Good morning. Summer means a bevy of new books. With the help of our Globe colleagues, today’s newsletter explores the dozen that you might want to dive into first.
Here’s what else is going on:
- A judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from preventing Harvard from enrolling foreign students.
- A second court ruled against more of President Trump’s tariffs, but an appeals court let others stay in place for now. The whiplash is creating added uncertainty for businesses.
- Some shoppers are ready to boycott Market Basket over the boardroom coup against chief executive Arthur T. Demoulas, as they did during a previous family leadership squabble.
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TODAY’S STARTING POINT
For many Americans, summer means more time for leisure. That means more time to read. And that means news outlets publishing lists of books that you might want to consider adding to your list.
The Globe has just released its own entry in the genre. Kate Tuttle, who leads the Books section, and five other reviewers whittled down the thousands of titles that will be published this summer to a lean 75 that you should consider putting in your beach tote. They span fiction, nonfiction, romance, thrillers, and mysteries. Some are breezy vacation reads; others are debut novels or deeply researched histories.
“We figure there’s probably not many single readers who will love all the books, but we hope very much that every reader, every kind of reader, will find something that appeals to them,” Kate told me. The goal is to feed existing appetites while also introducing authors whose work you might not yet have picked up.
The sad truth is that most Americans (myself included!) don’t read anywhere close to 75 books in a year, let alone during a summer. Distractions and other ways to spend our time — phones, Netflix — abound. Having kids out of school can increase the demands on parents’ time. And as Kate put it, “a lot of people don’t get to take the kind of summer vacations that we all fantasize about” — that is, reading the day away in a hammock. In a December 2023 YouGov poll, nearly half of Americans copped to not reading a single book that year.
And when it comes to summer, even the Globe’s 75 suggestions are just a taste. Lots of publications have their own lists of the season’s most-anticipated books. We found 16 others — from The New York Times (🎁), The Washington Post (🎁), NPR, and more — that collectively featured more than 280 different titles spanning forms (essays to memoirs), settings (16th-century Spain to a climate-flooded Florida of the future), and authors (veteran best-sellers to debutantes). That’s enough to flatten anyone’s nightstand.
So to thin out the crowd a bit — and figure out which of this season’s new books are truly setting the literary world ablaze — we went through those different publications’ lists to find the titles that recurred. Beyond the Globe, we tried to draw from a range of outlets, from the industry-specific (Publishers Weekly and Literary Hub) and relatively highbrow (The Atlantic 🎁) to the more salt-of-the-earth (Us Weekly, the New York Post, and USA Today). We also included lists that parsed genres (like Goodreads’, which lists fantasy and young-adult fiction) or featured categories that the Globe’s didn’t (like New York magazine’s, which includes a poetry collection and a graphic novel).
Here are the 12 books that appeared on at least five different publications’ lists, plus a brief description. Think of it as a shortlist guide to the season’s most-anticipated titles. Happy reading!
1. “Atmosphere: A Love Story,” by Taylor Jenkins Reid (on 10 lists)
From the author of “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo,” this novel follows an astronomy professor training with the first female astronauts. (Out June 3 from Ballantine Books)
2. “King of Ashes” by S.A. Cosby (10 lists)
Cosby’s novels explore the modern American South. This mob thriller features gangsters, troubled siblings, and a car crash that was no accident. (June 10, Flatiron)
3. “Flashlight” by Susan Choi (9 lists)
Choi, whose last novel won the National Book Award, returns with this “propulsive story about family secrets and displacement,” reviewer Wadzanai Mhute writes in the Globe. (June 3, Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
4. “Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil” by V.E. Schwab (8 lists)
This gothic novel follows three female vampires across centuries and continents. (June 10, Tor)
5. “Great Black Hope” by Rob Franklin (7 lists)
This debut novel — the only one on our shortlist — centers on Smith, a queer Black Stanford graduate who bounces between New York and his hometown of Atlanta. Things go wrong. (June 10, Simon & Schuster)
6. “Katabasis” by R.F. Kuang (7 lists)
With shades of Dante’s “Inferno,” a student of Magick partners with a rival to retrieve her academic adviser’s soul — and a letter of recommendation — from hell. (Aug. 26, Harper Voyager)
7. “The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex” by Melissa Febos (7 lists)
Febos’s memoir, the only purely nonfiction book on our shortlist, chronicles her journey to remain celibate after a bad breakup. As Kate Tuttle writes, it explores “the jagged borders between freedom and intimacy.” (June 3, Knopf)
8. “Don’t Let Him In” by Lisa Jewell (5 lists)
Globe reviewer Daneet Steffens calls this “whiplash-inducing” psychological thriller a “perfectly plotted, sinister tale” of charisma and deceit. (June 24, Atria Books)
9. “Meet Me at the Crossroads” by Megan Giddings (5 lists)
An apparent portal into another dimension tests the kinship of two midwestern teenagers. (June 3, Amistad)
10. “So Far Gone” by Jess Walter (5 lists)
In this novel, a reclusive former journalist must rescue his estranged daughter and grandchildren from a cultlike militia. (June 10, Harper)
11. “The Möbius Book” by Catherine Lacey (5 lists)
Fiction and memoir merge in this unique narrative mashup that explores relationships and memory. (June 17, FSG)
12. “Vera, or Faith” by Gary Shteyngart (5 lists)
Shteyngart’s latest novel tells the story of Vera, a girl whose blended Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP family is falling apart. (July 8, Random House)
🧩 4 Down: Salad fish | 🌤️ 74° Warmth returns
POINTS OF INTEREST
Boston and Massachusetts
- Karen Read retrial: The prosecution rested its case.
