Time keeps on slippin’ into the future, and the books keep right on coming, no matter what’s going on outside. Want to fly like an eagle? Already finished everything on this list? Check out the books the Literary Hub staff is most looking forward to reading in the back half of 2025 below, and get ready for the revolution.

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Geovani Martins, tr. Julia Sanches, Via Ápia
FSG Originals, July 1

Not to be all “as someone who was an English minor…” but as someone who was an English minor, I love an epic. An epic set in modern day Rio is even better. Via Ápia follows a group of young people whose lives are upended by a police occupation of their neighborhood. Set just before the 2011 World Cup and Olympics (both of which took place in Rio) and told over the course of a year and a half, Martin’s debut novel explores themes of state violence, resistance, friendship, and life in the modern world. Also, I love Julia Sanches! She’s a wonderful translator. Via Ápia is sure to be great. –McKayla Coyle, Publishing Coordinator

Michael Grunwald, We Are Eating the Earth
Simon & Schuster, July 1

We all know fossil fuels are bad. And we all actually know how to function without them… The problem here is one of politics, not solutions. But did you know that we’re also facing an imminent scarcity threat in terms of land use? That’s right, at current rates, by around the middle of this century, the earth won’t have enough land to feed its ever-growing population—this is also very bad! The good news is that not only does We Are Eating the Earth point out this alarming reality, it also offers some viable solutions. –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Claire Jia, Wanting
Tin House, July 1

I love a novel with a secret, and Claire Jia’s debut is bursting with them. Wanting follows Ye Lian and Luo Wenyu, high school best friends who drifted apart due to distance and minor YouTube celebrity, as they reunite in Beijing, now in their thirties and grappling with the calcification of their life choices. A gripping exploration of friendship, envy, desire, wealth, ambition, and contemporary Beijing, Wanting is both juicy and substantial. –Jessie Gaynor, Senior Editor, as recommended in our summer reading list

Maris Kreizman, I Want to Burn This Place Down: Essays
Ecco, July 1

Full disclosure: Maris Kreizman is a columnist at this website and I love working with her. She is principled, willing to speak truth to power, and uses her years of experience in the publishing industry to highlight its absurdities and hypocrisies while also celebrating the work of so many of its workers. AND she has a sense of humor. (NB: these things don’t always go together). So am I thrilled that she has a full-blown essay collection coming out that will, among other things, demonstrate to readers “that it’s never too late to become radicalized.” A-fucking-men. –JD, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Nell Stevens, The Original
W.W. Norton, July 1

I’ve been proselytizing Nell Stevens’ first book, Briefly, A Delicious Life since it came out a few years ago. It’s one of my all-time favorites, the kind of book that’s always in the back of my mind, that I come back to all the time. So I was beyond excited to find out there’s a new Nell Stevens book coming out this summer! And it’s a total banger! I literally couldn’t put this book down. I thought about it constantly while I was reading it. If that’s not a recommendation, I don’t know what is.

The novel follows a young woman, Grace, who secretly becomes an incredible art forger. Just as she begins to use her talent professionally, a man shows up claiming to be her long-lost cousin—but Grace’s face-blindness makes it impossible for her to know whether he’s really her cousin or not. It’s a novel about fakes and copies and originality and the meaning of art and it has so many delicious layers to unwrap. It’s like F for Fake (1973) by way of Jane Eyre or O Caledonia. It’s thoughtful and haunting and beautifully written. A perfect gothic novel to add to your summer reading list! –MC, as recommended in our summer reading list

Benedict Nguyễn, Hot Girls With Balls
Catapult, July 1

I’m always a sucker for a good gonzo satire and this one sounds truly delightful: two trans volleyball players, off-court romance and on-court rivalry, interrogations of celebrity and sports and gender… It looks funny as hell and willing to burn it all down, which we frankly need more of in our literature. –Drew Broussard, Podcasts Editor, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Loretta Rothschild, Finding Grace
St. Martin’s, July 8

