9 Best New Books For July
Neon In Daylight by Hermione Hoby
It’s New York City in 2012, the sweltering summer before Hurricane Sandy hits. Kate, a young woman newly arrived from England, is staying in a Manhattan apartment while she tries to figure out her future. Here, Kate encounters two strangers who will transform her stay: Bill, a charismatic but embittered writer, made famous by the film version of his only novel, and Inez, his daughter. Unmoored from her old life, Kate falls into an infatuation with both of them. This debut by journalist Hermione Hoby marries intelligence with captivating characters to offer a joyful, unflinching exploration of desire, solitude, and the thin line between life and art.
Swan Song by Kelleight Greenberg-Jephcott
In the autumn of 1975, after two decades of intimate friendship, Truman Capote detonated a literary grenade, forever rupturing the elite circle he’d worked so hard to infiltrate. Nine years after achieving wild success with In Cold Blood, Capote committed an act of professional and social suicide with his most lethal of weapons – words. A page-turning debut about the line between gossip and slander, self-creation and self-preservation, Swan Song is the tragic story of the literary icon and the beautiful, wealthy, vulnerable women he called his ‘Swans’.
Kismet by Luke Tredget
With a big birthday just around the corner, an important new project at work, and a boyfriend she suspects might be about to ask her a significant question, Anna should feel like she has it all together. But somehow, she just doesn't seem to be sure about, well, anything. So she gets out her phone and decides to download dating app Kismet. Will she embrace the life she has, or risk everything for the life she imagines? Warm and off-kilter, Kismet is a love story about imperfect people in a world obsessed with perfect matches. The perfect beach read.
Clock Dance by Anne Tyler
Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life: when she was 11 and her mother disappeared; being proposed to at 21; the accident that would make her a widow at 41. At each of these pivotal moments, Willa ended up on a path laid out for her by others. So when she receives a phone call telling her that her son’s ex-girlfriend has been shot and needs her help, she drops everything and flies across the country to look after this woman, her nine-year-old daughter and her dog. A bittersweet novel of hope and regret, fulfilment and renewal, Clock Dance brings us the everyday life of a woman who decides it’s never too late to change direction and choose your own path.
Slay In Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible by Yomi Adegoke and Elizabeth Uviebinené
From education to work to dating, this inspirational, honest and provocative book recognises and celebrates the strides black women have already made while providing practical advice for those who want to do the same and forge a better, visible future. Illustrated with stories from best friends Elizabeth Uviebinené and Yomi Adegoke’s own lives and using interviews with dozens of the most successful black women in Britain – including BAFTA Award-winning director Amma Asante, British Vogue publisher Vanessa Kingori and Olympic gold medallist Denise Lewis – Slay In Your Lane is essential reading for a generation of black women inspired to find success in every area of their lives.
My Year Of Rest And Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
This shocking, hilarious and strangely tender debut details a young woman’s experiment in narcotic hibernation, aided and abetted by a horrendous psychiatrist. Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, and an Upper East Side Manhattan apartment paid for, like everything else, by her inheritance – our narrator has everything she could ever need. But there’s a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents in college, the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend. This story of a year spent under the influence shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation sometimes is.
All The Beautiful Strangers by Elizabeth Klehfoth
Charlie Calloway has a life most people would kill for. A tight-knit family. A loyal set of friends. A fast-track to whichever college she chooses. But Charlie isn't interested in what most people want. She's a Calloway and she's been taught to want more. So when she's invited to join an exclusive secret society, her determination to get in is matched only by her conviction that she belongs there. But behind their mysterious facade is a history of lies which unravels everything Charlie thought she knew – including the story behind her mother's disappearance ten years ago.
The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley
New York Times bestselling author Maria Dahvana Headley presents a modern retelling of the literary classic Beowulf. To those who live there, Herot Hall is a paradise. With picket fences, gabled buildings, and wildflowers that seed themselves in ordered rows, the suburb is a self-sustaining community, enclosed and secure. But to those who live secretly along its periphery, Herot Hall is a fortress guarded by an intense network of gates, surveillance cameras, and motion-activated lights. And when the two worlds collide, two mothers – a housewife and a battle-hardened veteran – must fight to protect those they love.
Fruit Of The Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Eleven-year-old Chula and her older sister Cassandra enjoy carefree lives thanks to their gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs and assassinations hover just outside the neighbourhood walls, where drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation. When their mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city's guerrilla-occupied slum, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona's mysterious ways. Inspired by the author's own life and told through the alternating perspectives of Chula and Petrona, Fruit of the Drunken Tree contrasts two very different but inextricably linked coming-of-age stories.
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