The Summer
Reading List

Joe Sanderson thought he had cracked how to write the Great American Novel: live a life worth writing about. And that’s just what he did. Setting out from his childhood home in the farming heartland of Illinois, Sanderson began what would become the journey of a lifetime, 20 years of “road bumming” through history, from the 1960s to the 1980s, from Jamaica to Vietnam with hundreds of places in between, and finally to El Salvador, where he would lose his life fighting alongside rebels. Joe’s Great American Novel went unwritten, that is until 2008, when Héctor Tobar found his diary in El Salvador, tracked down Joe’s family, and got to work on the novel that never was: this book. A road adventure story that would make Jack Kerouac and Denis Johnson proud, The Last Great Road Bum is a thrilling tribute to freedom and to the journey.

(Biographical Fiction; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; August 25)

The first collection of essays from award-winning poet Nezhukumatathil is a set of meditations on the marvels we encounter in everyday life on Earth. Using a chosen flora or fauna as a jumping-off point to delve into her personal history, Nezhukumatathil’s 30 essays are brightly crafted microcosms of childhood, identity, belonging, parenthood, and memory. From fireflies recalling summer nights in rural western New York to touch-me-not plants sparking a contemplation on closeness, the writing shines with a tactile and beautiful lyricism that reimagines the world we see every day and sparks new magic in it. Peppered with gorgeous illustrations by Fumi Mini Nakamura, it’s a delight best read piecemeal, to savor the moments of inspiration and peacefulness it brings.

(Essays, Milkweed Editions, August 11)

With his memoir, a modern fix for fans of Brideshead Revisited, Hamill spins a tale you’d want to listen to while sprawled out on a summer lawn. Born into New York elite society, but following their father’s financial disintegration and divorce, 8-year-old Hamill and his brothers land in Bermuda with their mother. There, they embark on a life in which the boys are tasked with responsibility for their own survival, from securing food for the day ahead to maneuvering around their mother’s worsening alcoholism to Hamill’s increasing realization that he is gay amid an unaccepting world. Filthy Beasts is an irresistibly voiced coming of age story that journeys into the ways in which we save the people we love, the stains and legacies of the societal orbits we belong to, and how at last we find ourselves.

(Memoir, Avid Reader Press, July 14)

An unlikely partnership between a butterfly-specializing curator of a New Jersey natural history museum and a celebrated but enigmatic young fashion designer sets the stage for Fonseca’s sophomore novel, translated from its original Spanish. The story opens after the designer’s early death; the curator has received a series of manila folders containing her files. Some recall the exhibit that never was—the subject of mimicry, falsehood, and hiding in the animal kingdom, from the images of owl eyes on butterfly wings to the leaflike poses of the praying mantis. Others hint at the enigma of her past, opening a mystery that sends the reader on a search for answers from New York to Central America, illuminating not only a family drama but the ways in which our fashion and our clothing can either telegraph or conceal who we truly are.

(Fiction; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; July 14)

It’s an uncommon thing to find a novel that stands in two genres successfully, and more uncommon still to find a novel that combines the best of both. This literary thriller from Johnson, the youngest ever Man Booker Prize finalist, has a voice that makes you want to slow down to absorb the beauty of the dark and earthy details, set to a backdrop of growing dread that makes it irresistible to keep turning the pages. The result is equal parts heart and tension. Years after the death of their father, teenage sisters July and September accompany their struggling mother to Settle House, an ominous and crumbling place in the British countryside. Among the cobwebbed eaves and rusting tin cans a mysterious presence begins to grow among the women as they navigate the difficulty of restarting their lives from the past. Unbeknownst to them, the unraveling has just begun.

(Fiction, Riverhead Books, August 25)

Drawn closely from the lives and relationship of legendary American heiress and art collector Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter, Pegeen, Costalegre takes the shape of the diary of 15-year-old Lara at the brink of WWII. Previously released in hardcover, it’s a story deserving of more attention. Lara’s mother’s plan for their home in Costalegre, Mexico, is both a beautiful idea and doomed to fail: She has rescued a cohort of surrealist artists from the impending war in Europe and intends to house them all with her so that they can create great art in the secluded paradise. Lara has painting talent of her own, but much more interest in finding emotional understanding and love from her mother, and her diary unfolds a gorgeously intricate natural world, a fantastic satire of the oddities of artists, and a heartfelt search into what it means to create art and what it means to love and be loved.

(Fiction, Tin House, paperback July 14)

In 2006, a University of Minnesota student landed in Primorye, Russia, for his Ph.D. project: conservation research of the Blakiston’s fish owl. Little did he know that in the days and months that followed, that wilderness would meet him head-on in one of the greatest survival adventure stories of our time. From falls into deadly melting river ice, temperatures far below zero, wildfires, and Siberian tigers, to an uneasy brotherhood with the type of rugged outdoorsmen who count a bucket of moose meat as a housewarming gift, Slaght’s true story reads like the best of novels as he pursues the elusive species three times larger than America’s great horned owl. In the league of Jack London and J.A. Baker, it’s a book packed to its brim with moments of courage in both body and spirit, and of a love for nature and untamed land.

(Nonfiction; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; August 4)