The debut novel of Loretta Rothschild revolves around motherhood, identity, and fate. Honor and her husband Tom have a daughter, Chloe, and are trying for another via surrogate: Honor is obsessed with having another child, though Tom is less enthused. One night, they fight, they say terrible things, and then, in a truly shocking twist, Honor and Chloe both end up dead from a horrible accident. Tom is left in grief, with a pregnant surrogate, and very soon he has a baby boy named Henry who he raises alone. In the next twist, a woman named Grace reaches out: she was the egg donor, who shares an uncanny, eerie resemblance to Honor. Tom becomes attached, obsessed, centering his life around this woman who’s tied up in his life in complicated and unsettling ways. It’s a novel that will keep you guessing, both lulled by the realist voice, and shocked by the events that unfold: a fresh and creative novel about duplicity and love by a startling new talent.  –Julia Hass, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet
Ballantine, July 8

I love a workplace novel, especially when it’s about someone losing touch with reality. Williams’ debut explores power, desire, and fear, following an assistant in her early twenties who is caught up in an affair with an older writer she’s long idolized. Obsession and vulnerability can be overwhelming and dark, and even more so when it’s between fans and artists. Don’t meet your heroes, and especially don’t hook up with them at work. –James Folta, Staff Writer

Giulia Caminito, The Lake’s Water is Never Sweet
Spiegel & Grau, July 8

Girlhood, coming of age, fraught female friendships, lakeside towns… say less. Giulia Caminito’s English-language debut follows a young woman, Gaia, whose family moves from a poor suburb of Rome to a beautiful town by a lake in an attempt to escape their poverty. Gaia’s family is falling apart, her parents and siblings all struggling in their own private ways. Gaia builds a tenuous friendship with two local girls and tries to fit into her new life, but she begins to believe she might always be an outsider. And then something terrible happens to her friends, and her fragile new life falls apart. A complex, precise portrait of the loneliness of girlhood, The Lake’s Water is Never Sweet is exactly the kind of book I’m looking for this year. –MC

Aymann Ismail, Becoming Baba
Doubleday, July 8

Longtime Slate staff writer Aymann Ismail’s coming-of-age memoir is a funny and deeply moving account of growing up in a Muslim family in the shadow of 9/11. Ismail writes with candor and insight about his young life, and about becoming a father himself. A book about faith, discovery, and reckoning with the things we inherit and those we pass to our children, this is a stunning, vulnerable, and absorbing read.  –JG

Chloe Michelle Howarth, Sunburn
Melville House, July 8

I’m so happy this book is finally getting a wide release. My bookseller friend and I are always talking about how hard it is to find this book and how he’s spent several bookseller conventions bullying publishers about its distribution. Sunburn is a sapphic love story set in early 90’s Ireland. The novel follows a young woman who has always felt like an outsider. Then one summer, she falls in love with a female classmate and her life becomes much bigger and much more complicated. A story of first love, queer relationships, and the pains of coming of age, Sunburn is a beautiful queer novel. –MC

Marlen Haushofer, tr. Shaun Whiteside, Killing Stella
New Directions, July 8

I loved this brutal little novella—as quick (80 pages!) and sharp as a kitchen knife. It’s a story about domesticity, about silence, about love, and yes, about how Stella died. For fans of Fleur Jaeggy and “(picnic, lightning)” and feeling uncomfortable in someone else’s skin. –Emily Temple, Managing Editor

Helen Schulman, Fools for Love: Stories
Knopf, July 8

Schulman’s most recent novel Lucky Dogs had a lot of very fun Hollywood satire, and I’m looking forward to more of her humor in this new collection. These new stories inventively explore relationships at odd moments: a single mother falls for a rabbi as they tear apart a bookstore, a widow finds her dead husband’s sex diaries, and a playwright doubts her marriage to an actor during a performance of a Sam Shepard play. Finding the funny in grounded short fiction is often about pressing on the moments of everyday strangeness until they start to warp, something Schulman is very good at. –JF

Aysegül Savas, Long Distance: Stories
Bloomsbury, July 8

Over three previous novels, Ayşegül Savaş has developed a reputation for chronicling the banal aches inherent to contemporary life. Her fanbase includes many class acts, like Katie Kitamura, Sigrid Nunez, and just about everybody at The New Yorker. The thirteen stories in this debut collection make a case for her gifts at compression. Some pieces, like “Layover,” have appeared in print before. But a few are fresh off the presses. With this one, I’m looking forward to luxuriating in many well-wrought, elegant sentences. Ideally as I ride a European train. –Brittany Allen, Staff Writer

