The Best New Book Releases Out August 6, 2024

Every story I’ve read by Djèlí Clark has been woman-centric and fantastical, and I am super geeked for these dead cat tail assassins. Eveen the Eviscerator is our protagonist, and early on, we find out she’s a pro working in an ancient city. She’s sworn to the Matron of Assassins and must follow three vows lest she meet an early end. But then the city gets turned upside down, and a memory suddenly surfaces that was meant to be wiped, and now she’s got to make good on a promise she made a while ago.

In Hum, National Book Award—longlisted Helen Phillips nestles a sort of utopia inside a largely dystopian world. May loses her job to AI robots called “Hums” in a climate change-stricken city. Desperate to take care of her family, she signs up for an experiment that makes her unrecognizable to surveillance. She also spends a pretty penny on passes to a botanical garden that’s basically Eden 2.0. But the addiction to tech devices her family has proves harder to shake than she thought, and she realizes she’ll have to resort to trusting a dubious Hum.

At this point, we already know what to expect from Moreno-Garcia: bangers. This time, the genre chameleon tells us the story of three women. In 1950s Hollywood, two of them are Tinseltown hopefuls. There’s the unknown Mexican ingenue, Vera Larios, who becomes the girl du jour after it’s announced that she’s to play the life-changing role of Salome—but there’s also Nancy Hartley, an actress still hoping to make it big, and who has fallen into desperation. Lastly, there’s princess Salome herself, cursed to love the prophet who has doomed her stepfather, Herod.

Multi-award-winning author Iglesias is following up 2022’s The Devil Takes You Home with a doomed story of vengeance and the cycle of violence. Childhood friends Gabe, Xavier, Tavo, Paul, and Bimbo grow up in Puerto Rico with death never far away, but then Bimbo’s mother is murdered, and everything changes. Now the boys want revenge. When Bimbo sets out to find his mother’s killer, he has no mercy, and he soon learns that a ruthless kingpin may have been involved. But with a hurricane steady forming around the island, preparing to bring with it all manner of evil spirits, the boys may not be able to act out their vengeance as they’d hoped.

From an abuela-turned-marionette to mango farmers, reggaetón stars, and cyborgs, the characters and stories in this debut collection explore the past, present, and future of Central America.

Also, that cover is dope.

I got this book in the mail a few days ago, and the cover is so pretty! In-person, it has the added effect of shiny, mirror-like reflections. Gah, I live.

At first, I thought it was an Asian mythology-inspired YA with romance, maybe a little court intrigue, all that good stuff that I usually love. But it’s got a little more going on than that—for one, bestselling author Chloe Gong says it’s “The perfect blend of royal court drama and spine-chilling horror.” In it, Princess Ying Yue is a recovering romantic. A former believer in love, she becomes disillusioned once she’s chosen to marry the crown prince, who is cold and indifferent, and confines her to her room without explanation. With only herself—and her reflection—as company, she starts to see things. Then she unknowingly opens a gateway to a mirror world where she falls in love with an alternate crown prince. As it turns out, the two worlds are connected in bloody ways that involve the seven brides who came before her.