While Justice Sleeps (Avery Keene Thriller #1) by Stacey AbramsLearn about the other entries on the list.
Step into the halls of the Supreme Court with Avery Keene as she untangles a web of corrupt politicians and power plays. A justice in a coma and dangerous conspiracies are just the start as a young law clerk pieces together clues left behind by her boss in this gripping legal thriller from Stacey Abrams.
Sarah Lawrence College and received her MFA from Syracuse University. She is the author of The Split, the young adult thrillers Before We Were Sorry (originally published as See All the Stars), All Eyes on Us, I Killed Zoe Spanos, Very Bad People, and The Reunion, as well as the poetry collection A Small Rising Up in the Lungs.
Family of Liars by e. lockhartRead about the other entries on the list.
This prequel to modern classic We Were Liars goes back in time to the Beechwood Island of 1987—another summer, another deadly mystery. This time, we follow Carrie Lennox Taft Sinclair through her seventeenth summer vacationing with her large, wealthy, and broken family on their private island off Martha’s Vineyard. As the summer unfolds, confidences are betrayed, mistakes are made, and the truth about the very dark past kept tightly under lock and key by this earlier generation of Sinclairs comes to light.
Daniel Schreiber is the author of Susan Sontag, the first complete biography of the intellectual icon, as well as the highly praised and bestselling German-language literary essays Nüchtern and Zuhause. He lives in Berlin.
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren GroffRead about the other entries on the list.
Due out next month, this novel follows an unnamed girl who flees from a colonial settlement in 1600s Virginia to make her way through the forests and rivers of North America. Groff turns the ideological underpinnings of classic Robinsonades deftly on their head. During her fight for survival the girl comes to an understanding of the natural world and her life within it which is a rare testament to the spiritual upsides of loneliness that we can only experience when we are alone.
and elsewhere. In 2023, she was selected as a Tin House Summer Workshop Scholar and a Periplus Collective Fellow.
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa GyasiRead about the other entries on the list.
Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, follows a family of Ghanaian immigrants while focusing on Gifty, the narrator in her fifth year of graduate school, studying Neuroscience at the Stanford School of Medicine. Gifty specifically researches the neural patterns of reward-seeking mice with the hopes of unlocking a secret cure to both addiction and depression. After her brother, Nana, passes away from an overdose and her mother retreats to Gifty’s bed in bouts of suicidal thoughts, Gifty retreats into her studies and searches endlessly for answers. This is a novel that can be read, or it can be experienced—through spiritual and religious exploration, scientific explanation, and the overarching goal of transformation, Gyasi outdoes herself yet again with a phenomenal 264 pages of intellectual expansion.
The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained; Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places; Afterlives of the Saints: Stories from the Ends of Faith; and Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius. He is also the co-editor (with Joanna Ebenstein) of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology.
The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny by Susan LepselterRead about the other entries on the list.
Lepselter blends the genres of academic monograph and memoir in ways that make for a fascinating read. She spends time out in the desert near Area 51, hanging out with believers looking for aliens and trying to understand their deeper motivations, in the process tracing the metaphors and stories that conservative Americans tell themselves to make sense of a changing world. Literary in style and beautifully written, it’s not like any other book you’ve read, and definitely one I’ve returned to again and again.
Georgia State University. He has been a Townsend Prize finalist, longlisted for the Southern Book Prize, and a winner of the Georgia Author of the Year award. He lives with his wife and two sons in Atlanta, where he is the English department chair at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School.
Cop Town by Karin Slaughter (2014)Read about the other entries on the list.
Slaughter’s standalone is set in 1970s Atlanta. Kate Murphy is a brand-new police officer on a force that recently hired women but doesn’t want them there; being anattractive blond makes her harassment worse. On the surface Kate seems like a pretty, rich girl playing cop, and before her first day is over she wants to quit. But she is also a recent widow and Jewish, both of which deepen her character and her fortitude—most of her white male co-workers are misogynistic racists who are also suspicious of Jews, and an openly antisemitic cop killer roams the city streets. Kate gets partnered with Maggie Lawson, whose brother and uncle are also cops, although unhappy that Maggie wants to continue the family tradition. Both women must contend with colleagues who despise their presence, the aforementioned cop killer, and a shifting social and cultural landscape. Details like the uniforms the women are given—all deliberately too big, even the shoes—ground the story in a gritty realism. Cop Town is as much about Kate and Maggie’s growth and acceptance of themselves as police officers as it is a gripping thriller, and Kate’s journey especially makes for compelling reading.
Tupac Shakur by Staci RobinsonRead about the other entries on the list.
