JUNE

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Chris Smalls, When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class
Pantheon, June 2

American labor organizer and activist Chris Smalls rose to national attention during the pandemic when he was fired by Amazon for organizing a walkout to protest a lack of proper safety protocols around COVID-19 exposures at the warehouse in Staten Island. After his termination, Smalls went on to found the ALU, the first union of American Amazon workers, and achieve the first ever U.S. labor victory against the retail giant. In 2022, he was named one of Time‘s 100 most influential people. Like Greta Thunberg—another firebrand who refused to neuter her activism after being fêted by the liberal establishment—Smalls joined the 2025 Gaza Freedom Flotilla, attempting to break Israel’s blockade of the Gaza strip. Smalls is a true inspiration, and I’m excited to read his story.  –DS

Liaquat Ahamed, 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World
Penguin Press, June 2

The latest book from financial historian Ahamed, the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lords of Finance, chronicles the first Great Depression, with special emphasis on the Rothschilds, providing “a bird’s-eye reckoning with the full dimension of the crisis, from its buildup to its long aftermath.” Always relevant, and in 2026, it might just be even more so.  –ET

Alexander Starritt, Drayton and Mackenzie
Atlantic Monthly Press, June 2

This book is one of the first novels in over a decade to make it on to the longlist for the Financial Times’ best business book of the year. James Drayton and Roland Mackenzie are Oxford grads, management consultants moving through roles at McKinsey and eventually building a new startup in green energy. Set against the background of the global financial crisis, bailouts, and Brexit, it’s a novel about friendship, money, and ambition. In the UK, where it’s been out for a few months, they’re calling it a “punchy satire…Dickens meets The Big Short.”  –EF

Melissa Albert, The Children
William Morrow, June 2

From the bestselling YA author Albert, a first novel for adults that blends mystery, fantasy, and a sort of publishing world realism to create a twisty, delicious, and—I mean this in the best way—faintly sinister reading experience. Guinevere Sharpe’s mother died twenty years ago, leaving a beloved series of children’s books with protagonists modeled after her own children: Guin, of course, and her older brother Ennis. Now she and Ennis don’t speak, and Guin is flogging a ghostwritten memoir that makes her childhood like the fairy tale it wasn’t. But when Ennis opens a new art exhibit called Mother, Guin is determined to find him. It’s harder than it seems, but just like in the stories, there’s always a door somewhere, if you look properly. If you are a grown up who, at one time, believed that Narnia (or Neverland, or Oz) was real, this book is for you.  –ET

David Baerwald, The Fire Agent
Spiegel & Grau, June 2

The Fire Agent is one of those big, beautiful war novels about everything at the most important moment in history, and a story of the individuals that actually lived through it. Here, Ernst Baerwald works in Japan for what will become the German chemical company IG Farben—which provides pretext to his undercover work as a spy. From the origins of the Yakuza, the dawning of chemical warfare, and FDR’s spy shops, the novel treks across World War II to the dawn of the Cold War. Based on the life off Baerwald’s grandfather.  –EF

Morgan Thomas, Mad Eden
FSG, June 2

Did Morgan Thomas write this novel specifically for me? Definitely not, but they might as well have. I hate calling books “timely” or “relevant,” but this is timely and relevant to me, personally, so I’m doing it. I haven’t even read the book yet, but I can already see so many people I know and love reflecting back at me from it, which is very sweet and sad all at once.  –OS

Maggie O’Farrell, Land
Knopf, June 2

After falling in love with the world she built so exquisitely in Hamnet, I’m here for whatever Maggie O’Farrell chooses to give to us, ever after. Thankfully, it’s always something rich, and historical: woven as densely and intricately as a tapestry. This new novel is titled Land, and tells the story of a father and son in 19th century Ireland, post Great Hunger, as they set out on the task of mapping the entirety of the country. It’s a novel of father-son relationships, rootedness, and loyalty. It’s about the human need to grapple with the ground on which we stand, in order to build a future.  –JH

Hélène Bessette, tr. Kate Briggs, Twenty Minutes of Silence
New Directions, June 2

Certain words and phrases are mocked for being over-used in book blurbs, and rightfully so—I don’t think anyone’s ever gone into a bookstore or library and asked for something “luminous.” But it’s crucial to be able to interpret keywords in book jacket copy for your own purposes: i.e., if a novel is described as “sui generis,” that’s the marketing person admitting they’ve never encountered a book like this before and have no idea how to describe it. And that is the exact kind of novel I’m drawn to, and how the forthcoming Twenty Minutes of Silence is described. See also: the promise that, in Twenty Minutes of Silence “the detective novel is turned inside out and wholly on its head.” It doesn’t sound especially luminous, but that’s not what I’m looking for.  –CK