- Helping hand: Mayor Michelle Wu will award $2.1 million to groups that provide Boston’s immigrant communities with legal assistance, mental health support, and more.
- Under investigation: A state grand jury has been hearing testimony related to a 25-year-old police recruit’s death during a training exercise last fall.
- Guilty: A federal jury convicted a former MBTA Transit Police sergeant of helping a fellow officer cover up the beating of a homeless man at Ashmont Station in 2018.
- Stage fright: A problem with the stage caused Live Nation to cancel Shakira and Jason Aldean concerts at Fenway Park.
- Back home: The remains of a World War II airman from Somerville whose plane was shot down in Germany were returned to Massachusetts.
Trump administration
- Chilling effect: ICE raids on Nantucket this week have left local immigrants afraid to go to work.
- Citations needed: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” report included erroneous footnotes, including fake studies. The White House blamed “formatting issues” and posted a revised version. (NOTUS)
- Independent: Trump met with Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, whom he has hectored to lower interest rates. The Fed said Trump requested the meeting and pledged to keep monetary policy “non-political.” (CNBC)
- Not her: Someone impersonated Susie Wiles, Trump chief of staff, in messages to top Republicans and business leaders. Federal authorities are investigating. (WSJ 🎁)
- MIT minus DEI: The university became the latest institution to shutter its diversity office since Trump won.
The Nation
- Practice makes perfect: Faizan Zaki, 13, won the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Last year’s runner up, he nearly blew it again last night. (AP)
- Plane dealing: JetBlue and United announced a partnership that will let passengers on both airlines use and collect miles interchangeably.
Correction: In an item yesterday about recovered images of enslaved people in the US, we mistakenly referred to a descendant as an “ancestor.”
VIEWPOINTS
Massachusetts subsidizes horse racing to the tune of $20 million per year. As evidence grows that the industry harms horses, state lawmakers should reconsider, the Globe’s editorial board writes.
Conservatives debate Trump vs. Harvard
- Yes, Harvard can be out of touch and inhospitable to the right, Austin Taylor, a 2021 graduate, writes in a Globe Ideas essay. The administration’s pressure campaign is still wrong.
- Ilya Shapiro, another conservative Ivy League grad, says the school’s progressive rot goes so deep that only drastic action can fix it, Globe Opinion’s Carine Hajjar explains.
BESIDE THE POINT
By Teresa Hanafin
📺 What to stream this weekend: The latest “Captain America,” a new British detective mystery, a bunch of Hitchcock hits, and more.
🥣 Let them eat oats: Many breakfast cereals for kids have more fat, salt, and sugar than a decade ago and less protein and fiber. Dr. Leana Wen has ideas for alternatives. (CNN)
👩❤️👨 Dinner with Cupid: This couple on a blind date have so much in common that … well, you’ll have to find out.
🍹 New spots in R.I.: Oysters on Block Island, an eight-course tasting menu in Providence, a bar focused on unique cocktails. Here are 13 new restaurants and bars to try this summer.
💗 Love is in the air…plane? Travel opens up one’s heart, experts say, which may explain why so many people find their special someone while on a trip. (HuffPost)
🐙 Travel tip: If you have visited Portugal, it’s likely been in the south. But Christopher Muther argues that the best part of the country is north of Lisbon.
🎬 The Girls from Boston: They were the movie reviewers for five Boston newspapers starting in the 1930s: Women who were some of the nation’s best-known film critics. This is their forgotten story. (WBUR/Cognoscenti)
🖼️ Galleries of family life: In a world of digitized photographs, the prints on our refrigerators, held in place with magnets, are a reminder of what truly matters.
👩🍼 Too much mom? A new study shows that there has been a significant drop in the mental health of mothers. One psychologist thinks it may be due to overparenting.
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This newsletter was edited by Teresa Hanafin and produced by Diamond Naga Siu.
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