As summer approaches, here are some of our favorite reads – from thrillers to literary fiction, memoir, history and politics.
Current Events
An American Sickness
How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back
BY ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
An authoritative account of the distorted financial incentives that now drive medical care in the United States.
PENGUIN PRESS
Review: Gruesome tales from a dysfunctional health-care system
Fiction
American War
BY OMAR EL AKKAD
When climate change sparks a devastating civil war in the United States in the late 21st century, one young woman fights to avenge her family’s destruction.
KNOPF
Review: ‘American War’ follows today’s vitriol to a dystopian future
Fiction
Anything Is Possible
BY ELIZABETH STROUT
In these short stories, Strout returns to Amgash, Ill., where the protagonist of her 2016 novel, “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” was raised.
RANDOM HOUSE
Review: ‘Anything Is Possible’ demonstrates what Elizabeth Strout does best
History
The Blood of Emmett Till
BY TIMOTHY B. TYSON
Tyson clears away the myths that have accumulated over the decades and restores the immediacy of this quintessentially American tragedy.
SIMON & SCHUSTER
Review: Finally we hear from the white woman who drew Emmett Till’s wolf whistle
Fiction
A Book of American Martyrs
BY JOYCE CAROL OATES
An explosive story about the family of an abortion doctor and the family of the man who murdered him.
ECCO
Review: Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel arrives splattered with our country’s hot blood
Fiction
Borne
BY JEFF VANDERMEER
In a ruined city littered with discarded biotech experiments, a young woman finds a strange life form that she decides to raise.
FSG
Review: ‘Borne’ is the latest dazzling novel from New Weird author Jeff VanderMeer
Memoir
The Bright Hour
A Memoir of Living and Dying
BY NINA RIGGS
Written in the final two years of her life, a mother’s poignant memoir about her life, family and last days.
SIMON & SCHUSTER
Review: A dying mother’s memoir is this year’s ‘When Breath Becomes Air’
Biography
Ernest Hemingway
A Biography
BY MARY V. DEARBORN
This thorough reexamination of Hemingway shows the writer to be a more troubled, complex and tragic figure than most previous biographies have allowed.
KNOPF
Review: Ernest Hemingway: The man behind the cultivated image of hyper-masculinity
The Evangelicals
The Struggle to Shape America
BY FRANCES FITZGERALD
FitzGerald shows how a movement that began in reaction to the Calvinist establishment of New England shaped American identity in the first decades of the 19th century.
SIMON & SCHUSTER
Review: How Trump breathed new life into the cultural war waged by evangelicals
Fiction
Exit West
BY MOHSIN HAMID
Two Middle Eastern lovers fleeing the migrant crisis arrive in California, where they must contend with natives, other refugees and their grief for what they have left behind.
RIVERHEAD
Review: ‘Exit West,’ by Mohsin Hamid, is a tale of love in the time of migration
Social Science
Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
BY YUVAL NOAH HARARI
Harari presents three possible futures: In one, humans are expendable. In a second, the elite upgrade themselves, becoming another species that sees everyone else as expendable. In a third, we all join the hive mind.
HARPER
Memoir
Hunger
A Memoir of (My) Body
BY ROXANE GAY
From the author of “Bad Feminist,” a long-awaited memoir about her struggles with weight and childhood traumas.
HARPER
Review:
Janesville
An American Story
BY AMY GOLDSTEIN
A poignant account of how the people of Janesville, Wis., reacted to the closure of their local General Motors plant.
SIMON & SCHUSTER
Review: How workers coped after GM shuttered its Janesville plant
History
Jefferson
Architect of American Liberty
BY JOHN B. BOLES
Perhaps the finest one-volume biography of an American president.
BASIC
History
Killers of the Flower Moon
The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
BY DAVID GRANN
For present-day Osage communities, the events related in “Killers of the Flower Moon” are not last century’s news but yesterday’s. Many members of the tribe still wonder what exactly happened to their relatives.
DOUBLEDAY
Review: David Grann solves outrages against native Americans on Osage lands
Pop Culture
Letterman
The Last Giant of Late Night
BY JASON ZINOMAN
A definitive and enjoyable biography of the late-night legend and why he was better at his job than Jay Leno.
HARPER
Review: Why Letterman surpassed Leno as a comic and talk show host
Fiction
Lincoln in the Bardo
BY GEORGE SAUNDERS
When President Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, Willie, is laid to rest in Georgetown’s Oak Hill Cemetery, the ghosts engage in a spirited debate about how to move the boy along to the next level of existence.
