The Best New Books Coming Out This Summer
Updated: Jul. 27, 2021
Check out this season’s must-reads, including Louise Penny's latest book, The Madness of Crowds.
Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Whether it’s the golden age of film (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo) or the boho ’70s music scene (Daisy Jones and the Six), Reid mythologizes the recent past with a gauzy glow. This novel, set in the shoulder-pad 1980s, tracks the 24 hours before, during and after an epic star- and cocaine-dusted party in the Malibu Hills and how it upends the lives of four siblings—a supermodel, a surfer, a photographer and their coddled baby sister. $25.
The Maidens by Alex Michaelides
Michaelides follows his blockbuster thriller debut, The Silent Patient, with this novel about a magnetic classics professor at Cambridge University who may or may not be systematically murdering his female students. Meanwhile, a nosy psychotherapist becomes so fixated on proving the hunky professor’s guilt that her own sanity soon comes into question. $25.
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What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad
In this update of Peter Pan, the lost boy is the sole survivor of a sunken ship who washes up on an island of refugees. The magic of the story is in the moving partnership between the nine-year-old Syrian and a disaffected teenage girl who becomes his guide as they weave through abandoned junkyards and dodge the sinister colonel tasked with rounding them up. $30.
Her Turn by Katherine Ashenburg
Ashenburg sets this novel in the pre-Trump era—a time when the world was all but certain there would soon be a female president. Taking a page from the cozy, fast-talking dramedies of Nora Ephron, it’s about a D.C. advice columnist tasked with advising her ex-husband’s new wife, and the surprising camaraderie that forms between the two. $23.
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Velvet Was The Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Mexico City is the setting for Moreno-Garcia’s muggy, glamorous noir about a 1970s secretary who finds more than she bargained for when she searches for a missing neighbour. In her adventures, she encounters hit men, spies and a handsome criminal watching her from a distance. $37.
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Miss Butterworth and The Mad Baron by Julia Quinn
If you’re still burning for the sensuous spoon-lickings of the Duke of Hastings, the latest from the author of the Bridgerton series will quell your Regency romance cravings. The book is a satirical Gothic thriller about the demure Miss Butterworth, who survives a smallpox outbreak and a cruel aunt before she falls in love with a brooding aristocrat. It’s also the novel-within-a-novel that several Bridgerton characters read throughout the series. $25.
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Probably Ruby by Lisa Bird-Wilson
Bird-Wilson, a Métis and writer, is a survivor of the Sixties Scoop—the Canadian government removed her and thousands of other Indigenous children from their birth families. She probes her own experience in her poignant debut novel about an Indigenous girl who’s given up for adoption as a baby, shuffled through the foster system and finally selected by a white couple. As a young woman, Ruby embarks on a search for her roots, unlocking a trove of stories about the vast and textured Indigenous experience. $30.
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The Madness Of Crowds by Louise Penny
The cultishly popular mystery novelist made headlines when it was announced that she’d be collaborating with Hillary Clinton on a new novel set amid the intrigue of the American State Department, to be released in October. Until then, Penny is tiding over her fans with the 17th (!) instalment of her beloved Chief Inspector Armand Gamache mystery series, in which the Sûreté du Québec detective must face off against a dangerous—and dangerously popular—professor. $37.
Next, check out our roundup of the best summer movies ever!
