Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles (fiction and nonfiction) to consider for your August reading list.
This month’s new releases are about music and healing, faith and community, physics and biology—and these are just a few of the nonfiction titles. Fiction lovers will also find great ideas waiting for them: a surprisingly lush take on Shakespeare’s history, a survival story in a remote place with a dystopian twist, and a tough but essential new adventure for a beloved protagonist. Happy almost-end-of-summer reading!
FICTION
And then I roar: a novel
By Abi Daré
Dutton: 400 pages, $28
(6th August)
Abi Daré’s debut novel, “The Girl with the Loud Voice,” introduced readers to smart, determined teenager Adunni, who wanted a life beyond the confines of her small Nigerian village of Ikati. “And Then I Roar” leads Adunni to take refuge in the Lagos home of Tia, a woman who helps her enroll in school. But Tia has just learned a family secret that may force her to choose between protecting Adunni or claiming resolution for herself.
The Hypocrite: A Novel
By Jo Hamya
Pantheon: 240 pages, $26
(August 13)
They say that when a writer comes into a family, the family ends. What does it mean to have two writers in a family? Hamya (“Three Rooms”) explores the appalling tension between a sixty-something novelist and his playwright daughter as he watches the premiere of her new play and she awaits his reaction. The subject is a holiday during which the father’s cruel use of his daughter as his chaperone and sounding board is meant to shock the audience, especially her father, while the playwright herself is upstairs listening to her mother’s bitter memories of her ex-husband.
Burn: A Novel
By Peter Heller
Knopf: 304 pages, $28
(August 13)
Many of Peter Heller’s books, both fiction and nonfiction, are about outdoor adventures — that is, stories of survival: on a river, in a mountain lodge, even on a Japanese whaling ship. But Heller always goes beyond the exploits, digging into the complex emotions beneath a character’s barrage of fears. “Burn” centers on two friends who return from an annual moose hunt in Maine to learn that the world they so recently knew has become a terrifying dystopia.
Under another name: a novel
By Jodi Picoult
Ballantine: 544 pages, $30
(20th of August)
Fear not, sir. Even if you hold firmly to the idea of William Shakespeare as a cis-heterosexual white man who wrote all his own material, you can still get a lot of enjoyment out of Picoult’s fictionalized version of the real-life Emilia Lanier, née Aemilia Bassano. She most likely knew Shakespeare, because they moved in the same circles. Did she write things attributed to the Bard? Who knows. But her own life is interesting enough: she was born to an Italian father in England, though possibly baptized only as a cover for her family’s Jewish identity, was a courtesan to Queen Elizabeth I’s Lord Chamberlain, and a professional poet.
There are rivers in the sky: a novel
By Elif Shafak
Knopf: 464 pages, $30
(20th of August)
Few historical novelists in North America know what it’s like to be tried for “insulting” their country, or to be investigated on obscenity charges for including scenes of sexual abuse in a narrative, but Elif Shafak, the Booker-nominated British-Turkish author, does, and that’s why she feels her new book, which connects three women from different times and places through a single drop of water, means not just entertainment or edification, but also: freedom.
NON-FICTION
The Bookstore: A History of the American Bookstore
By Evan Friss
Viking: 416 pages, $30
(6th August)
Whether bookstores are flourishing or dying, they have been essential to the American experiment since Ben Franklin opened his printing press in Philadelphia, offering a market for ideas that have evolved along with our country's history. Friss, a historian, includes such very American bookselling ideas as the first book signings (held at Marshall Field's in Chicago) and successful author-owned venues like Ann Patchett's Parnassus in Nashville.
Circle of Hope: A reckoning with love, power, and justice in an American church
By Eliza Griswold
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 352 pages, $30
(6th August)
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Griswold won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and teaches at Princeton, among other accomplishments. But for her new book, the author’s upbringing as the daughter of an Episcopal priest (Frank Griswold eventually served as presiding bishop) might be most important. She learns about a progressive evangelical church in Philadelphia, known as Circle of Hope, and embeds herself in the community for a time, observing how the delicate bonds of care and concern sometimes break.
Life as no one knows it: the physics of the emergence of life
By Sara Imari Walker
Riverhead Books: 272 pages, $29
(6th August)
“Being alive is not a binary, it’s a spectrum,” writes Walker, a professor of astrobiology at Arizona State University. If that doesn’t blow your mind, try this: Life consists of matter, but life is not a property of matter. What does it all mean? Read on, because even if you don’t fully understand it, this is vital information.
I heard there was a secret chord: music as medicine
By Daniel J. Levitin
WW Norton: 416 pages, $33
(August 27th)
The eminent psychologist and neuroscientist (“This Is Your Brain on Music”) turns his talented little grey cells toward the frontiers of music and healing. For example, in his chapter on how Parkinson’s patients can learn to modulate movement difficulties with music, Levitin demonstrates how exciting progress can be, even when we don’t know much about it yet. As the author says, even by choosing a song to cheer you up, you’re essentially self-medicating.
Where we are
By Djamila Ribeiro
Yale University Press: 104 pages, $20
(August 27th)
The term “intersectionality” has been so overused that it may have lost some of its power to acknowledge that not all forms of feminism are equal. Brazilian scholar, philosopher and activist Ribeiro writes a manifesto about an individual’s social position and its effect on what is said and heard. Those seeking a way to decolonize debates about gender equality will find this slim volume a valuable source of information.