This biography—the only one authorized by the artist’s family—has been 20 years in the making. Staci Robinson wrote her first draft decades ago, then put it aside for her other book and screenwriting projects, before returning to the story she always wanted to tell. Robinson is closely connected to Tupac’s family—he crashed on her couch when he was a teenager with big dreams who was trying to launch his career, and his activist mother, Afeni, a famous member of the Black Panther party, was a mentor. And this memoir is worth the wait: It includes handwritten notes from Tupac that give readers insight into his poetic, wise mind; details from intimate conversations; and insight into the experiences that shaped his worldview. This biography, due out in October, paints a rich portrait of a young man who was shot and killed at just age 25, leaving readers pondering how his legacy could have been even greater if only he lived longer.
newsletter. His work has been cited as a notable mention in The Best American Sports Writing, and he has also been named Texas Sportswriter of the Year. Dent grew up in the Kansas City area and lives in Dallas.
Eli Saslow, Rising out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White NationalistRead about the other entries on the list.
This is the story of Derek Black—the so-called prince of the white nationalist movement in the United States. Saslow poignantly chronicles the transformation of an enthusiastic college student who arrives on campus in Florida, maintains his role as the host of a racist radio show, meets a group of close friends, and ultimately chooses to renounce his family’s past and his belief system.
Through detailed reporting and spare prose, the book offers a gripping portrait of a young person that you cannot put down. One of the reasons this “comeback” story is so illuminating is that it’s not neat and tidy—it’s complicated…but ultimately hopeful.
Akemi C. Brodsky is the author of The Brill Pill. She graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with a bachelor of science, then moved to the UK to do a master’s in engineering at Imperial College London. She currently lives in the Bay Area and spends most of her spare time traveling, cooking, seeing family and friends, and watching TV.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo IshiguroRead about another entry on the list.
Never Let Me Go is a classic that had to be included on this list because it is full of precious memories of school days gone by, and it is also dark AF. I didn’t go to boarding school, but I assume that each of the inane yet all-important social constructions adolescents create are magnified here. Ishiguro has an amazing way of authentically recreating all of those uncomfortable and unforgiving coming-of-age feelings which on their own pull at my younger self and yet make me recoil at the idea of returning to such a time. But, of course, there are other reasons you’d rather not be a student at Hailsham…
won the Bath Novel Award and Harper’s Bazaar Big Book Award. It was longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize and shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Pick. In 2019, she was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Her second book, Double or Nothing (2022), is the first in a trilogy commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to expand the world of James Bond. Her latest novel, A Wild & True Relation (2023), was described by Dame Hilary Mantel as “a rarity – a novel as remarkable for the vigour of the storytelling as for its literary ambition. Kim Sherwood is a writer of capacity, potency and sophistication.”
Read about the other entries on the list.American Spy, Lauren Wilkinson (2019)
As a black FBI agent in the 1960s, Marie Mitchell’s career is thwarted by the all-white boys’ club until she is handed a mission to seduce and undermine the revolutionary president of Burkina Faso. Lauren Wilkinson illuminates the untold stories of the cold war in a searing exploration of belonging, race and gender.
The Last Stone by Mark BowdenRead about the other entries on the list.
In 1975 Mark Bowden author of Black Hawk Down was a cub reporter for a paper in Baltimore Maryland when two sisters Katherine (10) and Shelia (12) Lyons disappeared from a shopping mall outside Washington DC. He reported on it for two weeks but there were no answers and for almost forty years the case was cold. In2013 an investigator came across a statement given by a Lloyd Welch (18 years old). Welch had gone to police to say he’d seen the girls being forced into a car by a middle-aged man in a suit but failed a polygraph. The investigator noted that a mug shot picture of Welch from 1977 resembled the police sketch of a suspect at the mall. The Last Stone focuses on the extended interrogation sessions with detectives in which Welch fabricates and lies but ultimately confesses. Gripping and a tribute to the tenacity of the detectives who literally turned every last stone.
Irina Zhorov was born in Uzbekistan, in the Soviet Union, and moved to Philadelphia on the eve of its dissolution. After failing to make use of a geology degree she received an MFA from the University of Wyoming. She’s worked as a journalist for more than a decade, reporting primarily on environmental issues.
Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Boris DralyukRead about the other entries on the list.
Sergey Sergeyich is a beekeeper living in a conflict zone in the Donbas region of Ukraine, where electricity has been off for years but shelling is relentless. When he decides to flee his home with his bees, he ends up in another conflict area, in Crimea. Along the way, he gets an education on Russian aggression, ethnic persecution and the cruelties of human nature. Russian violence in Ukraine has been a post-Soviet constant and this novel shows its effects on just a few lives.
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