The Best New Book Releases Out August 13, 2024

This dark academia thriller is gearing up to be another hit of a summer mystery. In it, Maya is excited to go back to Princeton for her 10-year reunion. She’s also hype to see her little sister, Naomi, graduate from the same school. But then something terrible happens: Naomi is found dead. Police are saying it was an accident, but Maya knows better, and as she starts to look into Naomi’s life right before she died, she sees how right she is. Turns out, Naomi had joined the über exclusive social club Maya had warned her against, and Maya is certain they approached her for the secret society within it. Maya starts to wonder if she should have been more forthcoming about what really happened at Princeton when she went there as an undergraduate because Naomi isn’t the first woman who died.

In the summer of 2020, Sophia is a young playwright whose latest play has been a hit. All that’s left is for her father—an author of yesteryear whose novels haven’t aged well—to see it and give his opinion. Little does he know it brings to life an argument the two of them had while vacationing in Sicily a couple years ago…and it cuts him up.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Storut returns to Maine where Bob Burgess, the town lawyer, has become involved in a murder investigation in which a woman has been killed, and police suspect her lonely son. While the case unfolds, Bob’s friendship with writer Lucy Barton, who lives with her ex-husband, gets deeper. Then Lucy meets Olive Kitteridge, and the two while away the days telling each other stories about the people they’ve known, thereby giving their own lives meaning.

If you haven’t already read Ifueko’s Raybearer duology and you love fantasy, please do. It’s got demons, and queer characters, and a magic system that I connected with on a spiritual level. The Maid and the Crocodile takes place in the same world as the duology, but you don’t necessarily have to have read the first books. It would be better, though, because they’re so good.

Here, Small Sade is looking for a job in the magical city of Oluwan. She hopes to work as a maid for people who won’t give her trouble for her disability or her appearance. Before she can find them, though, she accidentally becomes bound to the powerful god Crocodile, who she has to impress lest she become the latest pretty girl he devours. Crocodile, pretty himself, realizes the two of them are bound by fate once she reveals she’s a curse eater. Once she gets away from him, she starts a career as a curse eater to the wealthy, but Crocodile still has plans for her, and they may even involve a revolution.

Something about the combination of the title of this book and the cover just itches a particular part of my brain, and let me tell you that indie darling director Akhavan gets real. Like, really real. So real that if I’d experienced some of the stuff she speaks on in this memoir, I’d take it to my grave real. It starts off cute and nostalgic enough. Her childhood is full of ’90s realness—Tamagotchis, the Macarena, and discussions of Kate Moss—but then it takes a turn. Puberty hits like a natural disaster, and suddenly, she’s voted the ugliest girl at her high school (I would die), her parents strongly encourage her to get a nose job (and she does), and the first time she has sex, it’s with a guy on coke who she met at a support group for self-harm. Phew. Despite everything, the good sis perseveres in trying to find peace within her body, true home as the child of immigrants, and an authentic life as an artist.

This queer fantasy is very cozy but also very extra. Aila is this close to living out her childhood dream of conserving endangered phoenixes, but the program at the zoo she where works out is dead. She wants to prove that her facility is capable of saving the endangered birds, but she’s not the best when it comes to getting zoo patrons hype, and she feels like it’s damn near impossible to ask for help from the person who runs the most popular exhibit, griffin keeper Luciana, who was her rival in college. And who, honestly, is fine af. Aila is going to have to figure something out, though, because, as a phoenix heist shows her, the entire future of the species rests on her.