Summer Books
Preview Courtesy of Penguin Press
Courtesy of Knopf
JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
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I t’s summer 2020, and you know what that means: sitting quietly by yourself inside, leaving your
phone in another room and reading.

It’s certainly not the summer that we anticipated, but that doesn’t mean a good book can’t take
you somewhere else for a few hours. Here’s a preview of some of the summer’s hottest new reads.

“Death in Her Hands”
Ottessa Moshfegh (June 23)
Moshfegh, 39, might be the best young novelist
in America. “Death in Her Hands,” her latest
novel, delayed for a few months but now here
at last, is the story of an elderly woman who
thinks that she may have discovered a murder.

Her last novel, “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,”
grabbed the publicity, but check out her novella,
“McGlue,” fi rst.

“Cool for America: Stories”
Andrew Martin (July 7)
Andrew Martin writes stories about young
16 JUNE 25, 2020
Courtesy of Farrar, Strauss and
people that are sad and trying hard not to be.

“Cool for America,” his fi rst collection, borrows
some of the characters from his well-regarded
debut novel, “Early Work,” for stories about
people who doing their best not to just give up.

“Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir”
Natasha Trethewey (July 28)
Today, Trethewey is a Pulitzer Prize-winning
poet, and has served as the United States poet
laureate. But when she was 19, she was grieving
her mother, murdered by her stepfather. Trethewey
retraces her mother’s steps through the segregated
South to that awful day on Memorial Drive, giving a
history of her own childhood along the way.

“The Wild Laughter”
Caoilinn Hughes (July 30)
If you follow publishing trends closely, it seems
that new literary histories of the devastation of
the 2007-2008 fi nancial crises are published every
week. Hughes, however, sets her story in her native
Ireland, for a change of pace. Her novel asks a
deceptively simple question: What do people do
when they feel they have nothing to lose?
THIS SUMMER
Courtesy of Ecco
“A Burning”
Megha Majumdar (June 2)
Majumdar’s debut novel tells the story of three
Indians — Jivan, PT Sir and Lovely — caught
up in the complex web of politics, class and
corruption. Jivan must try to clear her name aft er
being accused of committing a terrorist act, and
Lovely, the only one who could exonerate her, can’t
do it. Meanwhile, PT Sir’s ambitions depend on
Jivan’s failure.

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