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Summer is just around the corner, which means that it’s time to start plotting which beach reads you’ll be toting to your local sands. The past few months, we’ve been toiling away on a list of the best books to read while at the beach. Behold: our list of the Best Beach Reads of All Time.
Now for the new books out this week, there’s the campy The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association by Caitlin Rozakis, the zesty Along Came Amor by Alexis Daria, and the sweet and studious All-Nighter by Cecilia Vinesse. And, for the Petti LaBelles (see: me), there’s The Science of Revenge: Understanding the World’s Deadliest Addiction–and How to Overcome It by James Kimmel, Jr. Meanwhile, mystery lovers will appreciate When Sally Killed Harry by Lucy Roth, and graphic novel afficionandos, Day of the Dead Girl, Volume 1 by A.J. Mendez, Aimee Garcia, and Bobby Curnow Belén Culebras.
Now for the featured books: there’s a witchy, Murder on the Orient Express-esque Golden Age mystery, moving memoirs by an activist and an Indigenous woman, and a queer story set in a changing land.
The Busybody Book Club by Freya Sampson
I love a good British cozy mystery, and this one has the added bonus of being centered around a messy book club. Nova Davies’s book club, to be exact. She initially started it to get brownie points at her new community center job, but it’s proven to be a disaster. The members can’t agree on the simplest things, like which biscuits to eat, for instance (cookies, for us stateside). When £6,000 gets stolen, it’s just as one of the book club members, Michael, disappears. Then a body is found at his house. It’s not looking too good for Mikey as far as the authorities are concerned, but his fellow book clubbers have their own theories—while the Agatha Christie stan wants to prove his guilt as a murderer-theif, romance novel lover Arthur thinks he’s just gone off with a lover, and teen Ash is looking at things from a more fantastical angle. Despite their differences, they pull together to get to the bottom of things.
Death on the Caldera by Emily Paxman
“It’s Murder on the Orient Express – with witches!” A brilliant tagline if I ever saw one.
Add to the Agatha Christie/witchy goodness a Golden Age crime setting, and I’d wager this has to be one of the funnest new books out now. It follows Kellen, Davina, and Morel—the secretive Linde siblings—who are high-tailing it to the kingdom of Halgyr because their father is dying, which means Kellen will become king. But the engine of the luxury train they’re on explodes, and it leaves them stranded on a caldera with volcanic magic. All of this brings out latent witch powers Davina never knew she had. But her brothers knew—and this drives a wedge between them. As the rest of the people on the train try to get to the bottom of what happened, people start dying—crew, regular passengers, and powerful men alike. Everyone knows a witch is very capable of the nefarious goings-on, but there’s not supposed to be one onboard…
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Dreaming of Home: How We Turn Fear into Pride, Power, and Real Change by Cristina Jiménez
Here, MacArthur “Genius” Cristina Jiménez recounts her experience as a child to Ecuadorians who sought a better life in the US. After Jiménez’s sister is lost to cancer, the family is reeling. Then, when Jiménez is 13, they arrive in Queens, NY. They live in a cramped one-bedroom apartment, and her parents work multiple jobs while under daily fear of being deported. All the while, Jiménez works hard to become an honors student. She eventually goes to college, with the help of immigrant rights advocates, and finds a community of people with similar experiences as her. She ends up co-founding United We Dream, which helped to win DACA and prevent thousands of young people from being deported. Here, she highlights the importance of community over fear and denounces the idea that “good” immigrants don’t face racism.
The South by Tash Aw
This begins the quartet of novels by Tash Aw that make up a portrait of a family. It starts with the death of Jay’s grandfather, which takes him and his family to the south to the land they inherited. It’s a woebegone farm with diseased trees and thirsty fields. Despite its state, Jay’s father sends him out to work the land under oppressive heat. While they’re in town, Jay and the farm manager’s son, Chuan, start an interesting relationship—one that changes into something else. Meanwhile, Jay’s family dynamics shift like global powers are shifting the life around them.
Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
I am a big fan of books that open people up to viewing nature in a different light, and in Forest Euphoria, this light is more personal. Ononiwu Kaishian saw herself—and her emerging identies as a queer and neurodivergent person—in the snakes and fungi of the swamps and culverts near her house. She shares her journey to being a scientist, then invites us to witness the queerness of nature. Fungal species have more than two sexes, some intersex slugs shoot “love darts” at each other, and more.
Soft as Bones: A Memoir by Chyana Marie Sage
In this poetic memoir, Sage examines generational trauma—which starts when her paternal grandfather is forcibly taken from his family and brought to residential schools, and culminates in her father becoming a crack dealer and going to prison for molesting her sister. Despite everything, she has hope. Cree stories, which are interspersed throughout, help keep her afloat and show the way towards healing.
Other Book Riot New Releases Resources:
- All the Books, our weekly new book releases podcast, where Liberty and a cast of co-hosts talk about eight books out that week that we’ve read and loved.
- The New Books Newsletter, where we send you an email of the books out this week that are getting buzz.
- Finally, if you want the real inside scoop on new releases, you have to check out Book Riot’s New Release Index! That’s where I find 90% of new releases, and you can filter by trending books, Rioters’ picks, and even LGBTQ new releases!
The following comes to you from the Editorial Desk.
We love a good cover, and this week, we’re highlighting a list of the best short story covers. Trust us when we say that these will look so demure on your bookshelves!
Read on for an excerpt and become an All Access member to unlock the full post.
In the course of writing about great book covers, there’s one thing that I’ve noted several times: short story collections have some of the most innovative, memorable, and eye-catching covers of them all. Why is that? Perhaps part of it is because short story collections are a harder sell to the average reader, so the first line of marketing has to be for the bookshop browser, whether they’re perusing on or off line. Perhaps part of it is that many great short story collections are coming from smaller presses, so pushing boundaries with design is part of what’s possible because there are fewer stakeholders to please in the process. Perhaps it’s also simply that short story collections, by nature of their diversity, invite more creativity into the cover design process.
Whatever the reason or reasons, I suspect anyone who appreciates a good book cover is here for it.
Let’s take a look at some of the banging short story book covers that have hit shelves this year, as well as look at some of the upcoming covers of collections you’ll want to pop on your TBR ASAP. If you’re reading this when the piece publishes in mid-May, know you’ll be reading it in time to partake in Short Story Month, too. Any month can be short story month, of course, but May gives extra reason to dive into bite-sized fiction.
As always, caveats abound here. It is still unnecessarily difficult to track down cover designers and artists for book covers, especially if you don’t have the book in your hand to double-check. Many publishers still don’t put this information on the landing pages for these books, so it takes good Googling and a lot of luck to dig up names to credit.
Autocorrect by Etgar Keret, translated by Jessica Cohen and Sondra Silverston (May 27)
If you’re looking for a collection of darkly funny stories, this cover is not going to steer you in the wrong direction. It’s a squirrel that’s clearly been launched right into the book title, and he looks completely unfazed by it all. There’s a lot of nice movement in this design, especially as it is very simplistic.
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