A few weeks ago we asked NPR staffers to share their favorite summer reads. Old, new, fiction, nonfiction — as long as it was great for hot and hazy hammock reading, it was fair game.
(Image credit: Islenia Mil for NPR)
Nothing goes right for American Wren Wheeler during a trip to London. And that's before the overthinking 18-year-old meets a prince — and they both learn a comet is hurtling toward Earth.
(Image credit: Wednesday Books)
These Paul Tremblay stories — a wildly entertaining mix of literary horror, psychological suspense and science fiction — will be more than enough to make readers into immediate fans.
(Image credit: William Morrow)
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Hull grew up in the rural interior of Central Florida during the 1960s and '70s. Her memoir evokes a land of perfect citrus, and the cruel costs of its harvest.
(Image credit: MacMillan)
Andrew Lipstein achieves the difficult feat of realistically animating a hedge fund manager who talks and moves as real hedge fund managers might, but who is compelling and not overly alienating.
(Image credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
An excellent work of people-first journalism, Donovan X. Ramsey's book offers a vivid and frank history and highlights how communities tend to save themselves even as they're being targeted.
(Image credit: One World)
Author and illustrator Jon Klassen is best known for children's books like I Want My Hat Back and This is Not My Hat. His latest, The Skull, is an adaptation of a traditional folktale.
Mai Nguyen's debut novel centers on the family of Tuyết and Xuân Tran, Vietnamese refugees who settle in Toronto. It simmers with questions about work, class and generational divides.
(Image credit: Atria Books)
Most novels set in bookshops are heartwarming paeans to bonds forged among readers. The Door-to-Door Bookstore by Carsten Henn and Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa are no exception.
(Image credit: Harper Perennial)
As we roll into the dog days of summer, these three YA novels move beyond being beastly — as their protagonists transform into the creatures that lie within.
(Image credit: Meghan Collins Sullivan/NPR)
Ford brings his Frank Bascombe saga to an end in Be Mine, while Moore weaves together a fragmentary Civil War plot with an off-kilter vision of the afterlife in I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home.
(Image credit: Harper Collins)
It is easy to act as if fiction and history were separate. But they cannot be completely divided. Jenny Erpenbeck's Kairos and Oksana Lutsyshyna's Ivan and Phoebe help readers connect with time past.
(Image credit: Meghan Collins Sullivan/NPR)
Brandon Taylor's The Late Americans is a sexually-explicit, cynical novel about young people striving. Such Kindness, by Andre Dubus III, grapples with injury, addiction, masculinity and loneliness.
(Image credit: W.W. Norton)
While not a new concept, Garrett Neiman makes distinct contributions to the conversation; as a rich white man, he has insider's access to that population — and doesn't shy away from self-indictment.
(Image credit: Legacy Lit)
A young student in East Berlin falls in love with a much older writer in the run-up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is a love story and a rich portrait of people watching their country disappear.
(Image credit: New Directions )
Bangladeshi-Irish author Adiba Jaigirdar's latest YA romance promises a spoonful of drama and a dash of deception, leading to a well-baked resolution.
(Image credit: Feiwel & Friends )
In their latest book CROWNED: Magical Folk and Fairy Tales from the Diaspora, Kahran and Regis Bethencourt retell fairy and folk tales with Black children as the main characters.
(Image credit: CROWNED)
Ellis' latest collection is full of hilarious, off-the-wall personal — and, at times, intimate — essays about home life and marriage.
(Image credit: Doubleday)
Sarah Viren's memoir, drawing from two life episodes, has the page-turning quality of a thriller. But instead of solving mysteries, she untangles philosophical tensions in pursuit of what is real.
(Image credit: Scribner)
These new releases might take you from Europe to Africa to the Middle East to Russia and the United States — without leaving your hammock.
(Image credit: Meghan Collins Sullivan/NPR)
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
