As quarantine drags on, summer reading has never been more vital. Absent the usual trips to pools, beaches, and friends’ crowded barbecues, we’ll need to learn to rely on the distracting power of a great read. Luckily, June is chock-full of book debuts guaranteed to take your mind off your troubles, at least for a while.
The book industry is certainly suffering from COVID-19, but there’s still plenty to read: See below for a list of seven captivating novels we can’t wait to dig into next month.
Twin sisters split apart and forge independent lives—one as a black Southern mother, one as a white-passing suburbanite—in this story about family, race, history, and the lies we tell each other (and ourselves) to get by. (Read the first chapter here!)
A Burning by Megha Majumdar (June 2)
Three central figures—young Muslim girl Jivan, right-wing gym teacher PT Sir, and outcast Lovely—find their fates bound up in one another’s in this debut novel that presents a complex and layered portrait of modern-day India.
A young Irish woman teaching English in Hong Kong is caught between two lovers—wealthy, inattentive Julian and beautiful, surprising Edith—in this deeply relatable story of love, millennial agony, and identity confusion.
Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier (June 9)
An 18-year-old young woman is pregnant, grieving, and delivering pizza in Los Angeles when she develops a bizarre fixation with one of her customers in this bold and unusual novel.
“You exist too much,” a young Palestinian-American girl’s mother tells her when she comes out as queer, and the rest of the novel—which follows that girl from youth to adulthood, and from New York to the Middle East—functions as a repudiation of that phrase.
Can we ever really change? That’s the question at the center of this novel that sees protagonist Sam from a troubled, extremely online life in New York to a multiple-day ayahuasca experience that’s intended to wipe clean a history of anxiety, depression, and romantic heartache.
In this novel, a frazzled new mother and a college student who takes a job as her nanny strike up an unlikely friendship that forces each of them to question their way of living.