Sam Kean, Dinner with King Tut
Little, Brown, July 8

Apparently there’s a “rogue” collection of archaeologists who’ve dedicated their lives to recreating living history, going beyond visual evocations of the past by recreating the sounds and smells and feelings of ancient civilizations. In Dinner with King Tut writer Sam Kean travels the world alongside these experiential historians as they cook Roman meals, fire Medieval cannons, and even make their own human mummies. (This is how history should be taught, no?) –JD

Charlotte Runcie, Bring the House Down
Doubleday, July 8

I’m still a theater kid at heart (no matter how much time continues to pass without auditioning) and there’s nothing like a summer festival—and of all the summer festivals, the Edinburgh Fringe is probably the wildest and most magical. Runcie (a journalist who covered the Fringe for years) gets theater right in this excellent debut novel. It follows a female critic who watches her male colleague suddenly become the focus of an excoriating one-woman-show after he gave it a bad review. It’s a brilliant look at the utter madness that is the Fringe, a deep consideration of criticism and art (and parenthood as a professional), and a fiery reminder that we still have so far to go when it comes to men behaving poorly and getting away with it. Like the title says, it’s time to bring the house down. –DB, as recommended in our summer reading list

Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea
Riverhead, July 8

If the Titan explosion and the Suez Canal obstruction by the Ever Given have taught us anything, it’s that people love seafaring drama. A Marriage at Sea is the true story of a married couple who leave everything behind to sail around the world and succeed for nearly a year before their boat sinks. The couple is then stranded together on a rubber raft. Rescue is improbable. This goes on for months. Months! Nautical drama, martial tensions—have you clicked away to pre-order the book already? –Calvin Kasulke, Associate Publisher, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith
Random House, July 8

Shteyngart’s new novel, his first since 2021’s Our Country Friends, is the story of a very volatile family in a very volatile America, filtered through the eyes of a child, who just wants to be loved (the most Shteyngartian of motivations, and the most human). “In its swirls of emotion, its humor, its pathos, and the unsparing humanity of its vision, Vera, or Faith is like some fabulous, hitherto-unknown creature that’s been let out of its bottle and set free,” remarks Michael Cunningham. Sounds about right. –ET, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Kyung-Ran Jo, Blowfish
Astra House, July 15

When I see a novel described as “atmospheric” and “melancholic” I’m immediately foaming at the mouth to read it (which could mean nothing, etc). Jo’s novel is about a woman who decides to kill herself by preparing and eating a deadly blowfish. If you’re unwell in the same ways I am, I know you’re already going “ooo okay!” and preordering this book. If you aren’t having that reaction, we have nothing in common. I can’t wait to get my hands on this strange, dark, lovely novel. –MC

Kashana Cauley, The Payback
Atria, July 15

Summer is heist season. Hear me out. At least on the Eastern Seaboard, everyone–excepting the rich–is dangerously hot and filled with gripes. Desperation creates powder-keg situations for working class heroes. Think Do The Right Thing, or Dog Day Afternoon.

Kashana Cauley’s The Payback, which comes out this August, unfolds against that heist-y weather. The speculative novel follows the down-on-her-luck Jada Williams, an under-employed Glendale mallrat who was recently fired from a more glamorous post in the film industry. Working the floor at Phoenix, a fast-fashion house after the Gap, Jada struggles to make ends meet. Especially when the not-at-all-hyperbolic Debt Police start calling. Her subsequent revenge looks as fun and swift as the most righteous robbery. –BA

Laura Poppick, Strata: Stories from Deep Time
Norton, July 15

The history of the geological earth is there for all of us to read; it can be found in the layers upon layers of compacted evidence created by eons of change—aka, strata—that reveal so many of our planet’s tumultuous changes. From asteroid impacts to ice ages, oxygen booms to planetary plant takeovers, science journalist Laura Poppick goes in search of these geological archives, alongside the scientists who understand them best. –JD

