PW Staff Best Summer Fiction Recommendations

Publishers Weekly is an international news magazine of book publishing and bookselling designed for publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents. PW has published continuously since 1872. Below are a few of their 2024 staff picks for summer reading in fiction. For full reviews of these books, go to Publishers Weekly Summer Reads.

All Fours by Miranda July (Riverhead)

July turns artistic desire and sexual fantasy into riveting fiction in her latest novel. It begins with a middle-aged artist’s cross-country road trip from Los Angeles to New York City but quickly turns into something delightfully weird, as the narrator remodels a roadside motel room and uses it to sort out the next phase of her life.

Bear by Julia Phillips (Hogarth)

San Juan Island feels like a nice place to visit but a difficult place to live, as evidenced by its portrayal in bestseller Phillips’s evocative and nimble novel. Here on this Pacific Northwest hideaway, two sisters respond in very different ways to the arrival of a grizzly bear, and their unsettled question of whether the bear is friend or foe elicits nail-biting suspense.

Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan (Doubleday)

The Crazy Rich Asians author takes a dishy tour through a contemporary milieu of royals and the über-rich in Europe, Hawaii, and Hong Kong as the wedding plans of a matriarch’s daughter and son are disrupted by an Austen-worthy series of reversals. Kwan’s pitch-perfect observations on art, fashion, and social etiquette make for a delectable feast.

Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi (Riverhead)

Sometimes summer reading means frothy escapism, and sometimes it means a scorching state-of-the-nation novel with lurid scenes of sex clubs, vengeful murder plots, and heartbroken young lovers. Emezi’s latest, set in the elite underground of New Lagos, Nigeria, where a jilted man gets in way over his head after a bad night out, serves up incisive class commentary along with loads of titillating fun.

Long Island by Colm Tóibín (Scribner)

Sequel season is raging, and Eilis Lacey is back in this welcome follow-up to Tóibín’s bestseller Brooklyn. The action takes place two decades later, with Irish immigrant Eilis unhappily settled down with her Italian American husband on Long Island in the mid-1970s. A revelation prompts her to return to Ireland, where Tóibín unfurls more than enough juicy drama for another great movie.

The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia by Juliet Grames (Knopf)

The past comes back to haunt a small Italian village in the 1960s, where an American aid worker is pulled into a plot involving an unearthed human skeleton and the unknown fates of two people who disappeared from Santa Chionia years earlier. As a mystery, Grames’s novel is as gripping as they come; it’s also a deeply satisfying character study of an outsider learning more about a place than she’d bargained for.

Not a River by Selva Almada, trans. from the Spanish by Annie McDermott (Graywolf)

Shades of Deliverance darken this haunting and surprising adventure. Somewhere in South America, two men are on a fishing trip, with another friend’s preteen son in tow. The trio attract negative attention from the locals after the men kill and string up a giant stingray on the island where they’re staying. Almada’s dreamlike prose and taut suspense are the ideal match for a sweltering afternoon.

Oye by Melissa Mogollon (Hogarth)

Mogollon builds this irresistible comedy around the serious subject of cancer. Surprisingly, there’s great fun to be had as the teen protagonist is pressed by her mother into helping with her grandmother, who might be terminally ill, while conspiring to keep her in the dark about her prognosis. Lively characters and witty banter make this just the thing to dive into when spending time away from one’s own family.

Same as It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo (Doubleday)

A married woman’s memories of her affair decades earlier return with a vengeance in Lombardo’s sparkling novel. The story begins in a grocery store, where the narrator runs into a friend she hasn’t seen for ages, and from there it leaps vertiginously into the past as the protagonist considers the cost of the life she’s built for herself. Readers will be torn between their instinct to race to the finish and their desire to savor every page.

State of Paradise by Laura van den Berg (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Van den Berg is a master at nudging the familiar world slightly off its axis, and few places are riper for that treatment than Florida. Her latest is about a ghostwriter who returns to the Sunshine State after an unspecified pandemic and discovers that the neighbors are obsessively using a new VR device and that many people have gone missing.

This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud (Norton)

In the end, summer reading means whatever one is reading in the summer, and sometimes that means carving out time for a hefty literary event. Messud’s saga, which spans from 1940 to 2010, follows a pied-noir family exiled from Algeria during the country’s war for independence. The magnificent sentences and staggeringly deep characterizations are cause enough to save this for a week free of interruptions.

The Witches of Bellinas by J. Nicole Jones (Catapult)

A foggy seaside grove in Northern California provides the stage for Jones’s intriguing novel. Yes, there are witches; they’re members of a cult run by a tech guru and a wellness influencer. There’s also a dead body: the husband of the narrator, who gradually unfolds the mystery of what happened to each of them after they arrived in the witches’ idyll turned nightmare. Jones puts her snappy prose, incisive commentary, and natural storytelling chops on full display.