Perotta's return to the indelible Type-A teenager he (and by extension, a young, unsinkable Reese Witherspoon) made famous in his sly 1998 satire Election and its subsequent film adaptation. This time around, she's a single mom and assistant high school principal sliding into middle age, but her competitive instincts remain undimmed. (June 7)
<i>Nuclear Family</i> by Joseph Han
Remember roughly four years ago when Hawaii announced that it was about to obliterated by a nuclear missile, and then said "never mind"? Han sets his much-buzzed debut in the months leading up that— a richly imagined, era-straddling saga exploring several generations of a Korean American clan. (June 7)
<i>So Happy for You</i> by Celia Laskey
If your taste in onscreen matrimony leans more toward Leslye Headland's lacerating Bachelorette than any toothy Julia Roberts rom-com, Laskey's bleakly comic send-up of the wedding industrial complex — centered on queer academic-turned-reluctant-maid-of-honor Robin and her best friend, the beatific bride-to-be Ellie — might ring your bell. (June 7)
<i>Hurricane Girl</i> by Marcy Dermansky
A thirtysomething escapee from a bad California romance crash lands in a beach house in North Carolina, only to be struck by a Category Five hurricane (and quite possibly a vase to the back of the head, thanks to a murky one-night stand) in the pitch-black latest from Dermansky (Very Nice, The Red Car); think of it as a beach read for nihilists. (June 14)
<i>Lapvona</i> by Ottessa Moshfegh
The author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, EW's pick for the best book of 2018, turns her inimitable lens to a medieval fiefdom ruled by deeply tribal ideas of class, family, and faith. The result reads like a cracked fairy tale, both familiar and fantastically strange. (June 21)
<i>Elsewhere</i> by Alexis Schaitkin
The moms of a remote mountain village keep disappearing, sucked up into the clouds like some kind of parental Rapture in the latest from the Saint X author, which has already drawn breathless references to modern masters of the domestic macabre like Shirley Jackson. (June 28)
<i>Any Other Family</i> by Eleanor Brown
Brown (The Weird Sisters) explores the meaning of motherhood and the limits of a blended family in her vivid character study of four biological siblings adopted by three sets of parents, set across the span of a single (and singular) vacation. (July 12)
<i>The Last White Man</i> by Mohsin Hamid
"One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown": So begins the latest from Hamid — a slim, surreal fable as profound and piercingly humanist as his Booker Prize shortlisted The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West. (August 2)
<i>Properties of Thirst </i> by Marianne Wiggins
After a 15-year absence, the Pulitzer Prize finalist (Evidence of Things Unseen) returns with Thirst, a rich historical fiction centered on a Southern California ranch family circa WWII and shot through with shades of Chinatown. (August 2)
<i>Carrie Soto Is Back</i> by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Reid (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Daisy Jones & the Six) concludes her series of bright, bingeable novels about famous women with Soto, centered on a onetime tennis star looking to recapture her former '90s glory. (August 30)
<i>The Marriage Portrait</i> by Maggie O'Farrell
O'Farrell follows 2020's National Book Critics Circle winner Hamnet, her lucid re-imagining of Shakespeare, with a vivid dip into Renaissance Florence, where a young girl named Lucrezia is abruptly thrust into royalty when her older sister dies on the eve of her wedding, leaving her to be the terrified replacement. (September 6)
