These New Novels Make the Perfect Backyard Reads

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The days are longer, the pollinators are out—the only thing fresher than the new blooms are these buzzworthy novels. From Pulitzer Prize finalists as well as debut novelists, the titles on this list will pull you in—and not let you go.

While we’re still adjusting to our newly set-back clocks, these novels, like all the best reads, will make you lose track of time entirely, causing a long commute to flash by in an instant and an afternoon sprawled in the sun feel like a lifetime. So, dust off your picnic blankets, take off your watch, and get reading.

The Tree Doctor, by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

In this intimate, erotic novel, a middle-aged woman returns to her childhood home in California to move her ailing mother into a nursing home. When the start of the pandemic makes visiting her mother—and returning to her husband and children in Hong Kong—impossible, she becomes obsessed with reviving her mother’s ailing Japanese garden, most especially when it comes to an aging cherry tree she desperately wants to bloom. She seeks out the counsel of a local “tree doctor,” and what begins as a horticultural relationship soon turns sexual. “Love, all the stories told her, was for the young,” but outside the pages of her beloved books—fully present in her own body and in enmeshed natural cycles of the garden— she awakens her long-dormant capacity for pleasure—and life. Mockett’s writing is exquisite, but this novel seduces with its honesty about our physical lives—the flaws, the fears, the joys, and the needs. She’s unafraid to make a reader laugh and unafraid to face the kind, messy, beautiful conclusions that will linger with you for quite a long time.

Wandering Stars, by Tommy Orange

Wandering Stars is simultaneously a prequel and a sequel to Orange’s Pulitzer Prize finalist There There, continuing the story of the Native American teenager Orvil Red Feather where the first novel left off—with a 2018 shooting at an Oakland powwow—and following it back in time, over several generations of his family: from the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, through the brutal history of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, to the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island and beyond.

While readers of Orange’s previous work will welcome the reunion with familiar characters and plot points, no prior reading is necessary to be swept, headfirst, into the rushing plot of this standalone story. Much of this book takes place after 2018, but Orange has a rare gift for making history feel just as urgently alive as the present. His characters are just as relatable and flawed when they are fleeing settler genocide in the canyons of Colorado as when they are chasing an opiate high in the streets of Oakland—and, from our bird’s-eye narrative view, we see clearly that neither experience can be extricated from the other. As Orange writes, these ancestors must be remembered not because "they are inherently sacred but because their stories are what you are made of.”

Headshot, by Rita Bullwinkel

In each chapter in this slim and muscular debut novel, we are given a front-row seat to a new fight in the 12th Annual Women’s 18 and Under Daughters of America Cup, entering the richly imagined inner lives of the teen boxers. The eight adolescent athletes have all come to Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno, Nevada, from different homes, pursuing different dreams, and escaping different terrors. But for one weekend, they all want the same thing: Each girl wants to hit the other girls with her fists; each wants to become the best girl boxer in the country.

Andi Taylor arrived at the tournament alone, having driven 2,800 miles and spent all her summer lifeguarding savings to get to the ring. Artemis Victor comes from a long line of girl boxing champions; her parents watch her every move in the ring in matching “Victor” T-shirts. Kate Heffer just wants to be the best in the world at something and for a “Kate-looking girl,” boxing seems like the safest bet. Though there are only two girls in the ring at a time, each match is crowded with the ghosts of the past and the glimpsed specters of their future: the toddler that Andi Taylor watched drown while on lifeguard duty at her local pool, the man Rose Mueller will one day marry, the girl boxers that will come after them, and, as the tournament progresses, those they had beaten out to get there—their dashed dreams and revised futures crowding the air between their victors’ fists. With language that floats like a butterfly and revelations that sting like a bee, Bullwinkel takes the gloves off teenage girlhood, leaving it splayed out in all its wonder, humor, violence, and glory.

Fruit of the Dead, by Rachel Lyon

In this modern retelling of the myth of Persephone and Demeter, a teenage daughter is lured into an underworld ripe with sex, drugs, and luxury when she accepts a job working on the private island of a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company’s CEO—and her single mother will stop at nothing to bring her back to the world of the living. Newly pink-haired and 18, Cory has no plans for the future beyond her summer camp counselorship, no college acceptances, and a very high-achieving (read: overbearing) single mother. So, when the charming father of one of her campers offers her a highly paid babysitting “internship,” Cory jumps at the opportunity to stave off her alarmingly empty adulthood a bit longer. She signs an NDA, ignores her mother’s frantic texts, and is ferried away to the exclusive enclave of, she will soon learn, the billionaire kingpin of the prescription-opiate crisis. While Cory descends into a world of unlimited drugs and unfathomable wealth, her mother, left completely in the dark, erupts into an unimaginable panic. Alternating between the perspective of mother and daughter, we can indulge in the full thrill of being young, reckless, and newly independent—and the full propulsive terror of being older and knowing better. Though Lyon pulls the bones of the story from ancient mythology, the book’s characters are intensely—at times achingly—human and its plot is urgently contemporary. A white-knuckled ride to hell and back.

Memory Piece, by Lisa Ko

From the award-winning and bestselling author of The Leavers comes a story that traces the lifelong and ever-adapting friendship of three women, set against the backdrop of a rapidly changing New York. It’s 1983. Three soon-to-be seventh-grade girls bond at a summer barbecue, forming a gravitational connection that will keep them in each other’s orbit for the rest of their lives: through life stages and regime changes, through the glitz and optimism of their Y2K youth to the unimaginable frontier of the 2040s. Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are each outsiders in their own way, and over the years, we see their shared sense of alienation divert into very different life paths. As Giselle makes a name for herself as an (at times hilariously) experimental performance artist in a (increasingly obnoxiously) elite avant-garde scene, Jackie codes her way to the bleeding edge of the dot-com boom, just as the internet’s full potential—and dark underbelly—are coming into view. Meanwhile, Ellen’s bohemian activist life becomes increasingly revolutionary as the government slides toward authoritarianism. As these friends' lives and work ricochet against each other’s—at times colliding into electric collaborations and intimacy, in other periods drifting apart—each must learn to balance the integrity of her passion with the demands of the outside world.

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad meets Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life—if the latter were 500+ pages shorter, infinitely less traumatic, and centered on a triad of Asian American women.

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