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July 2024's Essential Reads: Diverse Tales for Every Taste
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items Explore a curated collection of 25 captivating books that promise to ignite your imagination and enrich your reading journey this July. From gripping thrillers to poignant memoirs, timeless classics to thought-provoking non-fiction, each title beckon...
Kate Quinn’s new novel The Briar Club focuses on the women at a seen-better-days boarding house in Washington DC during the 1950s McCarthy Era. The widow Grace March is the newest member of this unofficial group. They are a network of women making th...
The Briar Club: A Novel|Hardcover
UK author Kerryn Mayne’s debut novel is a quirky charmer with a mournful undertone. Hero hero Lenny Mark is a woman who keeps to herself. Scarred by the childhood trauma of losing both her parents, Lenny takes comfort in routine: the same path home f...
Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder: A Novel
She had me at “Taffy.” But fans of Brodesser-Akner, okay let’s just be on a first-name basis and call her Taffy have high expectations from the author of the fiercely funny Fleishman in Trouble. The early buzz says she delivers with Long Island Compr...
Long Island Compromise: A Novel
Worldwide fame has its privileges. When Elton John and his husband David Furnish decide to collect photography as a hobby, they immediately become one of the most influential buyers of this art form in the world. They could easily stock an entire mus...
Fragile Beauty: Photos from Elton John Collection
Two horror and sci-fi novels to keep you on your toes. Chuck Tingle has the perfect name for an adult film star specializing in fetish. But he’s actually the author of numerous books under various pseudonyms. As Tingle, he burst onto the horror scene...
Bury Your Gays
This Great Hemisphere has the trappings of literary fiction, but don’t let that scare you off. This sci-fi novel has a propulsive plot set in the near future that involves a Dominant Population, with the rest of the folk in America relegated to invis...
This Great Hemisphere: A Novel
Can you resist the photograph? The cover of Wonderland features an arresting photo of Nicole Treska, staring down the camera with Jodie Foster-like confidence. Then you discover that kid who seems so tough is in fact surrounded by criminals: her fath...
Wonderland: A Tale of Hustling Hard
The Color of Everything needs more explanation. It’s a memoir by the National Geographic photographer and climber Cory Richards. The thrills here are not the very real challenges he faces when scaling some of the major mountains of the world, complet...
The Color of Everything: Quiet the Chaos Within
Fans of Donna Leon know to rejoice when Commissario Guido Brunetti returns for his 33rd appearance in Venice. A tangled case involving teenage gang members and a “hero” of the Iraq War whose seeming bravery is conveniently brushed aside provide just ...
A Refiner’s Fire: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery
Daniel Silva is just as acclaimed for his series featuring Gabriel Allon, art restorer and forger (and spy) extraordinaire. Allon’s 24th mystery begins with a stolen Vincent Van Gogh restored to its proper owners. But a murdered art historian soon le...
A Death in Cornwall: A Novel (Gabriel Allon, 24)
An ongoing series offers it’s own pleasures, but new faces are always welcome. The debut thriller of Johanna Copeland offers a woman with a happy life in Washington D.C., until a neighbor shows up and insists they know all about her. That leads to fl...
Our Kind of Game: A Novel
Have you watched the trailer yet for Brad Pitt’s action drama set in the world of F1? Maybe you’re obsessed with the Netflix docu-series Formula 1: Drive To Survive? In either case, you need a primer on one of the most popular sports in the world and...
F1 Racing Confidential: Inside Stories from F1
As if Florida wasn’t wacky enough, State of Paradise captures a state of unreality where people go missing and alternate realities are just around the corner in the Sunshine State. Author Laura van den Berg’s novel includes a ghostwriter for a famous...
State of Paradise: A Novel
Navola will inevitably be compared to Game of Thrones aka A Song of Ice and Fire. (Take your time, George! We’ll wait.) But this fantasy novel by Paolo Bacigalupi shouldn’t be sold as a rip-roaring tale with dragons. It’s mostly a coming of age story...
Navola: A novel
Anton Hur completes this trilogy of well-reviewed sci-fi/fantasy. In Toward Eternity, new tech cures cancer by replacing all your cells with little robot cells that incidentally leave you basically immortal. Then another breakthrough leads to conscio...
Toward Eternity: A Novel
Let’s make a deal. You love to read. I love to recommend books. What if I offered you a free copy of every book I recommended and all you had to do was read them from start to finish? Sweet, right? That’s a Faustian bargain of a sort, a deal that see...
Devil's Contract: History of Faustian Bargain
Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell tell another fascinating story from history. Instead of the literary realm of pacts with the devil, they focus on the history of mathematics. Specifically, they zero in on the many people who pioneered facets of math ...
The Secret Lives of Numbers: A Hidden History
Road trip! Melanie Sweeney’s modest frenemies romance involves two people who bicker over their favorite chair at a local coffee shop. Ash has had a crush on Hazel since she dated his best friend in high school. Now they’re adults and their lives don...
Take ME HOME
Bestselling author Emily Giffin captures what is for many the most stable relationship in their lives: friends. In The Summer Pact, friends at college pledge to always be there for one another. Ten years later, when one of them is at a loss, they com...
The Summer Pact: A Novel
Okay, no one is pretending Sunrise Nights is anything other than the movie Before Sunrise reimagined with high school students who get together at summer arts camp–and only summer arts camp one night a year. I mean, they call it Sunrise Nights so sur...
Sunrise Nights
August Thompson just got his MFA at New York University and now here’s his debut novel. It’s bursting with youthful drama complete with car crashes and confused sexuality and friendship and masculinity and rock and roll and all of it bundled up in a ...
Anyone's Ghost: A Novel
Ben Shattuck is already acclaimed for his memoir Six Walks, which recreates journeys taken by Henry David Thoreau. Now comes his debut work of fiction, a collection of 12 stories spanning hundreds of years, linked in one way or another by sound. With...
The History of Sound: Stories
Goodnight Tokyo is the English language debut of Japanese writer Atsuhiro Yoshida. This novel takes place in Tokyo in the wee hours of the morning over several nights, creating a cacophony of characters and events and emotions that come together in a...
Goodnight Tokyo
The bus–the chiva–is navigating the Andes mountains, picking up passengers and and pigs and plants and fruit and vegetables along the way. Colorful, beautifully calibrated in text that invites read-aloud fun and hummable words you might even try to s...
I Am La Chiva!: The Colorful Bus of the Andes
Danté Plays His Blues. It’s not Danté Plays THE Blues and that makes all the difference. In this picture book, a sad situation–Danté and his mom lose their home and must move in with relatives–becomes heartwarming. Danté misses his friends and his po...
Danté Plays His Blues