Summer Paperbacks That Make a Splash

The bestselling author of The Plot and You Should Have Known (which was made into HBO’s The Undoing, starring Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman) is back with an ingenious family epic featuring the Oppenheimers. They are a Brooklyn Heights–based-family—husband and wife Salo and Joanna and their triplets, Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally. Suffice it to say that this is not one big happy family. As the triplets—products of IVF, and yes, that becomes important to the story—prepare to leave for college, the quintet’s dysfunction shifts into high gear. It’s left to the “latecomer,” an unexpected fourth child, to perhaps prove that maybe people can change after all.

Maud travels to New York’s Hudson Valley for a summer of hard work: restoring the ruins of a 19th-century garden and relinquishing her crumbling marriage. She is not expecting to meet Gabriel, a charming archaeologist who becomes entangled in her life—and the life of her troubled tweenage daughter. With language as lush as the setting, Delury pulls readers into a thicket of lust, responsibility, and betrayal that they won’t want to escape.

As fans of Lauren Groff and Bruce Holsinger can attest, medieval history is fertile soil for rich, resonant storytelling. Moshfegh, the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, returns with the captivating tale of Marek, a motherless shepherd boy whose ties to a blind midwife ripple through their community and threaten to topple a church hierarchy. Moshfegh expertly creates a world with its own superstitions and laws, both timeless and topical, “made of limestone, the air heavy with the blood smell of iron.”

The 99th Oprah’s Book Club selection is finally out in an edition you won’t feel guilty-dog earing! By the author of the 2012 phenom Quiet, this timely and timeless exploration of the “melancholic direction” of how “the tragedy of life is linked inescapably with its splendor” is both an antidote for our uncertain times and a toolbox for using angst and yearning as a means of transforming pain into “creativity, transcendence, and love.” While this might not exactly sound like a beach read, it’s surprisingly uplifting. As Oprah put it, “This book has the power to transform the way you see your life and even the world.”

In the acclaimed poet’s first collection since the stunning On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong returns to familiar themes of longing, grief, and survival. Among the most haunting in the collection is a poem that lists items ordered from Amazon leading up to the death of his mother from cancer, the last line—one pair of woolen socks—a singular reminder that we come here alone and we die alone, regardless of whether time nurtures us or not.

In this unpredictable and propulsive romp of a thriller, after dedicating decades to eliminating the world’s most dangerous offenders, four female professional killers on the precipice of retirement find themselves in their agency’s crosshairs. Almost as maddening, no one can pinpoint the reason. In flashbacks, between thwarting their own assassinations and trying to ferret out why they’ve been targeted, we learn their stories—how this clandestine crew came into being, the challenges they faced, and how their spectacular success was finally turned against them. An inventive and distinctly feminist escapade.

Nothing delights like a sublime novel cunningly crafted by a writer at the height of her powers. Gil is a wealthy, laconic white guy who, in the wake of a doomed romance, abandons his life in Manhattan for a “castle” in a normie Phoenix neighborhood. A picture-perfect family inhabits the glass house next door, gradually drawing him into the dramas of their lives. Millet’s previous novel, A Children’s Bible, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award; here she metes out, in terse, calibrated prose, a tale of menace and redemption and the wall that separates them like a clear pane.