It’s almost time to curl up beachside with a good book. Who wouldn’t want to do so with a tome about the increasing instability of an A.I.-riddled world? Or the descent into depression of a small-town professor? All joking aside, any of this season’s best new releases would be equally enjoyable on warm sand or park bench or, for the less outdoorsy of us, a good AC-pumped reading nook. Pulitzer winners and cultural critics alike return with publications so good, they’re sure to be the subject of every warm-weather dinner conversation this summer.
Backtalker by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Genre: Memoir
When: May 5
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The legal scholar who gave the world the concepts of intersectionality and critical race theory tells the story of her own life, tracing her path from childhood in Canton, Ohio, to becoming one of the most influential public intellectuals of her generation.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Crenshaw frames “backtalking” as the guiding practice of her life, starting young. The book arrives as a personal history, further exploration of Crenshaw’s theories, and a roadmap for the next generation of resisters.
John of John by Douglas Stuart
Genre: Literary Fiction
When: May 5
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo is releasing a novel set on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. The book follows John-Calum Macleod, adrift after art school, as he returns to his hometown and his formidable preacher father.
Why It’s Worth a Look: A slow unraveling, John of John depicts the tension between father and son circling the same truths, salvation, and questions about their complicated relationship.
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
Genre: Literary Fiction
When: May 5
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout steps out of Maine, setting this new novel in a coastal town in Massachusetts and following Artie Dam, a beloved high school history teacher living a double life.
Why It’s Worth a Look: When a secret about Artie’s family surfaces, it forces him to reconsider every relationship he’s built. Strout develops a rich story around the distance between people who think they’ve fostered a certain intimacy.
The Hill by Harriet Clark
Genre: Fiction
When: May 5
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Debut novelist Harriet Clark, winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize and a Wallace Stegner fellow, introduces Suzanna Klein, a child whose mother is serving a life sentence after a bank robbery, and who spends every Saturday in line at the prison gates.
Why It’s Worth a Look: The Hill is an unexpectedly funny and intergenerational novel, its pages filled with grandmothers who were once Communist Party members and still bicker over the Hitler-Stalin pact, set against a childhood spent discovering what it means to grow up in the shadow of a parent’s conviction.
How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI by Trevor Paglen
Genre: Essays
When: May 19
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Artist and MacArthur Fellow Trevor Paglen turns to the question of what A.I. is doing to visual culture: not just how it generates images, but how it watches us, learns from us, and shapes what we think we’re seeing.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Paglen moves through psyops, UFO imagery, adtech, and recommendation algorithms to argue that the shift underway isn’t just about fake images, but about images that require no human eye at all. For anyone trying to make sense of what’s happening in the current digital and A.I. age, this is an equally readable and rigorous guide.
On Witness and Respair by Jesmyn Ward
Genre: Essays
When: May 19
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Two-time National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward collects more than a decade of essays, speeches, and newly published work in her first nonfiction collection, spanning her upbringing in rural Mississippi, explorations of grief and social commentary, and her life as a parent to a Black son in contemporary America.
Why It’s Worth a Look: The collection’s titular essay—about the sudden death of her partner—gathers alongside Ward’s other nonfiction work, creating a formidable body of work from an essential contemporary voice.
Whistler by Ann Patchett
Genre: Literary Fiction
When: June 2
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The PEN/Faulkner and Women’s Prize-winning author of Bel Canto and The Dutch House has developed a novel about Daphne Fuller, a middle-aged English teacher whose chance encounter with an elderly man at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is revealed to be a reunion with her former stepfather, whom she hasn’t seen since she was 9.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Patchett wrote Whistler while grieving someone close to her, so the book itself evokes a deep emotional texture while exploring the brief periods we are truly known.
Land by Maggie O’Farrell
Genre: Historical Fiction
When: June 2
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The Women’s Prize-winning author of Hamnet returns with a multigenerational epic set in 1865 Ireland. O’Farrell follows Tomás and his 10-year-old son, Liam, as they work for the Ordnance Survey mapping a country still devastated by the Great Hunger—until a disturbing encounter sends the family on a different journey.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Having just received global recognition for Hamnet’s film adaptation, starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, O’Farrell is releasing the book she says she always wanted to write, based on her own family history.
Over/Under: An Unexpected History of Sports Betting by David Bockino
Genre: History
When: June 2
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: A former ESPN producer and sports media professor at Elon University delivers a sweeping narrative of American sports betting, from 19th century New York gambling halls to the 2018 Supreme Court ruling that made it legal across the country.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Bockino argues that gambling didn’t grow out of American sports fandom, but rather created it. The book traces his thesis through Churchill Downs, Chicago, Las Vegas, and the Caribbean with the color and insight of someone who has spent years immersed in sports for a living.
A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies by David Thomson
Genre: Criticism
When: July 7
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Critic David Thomson, author of the definitive Biographical Dictionary of Film, delivers a one-volume history of cinema from the Lumières to the present day.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Thomson is widely regarded as the greatest living writer on film, which gives him the right to indict it. Rather than simply a history of cinema, A Sudden Flicker of Light argues that film has spent a century training audiences toward passivity and fantasy, which has had consequences for culture and politics.
Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead
Genre: Historical Fiction
When: July 21
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys closes out his Harlem Trilogy with this final installment following Ray Carney, a furniture dealer, and his longtime accomplice and thief Pepper across a decade of Reagan-era New York.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Cool Machine moves through 1981, ’83, and ’86, deepening the stakes every year, as Carney risks the respectable life he’s built for one last heist. Pepper takes a gig that drops him into the East Village art scene, and both men reckon with whether the city will ever fully let them go.
A Tender Age by Chang-rae Lee
Genre: Literary Fiction
When: August 11
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Pulitzer Prize finalist Chang-rae Lee returns with a coming-of-age novel following Jeon-Gi, a Korean-American boy on the cusp of adolescence who spends his time running with a pack of neighborhood kids, until the summer he turns 11, when a series of events sets off dramatic repercussions.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Lee is an emotionally precise writer, and in this book he further proves his expertise through his examination of guilt, innocence, modern masculinity, and boyhood.
Under the Falls by Richard Russo
Genre: Literary Fiction
When: August 11
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls is back with his first stand-alone novel since Chances Are… The crime story is set in the fictional upstate New York town of Stone Mountain, and follows aging musician Tyler Sinclair.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Russo has created a captivating setting where everyone knows everyone, and everyone has something to hide. Sinclair moved out of his claustrophobic hometown when he was 18, but after returning home for a one-night benefit concert, Stone Mountain proves to be a place you can’t escape twice.
Big Little Truths by Liane Moriarty
Genre: Thriller
When: August 25
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The long-awaited sequel to Big Little Lies—the bestseller behind the mega-hit HBO series—reunites Madeline, Celeste, Jane, Renata, and Bonnie a decade later.
Why It’s Worth a Look: The playground politics of the original have curdled into something darker: drugs, sex, and a stranger lurking around their kids’ school. HBO has confirmed a third season of the series will be based on this book, which makes it an even more timely read.
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