Fiction

Endling

By Maria Reva. Doubleday, 352 pages.

Set in Ukraine in 2022, Reva’s magnificent “Endling” follows Yeva, a rogue conservationist trying to rescue endangered snails. She lives in her mobile lab, financing her work via the shady romance tour industry. Needing more funds, Yeva reluctantly agrees to help two sisters aiming to kidnap a group of Westerners on one such tour — and then Russia invades. The story is riveting, heartbreaking and darkly humorous, and Reva, who was born in Ukraine, pulls off the neat meta trick of inserting herself into the story without losing her compelling narrative thrust. Undoubtedly one of the best books of the year.

The Phoenix Pencil Company

By Allison King. William Morrow, 368 pages.

Magical pencils that can hide and reveal secrets play a starring role in this engaging debut about two women who grapple with history and understanding their places in the world. Monica Tsai, a college coder, uses a computer program to find her grandmother Yun’s long-lost cousin in Shanghai. She’s sure Yun, who weathered two wars in China before immigrating to the U.S., will be happy. But Yun, who is losing her memory, is reluctant to expose her granddaughter to the dangers inherent in her magic — and in the past. Their captivating narratives paint a portrait of love, regret and sacrifice.

So Far Gone

By Jess Walter. Harper. 272 pages. Out June 10.

Balancing on the narrow path between comic observation and dark realism isn’t easy, but the “Beautiful Ruins” author navigates the journey with blistering humor and an insider’s eye. A shambling former journalist who lives off the grid in eastern Washington is unwillingly hauled back into family life, thanks to a grown daughter who has disappeared, her conspiracy-theorist husband (who’s tied up with a religious, gun-loving militia) and two grandchildren he hasn’t seen in years. “So Far Gone” can be funny, but Walter captures the contradictions and complexities of contemporary American life, where ideological divisions aren’t merely arguments but dangerous fault lines.

Great Black Hope

By Rob Franklin. Summit Books, 320 pages. Out June 10.

Privilege, class and racial injustice clash in Franklin’s intriguing debut, in which Smith, a young Black man, is arrested for buying cocaine at a party in the Hamptons. Navigating his way through the court system/sketchy mandated treatment and disappointing his wealthy, successful Atlanta family in the process, Smith learns a shocking lesson: that though money softens the blow and he’s better off than most first-time Black offenders, the weight of judgment still falls heavily. Franklin deftly examines the psychic cost of moving between different worlds as Smith explores the dangers of the expensive Manhattan playgrounds of the rich.

Midnight at the Cinema Palace

By Christopher Tradowsky. Simon & Schuster, 384 pages. Out June 10.

Set in San Francisco in the early 1990s, this coming-of-age novel from a St. Paul writer shines with a heady, nostalgic glow while never ignoring reality. Fresh out of a Midwestern college, movie-besotted Walter Simmering arrives in the city as the AIDS epidemic continues. He falls under the spell of Cary and Sasha, a stylish, charismatic couple who bend gender norms in ways he has never imagined. Cary and Walter want to write a noir screenplay that pays tribute to San Francisco’s past glamour, but sex, love and discovery are powerful distractions, and Walter begins to realize paradise can’t last forever.

Bug Hollow

By Michelle Huneven. Penguin Press, 288 pages. Out June 17.

A tragedy forms the foundation of this warm-hearted and wonderful novel about a family in California, but to Huneven’s credit, “Bug Hollow” is never overwrought, melodramatic or even devastatingly wrenching. Instead, it’s an inspired, down-to-earth meditation on the different phases of existence. Its characters pass from childhood to adulthood, from middle age to old age, falling in love and falling out, making mistakes, coming to understand each other better and learning to forgive and move on as the rhythms of their lives shift and flower. If you’re new to Huneven’s work, which includes “Search,” “Bug Hollow” will send you looking for more.

The Girls Who Grew Big

By Leila Mottley. Knopf, 352 pages. Out June 24.

