The Best New Book Releases Out August 21, 2024

Here, Sutanto—author of bestsellers like Dial A for Aunties and The Obsession—turns her talents to depicting the petty world of influencers. Meredith (Mer) Lee is an influencer who taught Aspen Palmer everything she knows about the life. But then Aspen gets too big for her britches and basically leaves Mer in the dust. So Mer, petty as she is, decides that a little Lite Stalking^TM and meddling in Aspen’s affairs are in order. Aspen, meanwhile, is confused on why it suddenly feels like everything in her life is falling apart, but she’s also not one to fall for the okie-doke and has some things up her sleeve. To make things extra spicy, Mer goes missing, and Aspen’s whole world goes sideways.

In There Are Rivers in the Sky, Booker Prize finalist Shafak tells the story of three characters spread through time. It begins with the ancient city of Nineveh, which produced one of the most enduring pieces of literature: The Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s this poem that affects the lives of Arthur in 1840s London, Narin in 2014 Turkey, and Zaleekah in 2018 London. Each of them fight to make it out of their predicaments—even as struggles with mental health threaten to pull them back down—and each is tied to the other through a single drop of water.

Graciela’s childhood is spent on a volcano among the indentured Indigenous women who work on coffee plantations in 1923 El Salvador. One day she’s taken to the capital where she’ll meet the sister she never knew she had and serve as an oracle for rising dictator El Gran Pendejo. As the years pass, they suffer under the dictator’s cruelty, and eventually realize how much they’ve unknowingly helped him subject their community to travesties. When they finally escape, they both think the other dead, and in their quest to reinvent themselves, they’ll journey from Hollywood to Paris, with the ghosts of their past lives at their heels.

La Tray always knew he was Indian, even though his father denied it. And when he goes to his grandfather’s funeral and sees so many obviously Indigenous relatives, his heritage becomes that much more undeniable. So, he sets out to learn more about his people, thereby learning more about himself. He does research, speaks to elders, and joins the more than 150-year-long struggle the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians have endured to become federally recognized.

Ezra Friedman can see ghosts. That’s obviously enough to make life interesting, but his family owning a funeral home makes life almost intolerable, especially when ghosts of his family members judge him on things like his going through hormone replacement therapy. It’s because of this constant scrutiny that he tries to keep away from the family business as much as possible, but then his dream job doesn’t quite go as he’d hoped, his mother—Messy Melinda that she is—announces her plans to dip with the rabbi’s wife, and Ezra is now firmly back in some mess. As he steps into his mother’s role in the family business, he’s also having to deal with Ben, the ghost of his crush’s dead husband. And Ben is getting a little too corporeal for Ezra’s liking.

This adventurous historical novel is inspired by the real-life, history-making aviatrix Bessie Coleman. Bessie is born one click from slavery—her mother was born enslaved—but has dreams of finding freedom in the air. And, while working at the White Sox barbershop in Chicago, she finds men who support her. The wealthy Robert Abbott and Jesse Binga become her mentor and lover, respectively, but their backing isn’t quite enough, since no one is willing to train a 26-year-old Black woman how to fly in 1920. So, years before Amelia Earhart, she travels to France and learns all manner of potentially life-ending stunts from German and French combat pilots. Bessie does find freedom in the air—it’s on land where all the trouble is: her brother is barely making it under Jim Crow, she almost dies in a crash, and her lover Binga may not be who she initially thought he was.