As summer approaches, here are some of our favorite reads – from thrillers to literary fiction, memoir, science and politics. And 10 novels we’re looking forward to.
History, Current Event & Pop Culture
The Caped Crusade
By Glen Weldon
How does one comic-book character remain so consistently intriguing to so many people over eight decades? A look at the history of Batman.
Simon & Schuster
Mysteries & Thrillers
Fixers
By Michael M. Thomas
Thomas, a former partner at Lehman Brothers, spins an audacious financial thriller based on real-life events — the 2008 financial crisis — that features cameos by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The novel juxtaposes the ideals of loyalty, service, patriotism and noblesse oblige against the venality of contemporary Wall Street.
Melville
History, Current Event & Pop Culture
The Gene: An Intimate History
By Siddhartha Mukherjee
A thorough and thought-provoking biography of the gene: its science, the scientists who study it and the controversies that have spun from our understanding of it.
Simon & Schuster
Memoir
Knitlandia
By Clara Parkes
Parkes, who fled a job in high tech and launched an online magazine, Knitter’s Review, here she shares her travels through the world of knitting, from Iceland to Paris and Portland.
Stewart, Tabori and Chang
History, Current Event & Pop Culture
Lab Girl
By Hope Jahren
The story of a girl who becomes a scientist, the book is also the story of a career and the endless struggles over funding, recognition and politics that get in the way. It is also really the story of two lab partners and their uncommon bond.
Knopf
Fiction
Modern Lovers
By Emma Straub
Like her 2014 novel “The Vacationers,” Straub’s witty book has a warm-weather vibe, even if it is set in the less idyllic, if beautifully gentrified, Brooklyn. Here a group of friends from college, now nearing 50, are forced to take a hard look at their relationships.
Riverhead
Fiction
My Name is Lucy Barton
By Elizabeth Strout
Lucy Barton wakes in the hospital to find her estranged mother at the foot of her bed. For the next five nights, she sits in a chair and tells Lucy stories about her past.
Random House
Fiction
The Nest
By Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
Just before the Plumb siblings are about to cash in the trust fund that will solve all their problems, they discover it’s been almost completely depleted. A comic novel about familiar greed and affection.
Ecco
History, Current Event & Pop Culture
One in a Billion
By Mark Johnson and Kathleen Gallagher
A riveting account of a medical team’s frantic search for the genetic error threatening a little boy’s life. What they found proved that it was possible to use a person’s genes to diagnose and treat a previously unknown disease and helped usher in the use of genome sequencing for people with unusual disorders.
Simon & Schuster
History, Current Event & Pop Culture
The Romanovs
By Simon Sebag Montefiore
Drawing on a wide array of Russian sources, Sebag Montefiore paints an unforgettable portrait of characters fascinating and charismatic, odd and odious.
Knopf
Fiction
The Summer Before the War
By Helen Simonson
Anglophiles mourning the end of “Downton Abbey” will find solace in this novel that begins in pre-World War I England and deftly observes the effect of war on the staid Edwardian sensibilities of the coastal village of Rye.
Random House
History, Current Event & Pop Culture
The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones
By Rich Cohen
Rich Cohen approaches the Stones from two perspectives — as the kid discovering the group from glorious sounds emerging from his older brother’s room and a young magazine writer, backstage as he works his way into the good graces of the aging rockers.
Spiegel & Grau
Memoir
Switched On
By John Elder Robison
Robison, who has Asperger’s syndrome, chronicles his rich emotional life following a scientific experiment on his brain. Exhilarated but chastened, Robison delivers an account that is both poignant and scientifically important.
Spiegel & Grau
Fiction
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
By Helen Oyeyemi
A series of loosely connected, magically tinged tales about personal and social justice. Built around the idea of keys, locks and magic doors, the stories cover a wide territory — from mythology and fairy tales to smartphones and YouTube stars.
Riverhead
Memoir
When Breath Becomes Air
By Paul Kalanithi
Written by a young neurosurgeon as he faced a terminal cancer diagnosis, this memoir is inherently sad. Still, this moving and thoughtful tale of family, medicine and literature is well worth the emotional investment.
Random House
Mysteries & Thrillers
Wilde Lake
By Laura Lippman
A new case dredges up painful memories for Luisa (Lu) Brant, the new state’s attorney of Howard County, Maryland. In what feels like Lippman’s most personal novel, the book is as much a legal drama as it is tale of childhood and family life.
Morrow
Fiction
The Year of the Runaways
By Sunjeev Sahota
“The Year of the Runaways” is essentially “The Grapes of Wrath” for the 21st century. By following a handful of young Indian men in England, Sahota has captured the plight of millions of desperate people struggling to find work, to eke out some semblance of a decent life in a world increasingly closed-fisted and mean.
Knopf