RANDOM HOUSE
Review: ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ arises from a tragic footnote in American history
Mysteries & Thrillers
The Long Drop
BY DENISE MINA
Based on the true story of Scotland’s most infamous serial killer, a chilling novel set in 1950s Glasgow.
LITTTLE, BROWN
Review: Denise Mina looks inside the mind of a psychopath in her chilling novel ‘The Long Drop’
Biography
Madame President
The Extraordinary Journey of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
BY HELENE COOPER
A penetrating history of Liberia and the story of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who became the first woman elected president of an African nation.
SIMON & SCHUSTER
Review: Madame President’: The Rise of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Fiction
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
BY ARUNDHATI ROY
In her first novel since “The God of Small Things” (1997), Roy draws us through a kaleidoscopic story about the struggle for Kashmir’s independence.
KNOPF
Review: We waited 20 years for her follow-up to ‘The God of Small Things.’ It was worth it.
Current Events
No One Cares About Crazy People
The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America
BY RON POWERS
Powers argues that the future of mental health in the United States is being shaped along two trajectories: a flourishing research enterprise juxtaposed with a chaotic system of delivering care.
HACHETTE
Review: A family’s and a nation’s struggle with mental illness
Fiction
No One Is Coming to Save Us
BY STEPHANIE POWELL WATTS
In a North Carolina town ground down by factory closings, an African American family struggles to survive. Then a handsome young man returns home promising to make a new life and lift them up.
ECCO
Review: ‘No One Is Coming to Save Us’: ‘Gatsby’ gets a revolutionary reboot
Fiction
Norse Mythology
BY NEIL GAIMAN
Gaiman transmutes the tales of ancient Scandinavia into expertly paced short stories for the 21st century.
NORTON
Review: Neil Gaiman’s suspenseful and surprising ‘Norse Mythology’
Mysteries & Thrillers
Not a Sound
BY HEATHER GUDENKAUF
Two years after losing her hearing, a nurse discovers the corpse of a co-worker in the woods near her Minnesota cabin — and realizes her life is in jeopardy.
PARK ROW
Review: ‘Not a Sound’: A thriller worth staying up all night to finish
Current Events
On Tyranny
Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
BY TIMOTHY SNYDER
Steeped in the history of interwar Germany, Snyder writes with bracing immediacy about how to prevent, or at least forestall, the repression of lives and minds.
TIM DUGGAN
Memoir
Option B
Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy
BY SHERYL SANDBERG AND ADAM GRANT
Sandberg, whose husband died in 2015, illustrates with heartbreaking honesty that nothing can inoculate you against the pain of grief.
KNOPF
Pop Culture
The Poetry of Pop
BY ADAM BRADLEY
Are pop music lyrics poetry? A tour of musical history that gets to the bottom of this age-old question.
YALE
Review: What makes song lyrics poetry?
Memoir
Priestdaddy
BY PATRICIA LOCKWOOD
Poet Patricia Lockwood’s darkly comic memoir about returning home to her parents’ house in Kansas, where she is forced to reassess her relationship with her eccentric father, a married Catholic priest.
RIVERHEAD
Review: Best memoirs to read this month
Mysteries & Thrillers
Since We Fell
BY DENNIS LEHANE
Lehane’s 14th novel, which takes the author back to his old New England stomping grounds of “Mystic River,” is a pleasantly twisted character study of a disgraced television journalist who shoots her second husband in the first scene.
ECCO
Review: Dennis Lehane’s ‘Since We Fell’ takes us into the heart of a tormented woman
Memoir
The Skin Above My Knee
BY MARCIA BUTLER
How did this distinguished oboist save herself from a detached, withholding mother and a sexually abusive father? In this insightful memoir, she reveals the answer and more.
LITTLE, BROWN
Fiction
Standard Deviation
BY KATHERINE HEINY
At the center of this witty novel on family life is a mother with an outsize personality who must deal with things such as a son who’s an origami prodigy.
KNOPF
Review: Looking for a blissful summer novel? Here it is: ‘Standard Deviation’
Fiction
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley
BY HANNAH TINTI
A widower with a violent criminal past moves into a small Maine fishing town hoping to establish a safe space for his daughter, who gradually learns the stories behind her father’s 12 bullet scars.
DIAL
Review: A thriller with heart: Hannah Tinti’s ‘The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley’
Fiction
Woman No. 17
BY EDAN LEPUCKI
A mother of two boys hires a nanny so that she can work on her memoir, but the nanny has a secret project of her own.
HOGARTH