10 August 2023 Books To Add To Your Reading List

After a near-death incident, an eight-year-old falls into a comatose state and then stops physically aging: drawing the interest and concern of a wide cast of characters in this Frankenstein-esque speculative novel for a youth-obsessed culture.

In this hallucinatory apocalyptic debut novel, the sun disappears. One traveler is determined to figure out where it went — making a trek across the parched landscapes of the southwest, where an unlikely love story blooms along the way.

It’s 1998 and Bunny Glenn is an American teenager temporarily living in Azerbaijan with her Foreign Service family. She witnesses her backyard become a political hotbed as the U.S. wages war for oil pipeline access. But later in her life, her own career swerves closer to the oil industry, even taking her back to the scene of her youth in his story about class, power, politics, and getting paid — no matter the cost.

This debut novel tackles issues of modern masculinity and capitalism (in only 300 pages?), following a laid-off star copywriter. It dares to ask the crucial, essential question: What do our jobs do to our souls?

Ann Patchett always lulls me in with details of fictional family trees, tracing how people meet and fall apart, with nuance and grace. Her latest novel Tom Lake takes place in the spring of 2020 when three daughters return to their family’s orchard in Northern Michigan and beg their mother to tell them the juicy details of her youthful tryst with a famous actor — causing each of the daughters to reconsider everything they know.

Girlboss backlash has finally hit literature. In this debut novel, a young, beautiful woman takes a job as an assistant to a self-help guru. She temporarily gets seduced into her world — until she realizes the cost of being in it.

An ethnography of the rave, a University of Birmingham ethnomusicologist explores the sense of belonging clubbers get from techno and house music scenes, tracing particularly those in Chicago, Paris, and Berlin in the 2000s.

A thrilling novel about the deadly effects of environmental racism, Kearse’s novel follows a biochemist-turned-coffee-shop-owner grieving his stillborn daughter who died from chemicals the government is planting in Black neighborhoods, injecting himself with snake venom and manufacturing designer drugs. Meanwhile, two Black epidemiologists are trying to figure out a mysterious black substance infecting neighborhoods and threatening lives.

Eleven juicy, unsettling short stories about Asian and Asian-American women who are restless amidst queer desires and longing, and against the pressures of modern society. Technology and tradition collide in stories like “Zeroes:Ones,” about a woman living abroad who escapes into virtual dating simulations to forget her abandonment by her best friend.

Everything/Nothing/Someone is a tantalizing coming of age debut set in the ‘90s. Carrière’s memoir traces her bohemian New York City upbringing as the daughter of artists in Greenwich Village through her struggles with dissociative disorder.