Joseph Lee, Nothing More of This Land
One Signal, July 15

In this historiography-cum-memoir Joseph Lee recounts the displacement of his people, the Aquinnah Wampanoag, from their traditional home of Martha’s Vineyard, and how difficult it can be for indigenous communities to maintain unity—and continuity—in the face of 21st-century pressures. But as Lee illustrates, there is a new generation of Native activists prepared to fight the good fight. –JD

Leonora Carrington, The Stone Door
NYRB, July 15

The Stone Door opens in a forest, on a house composed of competing styles, “as if the architect had wrought a terrible revenge on his school days.” It’s a fitting opening image for a book that is also a pastiche of styles, strange and tough to characterize with the epic sweep of myth, the significance of parable, and the magical logic of a fairy tale. As a child, Carrington was raised on fairy tales in an English manor house and as an adult was caught, tragically at times, in the upheaval of WWII Europe and in the constant company of Surrealists. All of these influences swirl in the book, and for such a short novel, The Stone Door morphs a lot. It’s impossible to anticipate where Carrington will go: the adventure can be grounded, as in the smaller, domestic scenes, or more grand, like when the main character must negotiate with a giant who wants to skin him. The Stone Door is a fascinating and unsettled book, that always seems to be teetering on the edge of something dark, something mad: “Hardly daring to touch what I want to say, yet knowing that if I had enough space around me it would be a piercing shriek.” –JF, as recommended in our summer reading list

Hannah Pittard, If You Love It, Let It Kill You
Henry Holt, July 15

Did you read the dishy NY Mag story about those four writers whose relationships all exploded? Of course you did. You’ve maybe even read Hannah Pittard’s viral essay in the Sewanee Review, the one that turned into her memoir-of-sorts, We Are Too Many. Now, she turns a fictional eye towards the aftermath of all of that, following a Hana P in Lexington KY going through a mid-life crisis after finding out her ex is publishing a novel with a none-too-flattering version of her in it. I can’t wait. –DB, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Ben Brooks, The Greatest Possible Good
Avid Reader Press, July 15

You’ll not forget the Candlewicks once you meet them! This splendid, wry satire is about a wealthy family, self-important and confident in their morality, whose blithe and bumptious existences are thrown into disarray when their father clandestinely decides to give all their money to charity, and so (in their opinions) completely destroys their lives. Droll and all-too-real. –Olivia Rutigliano, Editor, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Mariel Franklin, Bonding
FSG, July 22

This debut novel was feted on its English release last summer, and I’m so jazzed for its hop across the pond. Closely following the Millennial Mary over a year of career and courting chess moves, the story builds to an ice-cold, laser-focused critique of two industries structuring modern love: Big Pharma and Big Tech. People have compared Franklin’s coolly satirical eye to Houllebecq’s, but I actually thought of Gatsby in this classically structured cautionary tale about a decadent age. I’m betting this one will be the big cool girl beach read of the summer. –BA

Sam Bloch, Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource
Random House, July 22

One of the blurbs for this hybrid work of science, history, urban design, and social justice describes the book as, “my favorite kind of book: a history of something seemingly niche that secretly explains the entire world.” I, too, love these kinds of books, and as an Irishman whose natural enemy is the sun, I’m particularly intrigued by the premise. On our rapidly warming planet, as we suffer through yet another dangerous heatwave, a book that explores the history and necessity of this staple of human existence sounds like essential reading. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor in Chief

Michael Clune, Pan
Penguin Press, July 22

Though he works in many modes, Clune is best known for his 2013 cult memoir about heroin addiction, White Out, which was recently reissued by McNally Editions. In his first novel, he investigates panic, which when it manifests in the life of a teenage boy, takes on psychedelic, and then cosmic, and then, perhaps, divine proportions. The book explodes the central dilemma of the panic attack—what is real? and then, whether real or illusory, on what plane can I approach?—and wraps it all up in a moving coming-of-age story. –ET, as recommended in our summer reading list

