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SUMMER NIGHTS AND METEORITES

The Jewish Barbanels, like modern-day Bridgertons, provide fodder for any number of romantic adventures; this time they’ve provided a perfect foil for Jordan Edelman, who wears black lace and fishnets (even on Nantucket) and lives life fully. She flirts hard, falls harder, and cries hardest whenever the inevitable breakup comes. Jordan manages to be both uncomplicated and a muddle of messy emotions: She worries about her single, widowed father and how he’ll cope with her impending departure for

THE SYNDICATE SPY

Set in a near future when the planet’s oil reserves are essentially gone—and former oil-rich nations are desperate to regain their power on the world stage—the story revolves around Juliet Arroway. She’s an operative for the Syndicate, a partnership of intelligence agencies whose mission is to hunt down and eradicate energy terrorists. Arroway’s main goal is to stop the mysterious Abu Hassan, the head of a terrorist group that has been responsible for the deaths of countless people over the yea

STRANGE SALLY DIAMOND

Sally’s father, a psychiatrist, diagnosed her as “socially deficient,” so although she’s 42, she’s always lived with him outside the small Irish village of Carricksheedy. He'd always said that she should “put [him] out with the trash” when he dies, so when it happens, she tries to burn his body in their incinerator. In the flurry of public attention that follows, ranging from concern about Sally’s ability to function on her own to outraged theories that she must have murdered her father and was

THE PAINTER'S DAUGHTERS

As promised by the title, Howes delivers an immersive dive into the lives of Gainsborough’s daughters but also provides an intriguing backstory about his wife’s purported ancestry. The Gainsborough girls—Molly the elder and Peggy a bit younger—enjoy a fairly feral and unrestrained early childhood in Suffolk, despite their mother’s attempts to rein them in. Molly shows signs of a troubling tendency toward spells of odd behavior and confusion, which continue, and worsen, after the family relocate

FLAGS ON THE BAYOU

Seriously in debt to business associate Minos Suarez, Charles Lufkin rents him Hannah Laveau, an enslaved woman he’s recently purchased. Things don’t go well for either Hannah, whom Suarez unmercifully assaults, or Suarez, who’s found castrated with his throat cut shortly after Hannah parts company with him. Just as Hannah is haunted by Samuel, the son from whom she was separated during the bloody Union attack on Shiloh Church, Lufkin’s nephew, Wade, who volunteered as a medical officer on the

MADNESS

NBC News reporter Hylton documents the history of Crownsville Hospital in Maryland, founded in 1911 as the Hospital for the Negro Insane. Getting to the story was not easy: The archives were incomplete because “the state had destroyed or lost most of the files preceding the year 1960, and others they had allowed to become contaminated with asbestos.” Unsurprisingly, the more controversial the past episode, such as the murder of a patient or systematic abuse, the likelier the documents were to h

BURN THE NEGATIVE

The last time Laura Warren was in Los Angeles, she was a young kid going by another name and reluctantly starring in a slasher flick called The Guesthouse. The intervening years saw eight of the movie's cast and crew members come to terrible ends. Now living in London, she's been strong-armed by her editor into flying west to write about a new miniseries based on the original film. Why is he so adamant about making her write a puff piece anyone could do? Anyway, Laura is determined to stay in L

TEACHING EDDIE TO FLY

Arthur, a small bear, is friends with Eddie, an ostrich. After Arthur asks Eddie why he doesn’t fly, Eddie explains that he wasn’t taught. Solicitous Arthur decides to play teacher. He enjoys giving lectures and illustrates aeronautical principles on a chalkboard. Next, Arthur instructs Eddie to flap his wings, but nothing doing. More lessons ensue. Eddie is lifted in a hot-air balloon, jumps off a diving board, tries stilts, and dangles from a parachute. Arthur decides to ask some birds how th

THE WHITE BONUS

Award-winning journalist McMillan, author of The American Way of Eating, combines investigative reporting and memoir in a penetrating look at the material advantages of racial privilege. “For a very long time,” she writes, “I thought race and racism ‘happened’ only to people who were not white.” Using her own family as one example, and profiling four others, she investigates the impact of whiteness on individuals of different generations, from different parts of the country, who have one thing

FORGIVING IMELDA MARCOS

From a hospital bed where he is suffering complications from kidney surgery, Angelito Macaraeg begins a letter to his estranged son. Lito insists that he simply intends to tell “a good story”—something that might be useful for his son’s career as an American journalist. However, the deeper Lito delves into his memories, the more apparent becomes his struggle to make peace with the past. As Lito tells the story of his youth in the Philippines, he recounts his mother's murder, his father’s freque