The “Nightcrawling” author’s follow-up, about a group of outcast teenage mothers in the Florida Panhandle who form their own kind of family, cries out for more detail. How can anyone raise children in the back of a truck? How can people related by blood be so cruel? But there is no doubt you will care about “The Girls” and what happens to them. Mottley casts a spell over hard tales of abandonment, infusing them with relentless hope and courage. She forces you to confront prejudices you may have about motherhood, demanding justice for the troubles endured by too many young women.

A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart

By Nishant Batsha. Ecco, 304 pages. Out July 1.

Batsha’s novel of love and revolution is set in 1917, but its depiction of racism, government overreach and feverish patriotism feels painfully relevant in 2025. Cora Trent, a white graduate student activist, and Indra Mukherjee, an Indian revolutionary who has fled his country, meet at a party in California and quickly fall in love. Their love is dangerous, especially since Indra has concocted a plan with a German source to secure arms to fight British forces in India. With war looming, they must navigate the dangers of deportation and imprisonment, as well as the treachery of their own ambitions and desires.

The Homemade God

By Rachel Joyce. Dial Press, 336 pages. Out July 8.

Being the adult children of a larger-than-life figure takes on new dimensions for four siblings in the U.K. when their famous artist father suddenly marries a much younger woman and flees to the family lake house in Italy to work on a new masterpiece. When he’s reported dead, they rush there, fueled by varying degrees of sorrow, fury, guilt and shame. The author of “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry,” Joyce blends humor and empathy in her examination of these peculiar, often unlikable but redeemable misfits, delving into the power of family bonds and the difficulties of living with an outsized personality.

Vera, or Faith

By Gary Shteyngart. Random House, 256 pages. Out July 8.

Narrated by a precocious part-Korean, part-Jewish, part-WASP 10-year-old, Shteyngart’s sharp, ironic novel takes place in a near-future in which liberties are vanishing and old loyalties are shifting. Sound familiar? The endearing Vera is not old enough to understand the nuances, why her Russian publisher father is suddenly relevant (he thinks) in the new American world order or why he and her progressive stepmother seem unable to stay together. She also wants to solve the mystery of her missing birth mother. Through Vera’s eyes, Shteyngart creates a comic masterpiece that questions everything from politics to the way we adapt to change.

Loved One

By Aisha Muharrar. Viking, 336 pages. Out Aug. 12.

Jewelry designer Julia’s relationship with Gabe, a popular musician, is complicated. He was her first love when they were teenagers in Barcelona, but their breakup kept them apart for 12 years. When they meet again in Los Angeles, they become best friends. Now, after Gabe’s shocking and premature death, a reeling Julia finds herself at odds with Gabe’s estranged wife, who may have items Gabe’s mother and Julia want returned. Muharrar explores the lies we tell ourselves with wry humor and compassion, equally adept at mining the inherent comedy of human nature while understanding why we keep secrets even from ourselves.

Katabasis

By R.F. Kuang. Harper Voyager, 560 pages. Out Aug. 26.

After the success of her satire “Yellowface,” Kuang returns to her fantasy roots with an entertaining and imaginative journey about a Cambridge student who follows her dead professor into hell. Alice Law has given up everything to work with professor Jacob Grimes, the best magician in the world. When he dies, Alice’s degree is in peril — so, using Dante, Orpheus and T.S. Eliot as guides, she decides to travel to hell and bring him back. But her academic nemesis Peter Murdoch insists on tagging along, and they set off, intent on proving their sacrifices mean something but discovering more important truths instead.

Mysteries/ thrillers

The English Masterpiece

By Katherine Reay. Harper Muse, 304 pages. Out June 10.