Tehila Hakimi, tr. Joanna Chen, Hunting in America
Viking, July 22

Tehila Hakimi’s award-winning Hunting in America is available in English for the first time: an enigmatic puzzle of a novel with a wry, mesmerizing voice, it goes down easy in a one-sitting read. Not to say that it’s gentle, or comfortable. It’s sly, and eerie, and keeps you guessing, and on edge, but in a way where you can’t stop turning the pages. It centers around a woman who relocates from Israel to America for her corporate job, and while reckoning with her new country, her new office, her new mundanities, develops a fixation on hunting. Stalking prey, feeling stalked herself, feeling the weight of a country and its expectations, it evokes Samantha Schweblin and Han Kang in its surreality and daring specificity. Pervasively unsettling, both too alien and too familiar, Hunting in America coolly illustrates the complicity that both Israeli and Americans have in a gun-touting culture, and the insidious ways that violence can seep into our consciousness. –JH, as recommended in our summer reading list

Katie Yee, Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar
Summit Books, July 22

I can’t say I went into Katie Yee’s debut novel as an unbiased reader. I had the pleasure of reading Katie’s work for years when she was an editor at this very website. Still, personal relationships aside, I feel confident in recommending Maggie; Or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar to anyone who craves the embrace of a novel that perfectly weaves grief with warmth and wit. We follow the novel’s narrator as she absorbs the one-two punch of her husband’s affair (for which he apologizes, but does not ask for forgiveness—so, divorce) and a breast cancer diagnosis, while she meditates on the quotidian joys and betrayals of relationships, the strangeness of parenthood, the loss of health and of identity, how to nail storytime, and what a joke even is. Funny, sad, kind, and deeply tender, this is a book that goes down like a treat, and stays with you the way only the wisest novels can. –JG, as recommended in our summer reading list

Daniel Saldaña París, tr. Christina MacSweeney, The Dance and the Fire
Catapult, July 29

In Saldaña Paris’s ambitious new novel, three friends return to Cuernavaca, Mexico, a city on fire—wild fires and, soon enough, a kind of hysterical dancing compulsion overcoming the population. –Dwyer Murphy, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Stephanie Wambugu, Lonely Crowds
Little, Brown, July 29

This novel follows two friends, Ruth and Maria, over the course of a twisty, decades-long relationship. The pair of outsiders initially bond over being the rare scholarship students at their chilly New England Catholic school. When they both wind up pursuing art dreams in New York, competition tests their bond.

This much-hyped debut from a young writer-to-watch enters one of my favorite canons (buds-in-the-city-books) and is set in one of my favorite milieus (a 90s New York art world). Call me seated. –BA, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Ed Park, An Oral History of Atlantis: Stories
Random House, July 29

The long wait between Personal Days and Same Bed Different Dreams is a thing of the past—here comes another Ed Park joint, this time a story collection! Park was a Pulitzer finalist for Same Bed and he brings that same genre-bending, polyphonic style to this collection of stories about modern life and all its perfectly mundane strangeness. –DB, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Rax King, Sloppy: Or: Doing It All Wrong
Vintage, July 29

King is an excellent essayist and critic, and her work is never boring or stale: anyone who’s read her at MEL, Welcome To Hell World, or in her previous collection Tacky knows how funny and sharp her writing is. Her new collection of personal essays takes on bad behavior by looking inward, with examinations of sobriety, waiting tables, Neopets forums, and shoplifting from Brandy Melville. King has a blogger’s punch and an essayist’s analysis—her dexterous writing is intelligent, observant, and very, very funny. –JF, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list

Mattie Lubchansky, Simplicity
Pantheon, July 29

Where Mattie Lubchansky’s remarkable debut graphic novel Boy’s Weekend followed its trans protagonist’s attempt to navigate a bachelor party in a speculative near-future, Simplicity finds us a bit further into a dystopian-ish setting. Lucius Pasternak, a municipal employee of the New York City Administrative and Security Territory, is dispatched to study the people of Simplicity, an upstate utopian commune settled over a century ago, back in the 1970s.

While living among the residents of Simplicity, the uptight Pasternak struggles to adapt to the commune’s highly liberated attitudes towards sex and nudity; to further complicate matters, someone—or something—is hunting the people of Simplicity. Lubchansky’s sophomore graphic novel explores the limits of utopian separatism, the downsides to trying to work against an oppressive system from the inside, and how communities can defend themselves and win. –CK, as recommended in our first-half of 2025 list