It feels fitting that, on the cusp of summer vacation, the notable books we can expect this month are a well-traveled bunch. Below you can find books set in Ireland and South Korea, Los Angeles and Tuscany, the Western Front of WWI and … whatever you want to call the ecological wastelands of Earth 7.
The point being, there is ample reason to spare yourself those engorged gas prices, the rental car fees, the uncannily shrinking airplane seats – all those nightmares required to reach "dream destinations" – and just walk to your local public library instead. The place probably has air conditioning too, for what it's worth.
Land, by Maggie O'Farrell (June 2)
Ireland lost almost a quarter of its population to its Great Famine in the mid-19th century. That stunning total includes those killed by potato blight and the malfeasance of its absentee British landlords; and the waves of refugees lost to emigration, often to the U.S. "We know those stories, in a sense — and they're terrible, tragic stories," O'Farrell told NPR's Scott Simon on Saturday, "but I think what interested me was the people who neither died nor left, the ones who stayed in Ireland and survived." Land, the Northern Irish author's first novel since the release of Hamnet's Oscar-winning adaptation, is a chronicle of the lives of two such survivors Tomás and his wife, Phina. Their twists and tribulations open the window onto a truly brutal history.
Whistler, by Ann Patchett (June 2)
In her review of Patchett's 2019 novel, The Dutch House, NPR's reviewer Heller McAlpin observed that the author, bookseller and generous blurber "may well be the most beloved book person in America." The author of Bel Canto and most recently Tom Lake only burnishes that sterling reputation with Whistler, her finely crafted account of a reunion between daughter and stepfather after a divorce-inflicted separation of several decades. What emerges is the portrait of a broken family — riven by emotional fault lines and time itself, but still vital and confusing and needed.
Sublimation, by Isabel J. Kim (June 2)
The premise of Kim's debut novel makes for quite the opening gambit: When a person leaves one country for another in her spec-fic world, the immigrant literally undergoes a kind of binary fission, becoming two separate people: the one who stays, and the one who goes. "Instancing," as it's called in this world, certainly gets at the cognitive dissonance commonly felt by immigrants. As you'd imagine, things get complicated just about as soon as the Soyoung Kim who remained in South Korea meets her other Soyoung Kim, when she returns from the U.S. for the first time in two decades.
1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World, by Liaquat Ahamed (June 2)
Ahamed's first book Lords of Finance won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize with what the jury called a "compelling account" of the role central bankers played in bringing on the Great Depression. With his new one, he rewinds his focus more than a half a century to explore another economic implosion with lasting consequences: the Panic of 1873 and the Long Depression that followed. Ahamed applies a telescoping approach to the history, foregrounding the human characters at the eye of the maelstrom but also tracing its branching, sometimes-surprising effects throughout the world.
Daughters of the Sun and Moon, by Lisa See (June 9)
It's rare one gets the chance to feature books about the 1870s back to back. So rare, in fact, that I believe I'm legally obligated to do it. So here we are, back in that tumultuous decade – only, the halls of power that foregrounded in Ahamed's book couldn't be farther from the world inhabited by the three Chinese women starring in See's latest novel. Settled uneasily in Los Angeles, buffeted by the racial animus of their white neighbors, Petal, Dove and Moon hurtle toward still another terrible episode of American history: the Night of Horrors in 1871, during which lynch mobs murdered 10% of the Chinese immigrant population in Los Angeles.
Earth 7, by Deb Olin Unferth (June 9)
Bear with me here, because synopsizing this slim, strange novel won't be easy. Unferth's latest contains multitudes: Martians, tardigrades, Backrooms-esque complexes, sulfur cannons and more than half-a-dozen replicas of Earth. I guess the backup copies make sense, given the wretched state of the original – contaminated, irradiated, interred in human waste and beset by ecological cataclysm. Dark as that sounds, and dark as it often proves to be, this disquieting vision of the future also contains love, humor, and a fascinating lead in Dylan, whose scattershot path from seafloor to endless desert anchors this mesmerizing gem of a novel.
Villa Coco, by Andrew Sean Greer (June 9)
Meet the Baronessa, the 90-something proprietress of the Tuscan home in Greer's title. Imperious, incandescent, she's described thusly by an old friend: "You have to think of her as a magic door. Every time you open it, it leads somewhere new. To the Ottoman Empire, for instance. To a princess or a dockworker or a dog." An apt description of the fascinating woman employing our rudderless narrator, a hapless fish out of water she imported from the U.S. shortly after his college graduation. What follows is a smart, sweetly wistful comedy from the 2018 Pulitzer Prize winner, which goes down like fine olive oil. Buono!
Contrapposto, by Dave Eggers (June 9)
The prolific author (and screenwriter, Caldecott medalist, editor, publisher, national nonprofit co-founder, etc.) returns to long-form fiction with his newest novel, the portrait of an artist named Cricket. Born Robert Dibb, and redolent of David Copperfield, the hero of Eggers' first novel intended for adults since 2019 navigates the challenges of coming of age in the art world and all the difficult questions it embodies. But he at least has the good fortune to not to go it alone; with him is Olympia, childhood friend, muse, patron and so much else to him besides.
Children of the Wild, by Kevin Powers (June 9)
A combat veteran, Powers is personally familiar with war: its sights and sounds, its nightmare landscapes and the unhealable harm — physical, psychological, moral — that it inflicts even on survivors. Perhaps that's why scenes of war haunt his poetry and fiction, as in his acclaimed novel of the Iraq War, The Yellow Birds. In this devastating new novel of love and loss, it's World War I that ruptures the lives of its three principal characters, whose idyll on the cusp of adulthood in rural Virginia is irretrievably shattered by a conflict an entire ocean away.
As If, by Isabel Waidner (June 16)
"Isabel Waidner collides the real and the mythic, the beautiful and the grotesque, to mind-bending effect," observed a member of the jury that awarded Waidner's Sterling Karat Gold the Goldsmiths Prize. The prize's mandate is to reward particularly daring fiction that "extends the possibilities of the novel form." It's easy to see why their books have caught the attention of the prize's jury more than once; occasionally the experience of reading them could be legitimately likened to an acid trip. This time around, though, Waidner trades in the surreality for a more lucid story, with this tale of two happenstance doppelgangers who fall into the ol' life-swap scheme, whether they meant to or not.
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