Never underestimate the power of a creative woman with nothing to lose, or the arrogance of a wealthy one who manipulates those she perceives as weak. Set in London’s Tate Gallery, after Pablo Picasso’s death in 1973, this enthralling novel follows Lily, a struggling working-class artist. Lily works for Diana, rich, educated and the director of modern art at the Tate. Diana’s everything Lily thinks she wants to be. Success is at Lily’s brush tips until she spots a fake at a Picasso commemorative exhibit. The investigation embroils Lily in a global art forgery scheme involving Nazi-looted art.

King of Ashes

By S.A. Cosby. Flatiron Books, 335 pages. Out June 10.

Roman Carruthers, whose financial clients could take up the “front row of the BET Awards,” is going home to Virginia just “long enough to make sure his daddy isn’t going to die.” Alas, his brother, Dante, has put his family deep in debtor’s hell, owing money to some serious gangsters. His sister runs the family’s crematory while stoking an obsession with their mother’s years-ago disappearance. Reluctantly, Roman must “defuse the mayhem.” This is a tale of Shakespearean proportions, of festering passions, brutal vengeance, of loyalty and love. Cosby’s (“All the Sinners Bleed”) prose is a brilliant conflagration of fiery metaphors and brutal realism.

A Murder for Miss Hortense

By Mel Pennant, Pantheon, 352 pages. Out June 10.

I love a book that takes me into a world far from mine. Pennant, a British playwright, has done that in this stellar debut, infused with the patois and traditions of an Afro Caribbean community in England. Miss Hortense “pays attention to everything,” and doesn’t forget a thing. She’s a retired nurse and avid gardener, but also a disgraced neighbor — because of a mysterious “thing that no one spoke about.” In her quiet town of Bigglesweigh, she helped found the Pardner network, a banking cooperative that made investments to ensure that the community thrived. When the Pardner’s banker is murdered, Miss Hortense investigates.

Rattlesnake Bluff

By Cary J. Griffith. Adventure Publications, 424 pages. Out June 10.

The only way I’m spending this much time with snakes is via a book. C.J. Box and Paul Doiron fans need to track down this engaging environmental mystery from Minnesota author Griffith. “No good comes from killing a snake,” says Jules, not realizing the particular snake he killed was endangered. Toiling in Minnesota’s Driftless Area, U.S. Fish and Wildlife agent Sam Rivers is caught in a struggle to preserve a possible rare rattlesnake habitat that’s also a proposed land development near Rochester, all while investigating multiple murders. Sam’s hunt becomes part of something deeper and darker. Spoiler alert: Not all snakes crawl.

Murder Takes a Vacation

By Laura Lippman. Morrow, 261 pages. Out June 17.

To the novel’s delightfully wry narrator, she’s Mrs. Blossom. To close friend Elinor, she’s Muriel. To me, she’s Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” after her famous party. Mrs. Blossom is not a risk taker. She “orders off menus,” is “prone to inferring condescension,” is “trusting and trustworthy,” and knows life mostly from “books and podcasts.” Mrs. Blossom is 68, an ex-investigator from Baltimore who, after winning the lottery and to mark the 10th anniversary of her husband’s death, takes a cruise on the River Seine. Murder and mystery board with her. I adored the vintage vibe of this meticulously written mystery.

Murder on Sex Island

By Jo Firestone. Bantam, 240 pages. Out June 24.

To survive racy reality show “Sex Island,” all contestants must be “hot and chill.” Private investigator Luella Van Horn (also known as Maria Jones, a divorced social worker) is neither. When a popular cast member disappears, the show’s producers ask Luella to go undercover as a contestant. So Luella/Maria (in false teeth and blond wig) agrees. Luella investigates motive, means and what she calls the big O (“opportunity not, orgasm”). But Luella’s “not the world’s greatest detective.” Mostly, she’s just a good listener. Firestone writes comedy for TV, including “The Tonight Show.” It’s hilariously obvious here. Wear protection while reading (sunscreen, I mean).

Etiquette for Lovers and Killers

By Anna Fitzgerald Healy. Putnam, 352 pages. Out July 1.

