Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles — fiction and nonfiction — to consider for your August reading list.
New releases this month deal with music and healing, faith and community, physics and biology — and those are from just a few of the nonfiction titles. Fiction lovers will find big ideas awaiting them, too: A surprisingly lush take on Shakespeare’s backstory, a backwoods survival story with a dystopian twist, and a harsh but essential new adventure for a beloved protagonist. Happy almost-end-of-summer reading!
FICTION
And So I Roar: A Novel
By Abi Daré
Dutton: 400 pages, $28
(Aug. 6)
Abi Daré’s debut novel, “The Girl With the Louding Voice,” introduced readers to the smart, determined adolescent Adunni, who wanted a life beyond the confines of her small Nigerian village of Ikati. “And So I Roar” brings Adunni to take refuge in the Lagos home of Tia, a woman who helps her enroll in school. But Tia has just learned of a family secret that may force her to choose between protecting Adunni and claiming resolution for herself.
The Hypocrite: A Novel
By Jo Hamya
Pantheon: 240 pages, $26
(Aug. 13)
They say when a writer comes into a family, the family is finished. What does having two writers in a family mean? Hamya (“Three Rooms”) explores the ghastly tension between a 60-something novelist and his playwright daughter as he watches the premiere of her new work and she awaits his reaction. Its subject is a vacation during which the father’s callous use of his child as both dogsbody 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
(Aug. 13)
Many of Peter Heller’s books — fiction and nonfiction — concern outdoor adventures, by which I really mean survival stories: on a river, in a mountain lodge, even on a Japanese whaling ship. But Heller always goes deeper than derring-do, excavating the complex emotions beneath a character’s avalanche of fears. “Burn” centers on two pals returning from an annual moose hunt in Maine who learn that the world they so recently knew has become a terrifying dystopia.
By Any Other Name: A Novel
By Jodi Picoult
Ballantine: 544 pages, $30
(Aug. 20)
Fear not, sirrah! Even if you cling firmly to the idea of William Shakespeare as a cishet white man who wrote all his own material, you can still very much enjoy Picoult’s fictional take on the real life of Emilia Lanier, née Aemilia Bassano. She quite likely would have known 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: born to an Italian father in England, baptized though possibly only as a cover for her family’s Jewish identity, courtesan to Queen Elizabeth I’s lord chamberlain, professional poet.
There Are Rivers in the Sky: A Novel
By Elif Shafak
Knopf: 464 pages, $30
(Aug. 20)
Few historical novelists in North America know what it’s like to be tried for “insulting” their country, or to be investigated on charges of obscenity 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.
NONFICTION
The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore
By Evan Friss
Viking: 416 pages, $30
(Aug. 6)
Whether bookstores are flourishing or dying out, they have been essential to the American experiment since Ben Franklin opened his Philadelphia print shop, offering a marketplace for ideas that has evolved along with our country’s story. Friss, a historian, includes very American bookselling ideas like early signings (held at Marshall Field’s in Chicago) and successful author-owned places such as 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
(Aug. 6)
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Griswold won a Pulitzer 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 matter the most. She learns about a progressive, evangelical church in Philadelphia, known as Circle of Hope, and embeds herself with the community for a time, observing how delicate ties of caring and concern sometimes break down.
Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence
By Sara Imari Walker
Riverhead Books: 272 pages, $29
(Aug. 6)
“Being alive is not a binary, it is a spectrum,” writes Walker, an astrobiology professor at Arizona State. If that doesn’t blow your tinfoil hat from your head, try this: Life consists of matter — but life is not a property of matter. What does all of that mean? Keep reading, 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
W. W. Norton: 416 pages, $33
(Aug. 27)
The eminent psychologist and neuroscientist (“This Is Your Brain on Music”) turns his talented little gray cells to the frontiers of music and healing. For example, in his chapter about 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 in choosing a song to cheer you up, you’re essentially self-medicating.
Where We Stand
By Djamila Ribeiro
Yale University Press: 104 pages, $20
(Aug. 27)
The term “intersectionality” has been bandied about so much that it may have lost some of its power in acknowledging that all forms of feminism are not equal. Brazilian scholar, philosopher and activist Ribeiro writes a manifesto on an individual’s social standing and its effect on what is said as well as what is heard. Those seeking a way to decolonize discussions of gender equality will find this slim volume rewarding.
