What New Book Should You Read This Summer?

Maria seems like she’s about to have the perfect life she’s always wanted — she and her college sweetheart from Stanford are planning their wedding, they’re living in a bohemian black Brooklyn neighborhood, and they will be starring in a documentary about biracial people. But she also has doubts about the marriage, and her crush on another man, a poet, soon develops into an obsession that threatens life as she knows it, as well as what she thought she knew about identity and race. Publication date: Aug. 1

Made for Love will be one of the funniest, most absurd books you’ll read this summer. Hazel escapes from her husband Byron, a tech mogul who wants to use brain chips to combine their minds, and moves to a trailer park of senior citizens with her father and his sex doll. While Byron uses his company’s technology to track her down, she tries to make and adjust to a new life and home. Hilarious, clever, and strikingly original, Made for Love speaks to the absurdity of our societal obsessions with technology and wealth. Publication date: July 4

Ever felt a little lost in life? You'll relate to Chemistry, in which a young female doctoral student’s life doesn’t go quite as planned — as she struggles with her research, her relationship with her boyfriend, and her Chinese parents’ high expectations, her life begins to unravel. As the pressures from both her university and those around her push her deeper into depression, she is forced to re-evaluate who she is and what she really wants, and re-find her place in the world. Publication date: May 23

Dragons and mad scientists and high school, oh my!Gork, the Teenage Dragon is like nothing you’ve read before — a quirky, wildly fun ride of a debut novel about a 16-year-old dragon with a big heart. A coming-of-age and love story, Gork, the Teenage Dragon follows the most human dragon you’ll ever meet on his journey to find a mate and return to planet Earth. Publication date: July 11

Heartbroken after her engagement is called off and feeling that her life has become a mess, 30-year-old Ruth quits her job and goes home to her parents to take care of her father, who is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. As his condition grows worse, Ruth devotes herself to researching supplements and meals that might restore his memory. Tender yet funny in turns, Goodbye, Vitamin offers poignant insight into family, memory, marriage, parenthood, love, and loss. Publication date: July 11

Short story collection Sour Heart takes a fresh new look at the immigrant experience in America through the lens of adolescent girls growing up in Chinese or Taiwanese families from Queens, New York, to Shanghai. Zhang portrays the courage, humor, and complex emotions of these young women struggling to come to terms with who they are, their families, their bodies, and growing up in poverty, in seven stories that feel true to life. Publication date: Aug. 1

Stephen Florida is a coming-of-age novel about the senior year of an ambitious college wrestler determined to win the Division IV national championship at all costs. Unsettling yet emotionally compelling, Stephen Florida is an utterly original portrait of one young man’s obsession, loneliness, and interior life. Publication date: June 6

The Answers centers around people looking for the answers to love, to emotions, to ailing bodies. Mary, a young woman in New York City, is desperate for a cure for her paralyzing pain when she finally finds an effective treatment that she can’t afford. To pay for it, she joins eccentric actor Kurt Sky’s “Girlfriend Experiment” — a project for which Sky has recruited multiple women to fulfill different roles in an attempt to create the perfect romantic relationship — and becomes his “Emotional Girlfriend,” along the way learning more about herself and the nature of connection. Publication date: June 6

What We Lose is at heart a coming-of-age story — Thandi, a young African-American woman who has always felt like an outsider, must grapple with her identity after her mother dies from cancer. Powerfully moving and beautifully wrought, What We Lose reflects on family, love, loss, race, womanhood, and the places we feel home. Publication date: July 11