Murder is an etiquette nightmare. Just ask Billie McCadie in this charming rom-com mystery. Raised to know the difference between a fruit fork and an oyster fork, Billie’s sure the knowledge has done nothing to bring excitement into her life. Billie wants excitement. And romance. She wants to be in a Jane Austen novel. But in the resort of Eastport, Maine, in the 1960s, the struggle for both is real. When Billie receives a love letter addressed to Gertrude and the next day discovers Gertrude murdered at a lavish ball, Billie asks, “What would Jane Austen do?” and follows the “trail of gossip.”

Fast Boys and Pretty Girls

By Lo Patrick. Sourcebooks Landmark, 336 pages. Out July 8.

Told in a sharp, self-deprecating, first-person point of view, this small town, Southern mystery packs a big wallop. The story shifts between narrator Danielle’s reckless young adulthood as a so-so model in New York, her youth in Pressville, Ga. (a place where “like Walt Whitman … it was us and the leaves of grass”), and her return to her family’s abandoned house to raise her own family. When her daughters find a body in the woods, the narrator knows it’s part of her past, one she’s buried — as if, for decades, a “heavy wire” has kept her “mouth clenched shut.”

Salt Bones

By Jennifer Givhan, Mulholland, 384 pages. Out July 22.

El Valle is a place near California’s Salton Sea where “daughters disappear.” Mal, a mother of two daughters and the sister of a disappeared woman, has held onto “her family’s pain like a birthright.” Her sister’s case was “never closed but it’d never really opened either” because Indigenous and Latina communities in El Valle are not a police priority. When more daughters go missing and the mythical “La Siguanaba,” a horse-headed woman, rides into Mal’s dreams, it’s an omen Mal can’t ignore — good or bad. Givhan’s prose is lush, lyrical, and deeply visceral. This is a piercing and perceptive psychological thriller.

She Didn’t See It Coming

By Shari Lapena. Viking, 352 pages, Out July 29.

Reading Lapena’s terrific, twisty novel felt like taking apart a Russian doll. One character’s lie opens up to another character’s and so on — until each lie exposes a different motive for the disappearance of Bryden Frost. One afternoon, Bryden left her keys, her purse, her daughter, her husband and vanished. Her husband is distraught and the first suspect. Lizzie, her sister, is distraught and obsessed with true crime. Paige, her best friend, is distraught and steps up to help. Detective Jayne Slater is sympathetic, but really suspicious. Soon, everyone could have had something to do with Bryden’s disappearance.

The Grand Paloma Resort

By Cleyvis Natera. Ballantine, 352 pages. Out Aug. 12.

Situated in a decadent luxury resort in the Dominican Republic, Natera’s setting resembles the TV series “The White Lotus." But it’s much more. With an unflinching point of view and an electrifying plot, the novel exposes how class and race shape desire. The story follows the lives of the staff, particularly the Moreno sisters, with “silences and secrets” between them, and Pablo (whose services are, ahem, wide-ranging). Many tourists may have the “same skin color” as the staff, but, says one of the sisters, it must be nice “to have the freedom to choose the high ground that wealth afforded.”

I Become Her

By Joe Hart, Thomas & Mercer, 33 pages, Aug. 26.

Imogen knows “how darkly seductive lying to yourself can be.” After all, her job is corporate risk assessment. But when you consider all the risks, all the bad things, life looks “like it was made of knives.” Imogen’s paranoia is palpable in Minnesota author Hart’s mesmerizing Patricia Highsmith-meets-Alfred Hitchcock mystery. Imogen is unnerved and unnerving. While on her honeymoon, she pushes Lev, her husband, overboard. Accidentally? Maybe. Has she murdered before? Maybe. Lev, it turns out, recovers with amnesia, heightening Imogen’s paranoia. Suddenly, her life’s a “land mine,” waiting to be tripped.

Connie Ogle is a writer in Florida. Carole E. Barrowman reads and writes in Waconia.

24 terrific books for the beach, cabin or lawn chair you’ll want to read this summer