Deborah Levy, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction
FSG, June 2

Levy is one of few writers who find fresh ways to astonish with each project. Her memoir writing on the independent artist’s life has driven me to purchase silk sheets and lust after writing sheds, while novels like The Man Who Saw Everything glitter with ambitious formal turns. My Year in Paris…promises more of that Levy wizardry: bold structural swings and a freewheeling spirit. A woman in today’s Paris is trying to write about Gertrude Stein, but she keeps hitting walls. I can’t wait to see how they’re mounted.  –BA

Courtney Maum, Alan Opts Out
Little, Brown, June 2

The eat-the-rich farce we need, from one of our funniest writers. The titular Alan, a successful and powerful advertising exec, has an epiphany on the heels of a failed pitch: that he shall renounce his capitalist ways! Of course, his family has some questions as does his affluent Connecticut community… but as readers of Maum’s Touch will know, sometimes the unexpected choice can lead to real change. Or at least we can have some fun along the way.  –DB

Daniel M. Lavery, Meeting New People
HarperVia, June 2

Both Daniel Lavery and his publisher describe this latest novel as “Nora Ephron-style,” which is an incredible endorsement and reason enough to check this book out. Lavery’s protagonist in Meeting New People is an acerbic older woman named Barbara, who is trying to optimize her next and potentially last friendship by analyzing what went wrong with failed best friendships in the past. Faced with a choice between two potential new pals, Barbara must decide whether to repeat the old or reinvent something new. Lavery is one of my favorite writers and one of the funniest prose stylists of his generation—I’m very excited for this one.  –JF

Ann Patchett, Whistler
Harper, June 2

New Ann Patchett is always a cause for celebration, and this latest is no exception. Following a middle-aged woman as she reconnects with her former step-father, it’s absolutely going to make you cry and probably make you feel a little better about the beauty of human experience in the process.  –DB

Ruth Ozeki, The Typing Lady
Viking, June 2

From bestselling novelist and Zen Buddhist priest Ozeki, a short story collection about “characters standing at life’s thresholds—grappling with faded ideals, evolving identities, and the inevitable compromises that shape a life.” True to form for Ozeki, it is also a book about books—my favorite thing.  –ET

H.W. Brands, American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington
Doubleday, June 9

2026 is going to be chock full of patriotic reflections on America’s founders, and I’m bracing myself for a year full of relitigation of what America has amounted to after two and a half centuries. Some histories and celebrations will not be worth our time (like the White House’s planned wrestling extravaganza), but I’m interested in this new biography of America’s first president, written by seasoned historian H.W. Brands. The best selling academic has written a number of impressive, one-volume biographies of famous Americans, notably Aaron Burr, Ronald Reagan, Ben Franklin, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Brands latest portrait follows Washington from early life through his maturation as a general and leader, and situates the first president among his many allies and rivals. Brands’ books are always long but move along nicely—he’s skilled at synthesizing vast lives and complicated contexts into approachable, readable narratives.  –JF

Zinzi Clemmons, Freedom: Essays
Viking, June 9

Clemmons is one of the smartest writers I know, and her first collection of essays (after her beautiful debut novel, What We Lose) showcases her ability to draw on the personal in order to understand the wider systems of power, struggle, and capitalism. The daughter of a South African mother who grew up in a white town in the Northeast, Clemmons uses her frequent travels to Johannesburg to contextualize the promises of freedom, the realities of entrenched inequalities, and consequences of violence. “Freedom is an incendiary exploration of race, sex, class, and inheritance”—an absolutely essential read.  –EF

Carlos Barragán, The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers
FSG, June 9

Maybe the preponderance of right-wing grifters has made me nostalgic for a simpler kind of con: the romance scam. The Yahoo Boys promises to be an in-depth work of narrative nonfiction that explores the material conditions that make these scams profitable, and the lives of four such scammers in Lagos, Nigeria. All these years later, we may yet cycle back to sympathizing with the “Nigerian prince” spammers desperately emailing strangers for money.  –CK

