Books

Memorial Days

Pulitzer-winning novelist (for March) Geraldine Brooks pens a memoir about grieving the sudden death of her husband, fellow Pulitzer winner Tony Horwitz, in 2019. Besieged by the demands of a partner’s death, Brooks put off grieving for three years. Memorial Days is about the time after, when she retreated to a remote island off the coast of Australia, her home country, to finally attend to the demands of grief.

The Loves of My Life

By Edmund White

Novelist, biographer, playwright, essayist and queer icon Edmund White (The Humble Lover, A Saint From Texas) has spent his long career writing about love and sex in a way that shatters taboos and elevates the value of pleasure. His dishy new memoir, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir, explores these themes during different seasons of his life.

Kuleana

By Sara Kehaulani Goo

The Hawaiian word kuleana means responsibility and stewardship carried through the generations, and it’s the theme of Sara Kehaulani Goo’s Kuleana: A Story of Family, Land, and Legacy in Old Hawai’i. A veteran journalist (Axios, NPR, the Washington Post), Goo was drawn to investigate her family’s ancestral land in Maui when their property tax rose by 500%, a sum that seemed intended to displace them. Kuleana’s understanding of her own cultural identity deepens as she unfurls her family’s story alongside that of Hawai’i’s.

No Straight Road Takes You There

By Rebecca Solnit

For two decades, author, historian and activist Rebecca Solnit (Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, The Faraway Nearby, among many) has been an incisive interpreter of the modern age, with a particular talent for laying bare current social and political crises while providing actionable advice to effect positive change. With No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, Solnit homes in on climate change, prison abolition and more to explore how to harness the lessons of the past to forge ahead with courage and intention.

Toni at Random

By Dana Williams

A great editor works so seamlessly in the range of the author’s voice as to be invisible to readers. It makes sense that when considering Toni Morrison—Nobel Prize winner, stone-cold genius and among the greatest writers of all time—readers might not be thinking about her impact as an editor, even though it was tremendous. Working at top publishing houses, Morrison edited authors like Toni Cade Bambara, Leon Forrest and Lucille Clifton, and profoundly influenced American letters. Before her death, she requested that Howard University dean Dana A. Williams tell this story. Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship will grant her wish.

Positive Obsession

By Susana M. Morris

In her too-short life, Octavia E. Butler redefined science fiction with books like Kindred, Parable of the Sower and Bloodchild. Named for Butler’s 1995 essay, in which she writes starkly about her beginnings as a writer, Susana M. Morris’ Positive Obsession seems akin to Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ 2024 biography of Audre Lorde, Survival Is a Promise. By grounding Butler’s work in the sociological and historical contexts of her time—such as Black Power, women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights—Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler promises to show how the author was driven to push boundaries, imagine new futures and expand the genre of science fiction.

Lorne

By Susan Morrison

For five decades, Lorne Michaels has pulled the strings behind the curtain of the late night show he created, Saturday Night Live. Famously private, yet storied and mythologized by countless SNL cast members and writers through the years, Michaels is revealed in full in Susan Morrison’s deeply reported story of his life and career.

Misbehaving at the Crossroads

By Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois was longlisted for the National Book Award, and made our 2021 list of best fiction, for good reason: “Her masterful treatment of the characters and their relationships, paired with the thorough and engaging way the narrative is laid out, makes for a book that is easy to invest and get lost in,” our reviewer wrote. Jeffers’ first work of nonfiction will explore “the emotional and historical tensions in Black women’s public lives and her own private life.”

South of Nowhere

By Jeffery Deaver

Jeffery Deaver’s Colter Shaw series—which also now serves as the source material for Tracker, a hit TV show on CBS—follows the titular character as he searches for missing people and, inevitably, stumbles upon a crime he must put right. For his fifth adventure, Colter travels to Northern California to find a family that’s lost in the rising floodwaters as a nearby levee fails.

Nobody’s Fool

By Harlan Coben

Harlan Coben’s extensive backlist has proved fertile ground for Netflix in recent years, with adaptations of the thriller master’s effortlessly engaging novels frequently becoming the most watched shows on the platform. Fool Me Once, based on Coben’s novel of the same name, was an enormous hit, and so the ever-savvy Coben has penned a sequel of sorts: Nobody’s Fool, which follows former detective Sami Kierce of Fool Me Once as he investigates a mystery from his past.

The Last Ferry Out

By Andrea Bartz

Andrea Bartz’s thrillers are marvelous marriages of ripped-from-the-headlines plots and nuanced character work, the perfect read to while away a day by the pool or on a blanket in a park. So The Last Ferry Out had a near-guaranteed spot on our summer reading list, even before we heard its juicy premise: A woman travels to the island paradise where her fiancée died to find closure, and befriends a charming group of expats. But then one of the expats vanishes—right after saying he knows the truth about what happened to her fiancée.

The Ghostwriter

By Julie Clark

We loved both of Julie Clark’s two previous novels, The Last Flight and The Lies I Tell, both of which were international bestsellers. So we can’t wait to get our hands on The Ghostwriter, which follows Olivia, the titular character, as she prepares for her most challenging job yet: writing her father’s last book. A legendary horror writer who was suspected of killing his siblings, Olivia’s father is finally ready to reveal the truth.

We Live Here Now

By Sarah Pinborough

The mad genius who penned Behind Her Eyes, a book whose twists will go down as some of the most go-for-broke and shocking reveals in suspense history, returns with a gothic, haunted house thriller that sounds right up her alley. After nearly dying in an accident, Londoner Emily moves with her husband to a beautiful, remote estate in Dartmoor. Things start to go wrong immediately—fires going out, books falling from the shelves, a terrible presence in one of the rooms—but only when Emily is alone.

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