30 Must-Read Books to Bring on Your Summer Vacation

In Akil Kumarasamy's debut collection, Half Gods, 10 interlinked stories bring together the exiled, the lost, and the searching through the complex legacies of war and returning home.

In Tara Isabella Burton's haunting debut, Social Creature, a chance encounter between a socialite and a social climber spirals into an intense, obsessive, and eventually lethal friendship.

Now My Heart Is Full, the first book from The Verge founding editor Laura June, is a poignant memoir about June raising her daughter without the help of her own mother, exploring motherhood with searing intimacy and honesty.

From Rebecca Makkai, author of The Hundred-Year House, comes The Great Believers, a novel weaving together the stories of a Chicago art gallery director who loses his friend (and soon everything he knows) to the 1980s AIDS epidemic, and his friend's sister, who grapples with her own loss 30 years later in Paris.

In The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants star Amber Tamblyn's first novel, Any Man, Tamblyn uses a blend of prose and poetry to give voice to victims of sexual violence, and their collective narrative maps the ways in which society perpetuates and normalizes rape culture.

In the first novel from award-winning Irish novelist Caoilinn Hughes, Orchid & the Wasp, a young, savvy opportunist hustles her way through Dublin, London, and New York trying to save her family from economic collapse, but she ends up losing herself in the process.

The Last Samurai author Helen DeWitt's new story collection, Some Trick, delivers 13 brilliant, twisty stories about romance, statistics, and chance, all told with DeWitt's signature dry wit.

Eileen author Ottessa Moshfegh's latest novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, tells the story of a recent Columbia grad with everything at her disposal who questions what would happen if she were to simply stop trying, and her extended hibernation from the world shows just how imperative self-imposed alienation can be.

Katy Regan's Little Big Love is a sweet, smart tale about precocious 10-year-old Zac Hutchinson, who searches for clues about his absent father while his mother struggles to rebuild what was broken when Zac's father left.

In the legendary Anne Tyler's 21st novel, Clock Dance, a woman yearning to be a grandmother impulsively flies across the country to Baltimore after receiving a mysterious phone call, and it is there that she discovers the community she wanted but was never expecting to find.

Carola Lovering's debut novel, Tell Me Lies, tracks the toxic on-again, off-again relationship between Lucy Albright and Stephen DeMarco from college through postcollege life in New York City, demonstrating just how potent first love (especially a first love with the wrong person) can be.

JM Holmes's How Are You Going to Save Yourself tells the story of four friends growing up in postindustrial Pawtucket, RI, grappling with sex and drugs and struggling to escape from the legacy of the black men who grew up before them.

Ivelisse Rodriguez's Love War Stories is a collection of stories about Puerto Rican women struggling to find love and to escape from the vicious cycles of violence, betrayal, and broken promises that plague their families and communities.

In her debut novel, Lies You Never Told Me, Jennifer Donaldson tells the parallel narratives of Gabe and Elyse, two high schoolers who have never met but both make the mistake of falling — and falling hard — for the wrong person, and they must contend with the unexpected (and deadly) consequences.

In her debut collection, How to Love a Jamaican, Alexia Arthurs navigates the tension between Jamaican immigrants in America and their families back home and, through her 11 stories, paints a vivid portrait of a nation and a way of life.

Paul Tremblay's latest novel, The Cabin at the End of the World, is a terrifying tale about a family vacation in a remote cabin in New Hampshire and the mysterious strangers who crash their trip with an unexpected request.

The author of How to Survive a Summer, Nick White, returns with Sweet and Low, a collection set in the idyllic South where the characters are not what they seem and the core qualities of Southern fiction are gradually and masterfully deconstructed.

In Chelsea Hodson's essay collection Tonight I'm Someone Else, Hodson launches from her eclectic work history through other ways in which a human sacrifices body and will, reaching out to anyone who has ever questioned what a person is worth and what a person can endure.

Final Girls author Riley Sager's latest thriller, The Last Time I Lied, tells the story of Emma Davis, a rising star on the New York art scene, who returns to her childhood Summer camp to investigate the truth behind a tragedy that happened there 15 years prior.

In Nico Walker's debut novel, Cherry, a freshman college romance quickly blooms into a long-distance marriage when the protagonist flunks out and joins the Army, and when he returns, the marriage is even further tested by PTSD, the Midwest opioid crisis, and eventually, bank robberies.

In her latest collection of stories, Fight No More, Lydia Millet weaves a web of stories that center on Nina, a lonely real-estate broker estranged from her family, connecting Nina's story with other tales of fractured families and communities.

In Ashleigh Young's essay collection, Can You Tolerate This?, Young explores the frailty, anxiety, and limitations of the body as she comes of age in a colorful, isolated community.

In his latest novel, Southermost, the legendary Silas House explores the aftermath of a destructive flood in a small Tennessee town and an evangelical priest who opens his home to two gay men, forcing him to question his past, his prejudices, and everything he once held true.

In AJ Pearce's debut, Dear Mrs. Bird, an adventurous young woman living in World War II London takes a job as a typist for a renowned advice columnist, and though she is told to disregard any letters involving unpleasantness, her inability to resist responding leads to her own secret advice service.

Crystal Hana Kim's debut novel, If You Leave Me, is the saga of Haemi and Kyunghwan, childhood friends turned forbidden lovers, who are separated by civil war in Korea and brought together years later, when Haemi must choose between love and loyalty.

Bestselling author Barbara Delinksy's latest novel, Before and Again, tells the story of Mackenzie Cooper, who is struggling to keep her life together after a fatal car crash that kills her daughter and tears apart her marriage, but when a friend is thrust into the national spotlight, Mackenzie must choose between her friendship and the risk of revealing her past.

From the coauthor of The Wife Between Us, Sarah Pekkanen, The Ever After is a deeply resonant story of a marriage in crisis, and as the narrative explores how exactly the marriage went off course, it also forces the question of whether the marriage is even worth saving.

In her satirical story collection Days of Awe, A.M. Homes depicts an America in crisis through characters who aren't the people they wish they were, but who aren't sure how to become those people either.

In Gaël Faye's Small Country, 10-year-old Gabriel's comfortable life in Burundi is shattered by the beginning of the civil war and genocide in neighboring Rwanda, illustrating the loss of innocence as seen through a young child's eyes.

In Lucy Tan's debut, What We Were Promised, a family returns from chasing the American dream in suburban America to join an elite community in a radically transformed Shanghai, and it is only when the estranged son returns to the family that they must confront the choices they made to ascend to this life.