Ben Fountain, Rasputin Swims the Potomac
Flatiron, June 9

Fountain turns this scathing satire to the most relevant story of our time: the twists and turns of American democracy as it hurtles toward authoritarianism. We have reporter Clarence Thomas Jr., former country music teen star-turned White House employee Faith Spack, a two-term incumbent president campaigning for a constitutionally dubious third term, a new pandemic of “weeping sickness,” and the mystical pro wrestler Rasputin whose power is perhaps too real to control.  –EF

Mollyhall Seeley, We Hexed the Moon
S&S/Saga Press, June 9

Exactly what it says on the tin, and boy howdy what a blast! A group of teen girls decide to hex the moon and, wouldn’t you know it, the moon (in corporeal form) pops into their midst and chaos ensues. It’s a sticky-hot blast of summer-before-college nostalgia, humid and sweaty and euphoric. Oh, and it’s absolutely magical, too.  –DB

Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco
Doubleday, June 9

The Pulitzer-winner returns with what looks to be a giddy farce, about a young man who takes a role as caretaker to and for an eccentric older woman and her Tuscan estate as she tries to reconnect with the great lost love of her life.  –DB

Dave Eggers, Contrapposto
Knopf, June 9

Have you ever put off watching a TV show until the final season, then caught up all at once? I don’t mean to suggest this will be Dave Eggers’s final book—that seems extremely unlikely—but he’s been prolific enough that now might be the time to start catching up on his oeuvre, starting with next year’s Contrapposto. Plus, I’m a sucker for any story about artists and fellow travelers who are aligned creatively and misaligned-but-entangled personally.  –CK

Deb Olin Unferth, Earth 7
Graywolf, June 9

Unferth’s follow-up to the hit Barn 8 sees her heading to the future, with a nearly empty Earth and attempts by those few who remain to create something new—and maybe even better. Unclear as to whether or not the burgeoning numerical sequence to her work has a hidden meaning, but there’s only one way to find out.  –DB

Samuel R. Delany, Last and First Tales
McNally Editions, June 16

Samuel Delany is one of the greatest and most unique sci-fi writers of all time and in his 65 plus years of writing, he’s established a fearless and iconoclastic voice. Last and First Tales is a collection of stories selected by the author, including some of his early writing and his more mature and celebrated work, some reworked into new versions. Delany completionists no doubt already have this on their TBR list, but for the uninitiated who are overwhelmed by Delany’s vast output, I imagine this survey will make for a great starting place.  –JF

Joyce Carol Oates, The Frenzy
Hogarth, June 16

Our Literary Twitter Champion is not only a famously prolific tweeter, but a famously prolific writer (where oh where does she find the time?); her latest is a short story collection whose tales “evoke life at its most vivid and perilous, when fate and free will intersect, and one ominous encounter or bad choice can be the difference between an ordinary day and the point of no return.”  –ET

Amitav Ghosh, Ghost-Eye
FSG, June 16

Ghosh’s climate writing (The Great Derangement) brought the frightening future into close proximity. His fearlessness in the face of what most people find “unthinkable” has left me thrilled about the prospect of his fiction. Ghost-Eye is a time traveling odyssey involving reincarnation, environmental activism, and buried memories. I’m betting this is a climate novel worthy of the man who issued the gauntlet for same.  –BA

Erin Maglaque, Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body
Astra House, June 16

A history of women’s bodies, presented in the form of a biography of the writer’s own: from girlhood to adulthood to motherhood to caretaker, which Sophie Gilbert describes as “an immersive, revelatory, and astonishing book about women, told through the distinct bodily experiences that punctuate our lives, and the history we’ve rarely been taught.”  –ET

Devin Thomas O’Shea, The Veiled Prophet
Haymarket, June 23

A genuinely startling deep-dive into something that sounds like it should be a conspiracy theory but is, in fact, real: the secret society populated by monied elites that has controlled the heart and soul of St. Louis for over a century. It sounds like something out of Pynchon, but it turns out truth is stranger than fiction.  –DB

Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain, Bone Horn
Soft Skull, June 30

What if Alice B Toklas had a horn? And what if a private investigator went looking for it? This is the kind of mystery novel I want to read, straight up. We need more queer detective stories.  –OS

Teddy Wayne, The Au Pair
Harper, June 30

I first got to know Teddy Wayne’s writing through his short humor, and I love how his novels are able to pair his knack for a thrilling plot with his fluency with jokes and observational satire. Wayne’s newest book is about a writer whose career and marriage are struggling, and who gains a level of fame again after his infatuation with a Norwegian au pair explodes into scandal. A thriller with twists, erotic tension, and jokes about the Brooklyn literary scene, this sounds like a great early summer read.  –JF