BUTTER

Three of the men died in suspicious accidents, one of a drug overdose, another under a train, and another in a bathtub. Determined to score an interview with the assumed murderer, who is in a detention center awaiting a second trial, Rika overcomes the woman’s refusals by expressing great interest in food. To further gain her trust, Rika carries out the extreme assignments concocted by Kajimana, including having sex (with her droopy older boyfriend, as it turns out) before rushing out to consum

DIVISIBLE MAN

In this 10th installment in his contemporary adventure series, the author continues the exploits of Will Stewart, an air charter pilot, and his wife, Andy, a detective in Wisconsin’s Essex County Police Department (characterized by her husband as “an equal opportunity juggernaut of justice”). Will and Andy are briefed by FBI Special Agent Leslie Carson-Pelham and her colleagues on the inner workings of a paramilitary insurgency group known as Company W (“The W stands for White and the military

LOUD

Afualo never intended to become famous on TikTok. Her goal had been to become a football reporter because football was home to many members of her Samoan community. Then, dismissal from her dream job, followed in quick succession by the Covid-19 pandemic, changed her plans. “The reality of it going down the drain so quickly and aggressively crushed my spirit in ways I had never anticipated,” she writes. The author joined TikTok and posted humorous tirades against “awful men who attack marginali

HERE I AM

At 6 feet tall and fat, Marcella Boucher is friendless and self-loathing. At school she faces constant, sometimes physical, torment, and at home, her gym-owning, ostensibly loving parents enforce dangerous calorie restrictions. She’s been making out with popular boy Lou, but only in secret. In fact, Lou is dating Vivi, a popular, skinny cheerleader. Marcella is humiliated after she asks Lou out in public—he not only rejects her, but Vivi also adds her own scornful insults. Her distress is so gr

THE CASE WITH NO CLUES

Cued by an elderly neighbor’s memories of a never completed treasure hunt set up when she was a third grader in 1947, Leila and canine sidekick Nugget rush to investigate. Though it seems impossible that clues so old could have survived, the authors stretch things surprisingly little to accommodate the unlikely premise as they plant hints for Leila to uncover, ranging from an altered old class photo to origami animals slipped into the spines of certain books. Efforts to keep her hunt secret not

WOODROW WILSON

Historian, lawyer, and former Congressman Cox writes that Wilson was the first Southern Democrat to occupy the White House since Andrew Johnson. Scholars have long considered him a giant among presidents for his progressive reforms and leadership in World War I. They have not ignored his flaws, emphasizing the censorship, suppression of civil rights, and persecution of war opponents. Cox will have none of that. Sticking to the historical record but keeping Wilson’s achievements in the backgroun

EVERYWHERE BEAUTY IS HARLEM

Roy DeCarava (1919-2009) gets off work, and now his “time is his own.” He loads a roll of film in his camera and pays attention to what he sees around him in Harlem. Relying on his senses, he takes in the city. With his camera, he captures a variety of sights. A boy drawing on the sidewalk with chalk. An artist showing his paintings as the sunlight catches his hat. A mother and son: the love in the boy’s eyes. A crushed soda can. And then there are the sights he can’t catch. A man holding a chi

ALL THE LOVELY BAD ONES

Travis, nearly 13, and his sister, Corey, who’s a year younger, enjoy a good prank or 10. Having been banned from camp for all the pranks they pulled last year, they’ll spend this summer at their grandmother’s Vermont inn. After learning about the inn’s haunted reputation, the siblings decide they’ve found the perfect outlet for their mischief: pretending to be the ghosts that have gone quiet since their grandmother took over. While they play at haunting the inn’s guests, Travis can’t help feel

BOOK OF SCREAMS

Tanya is beyond excited to meet Joel Southland. His scary stories are so relatable, and she treasures the signed bookmark he gives her when he visits her school…until late one night, when the ink from the signature appears to come to life. When a new Southland story feels entirely too familiar, Tanya begins to piece together the clues about where he’s getting his ideas, and she patiently develops a plan to turn the tables. Interwoven with Tanya’s journey to stop Southland are many of the short

MELVILL

“Call me Herman.” Such a commandment could come from only one writer, Herman Melville, who stands at the center of Fresán’s narrative. Occupying much of that space, too, albeit in sometimes spectral form, is Melville’s father, Allan Melvill (the -e a typo that his son, the victim of a bureaucrat’s pen, stuck with, even as, later in the novel, he notes ruefully that his obituary in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, where several of his stories appeared, will render his name as Henry). Allan, born to a