5 electrifying books to read this June to spark your imagination
When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team.
Summer reading is still a pastime worth indulging, especially with a consistent stream of enthralling would-be beach reads coming in June. This month's new releases include some of the summer's most anticipated books alongside some daring debuts, including another love story by Taylor Jenkins Reid, an experimental memoir/fiction hybrid and an ode to Virgil Abloh.
'Atmosphere: A Love Story' by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The bestselling author behind "Daisy Jones & The Six" and "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo," Reid infuses the "stratospheric tension of a 1980s space mission with a cosmic love story" in her latest novel, "Atmosphere: A Love Story," The New York Times said. "I wanted to tell a grand, epic love story,” Jenkins Reid said to Vogue of her latest project. The story follows Joan Goodwin, an astronomy professor who gets the chance to join NASA's space shuttle program and finds love and faces sexism along the way. The space thriller is filled with "high-stakes action," but the "touching and surprising love story is the emotional heart of the book," said Kirkus Reviews. (June 3; $21, Amazon; $30, Penguin Random House)
'The Slip' by Lucas Schaefer
Schaefer's ambitious debut novel is a "tragicomic Texan epic" that tackles "race, class, gender, sexuality, police violence, mental illness, immigration, boxing and clowning," Dan Sheehan said at Lithub. The nearly 500-page story follows an "endearingly malcontent teenage boy" named Nathaniel Rothstein who spends the summer of 1998 training under a "swaggering Haitian ex-boxer." Just as Nathaniel starts to come into his own, he disappears. From that point, "Schafer builds us a big, bold, brave, brilliant, beast of a novel," the outlet said. The novel is as "fearless and enjoyable a debut as you're likely to read this year."
If you like your fiction "neat and ruminative, stay away from this sweaty, outrageous book," said The Washington Post. (June 3; $28, Amazon; $30, Simon & Schuster)
'Great Black Hope' by Rob Franklin
"Great Black Hope" is another debut due this month, this one from poet Rob Franklin. It's a "coming-of-age whodunit about race, class and addiction," Time said. After the mysterious death of his friend Elle, Smith, a queer Black Stanford graduate "reckons with his class privilege and drug use in the aftermath of his best friend's mysterious death," said Publishers Weekly. When he is arrested for drug possession in the Hamptons, he uses his prestigious background to his advantage. Eventually, he realizes the limits of this privilege as he navigates the U.S. criminal justice system. Franklin "keenly portrays Smith's grief over Elle and how they fell into their hard-partying life. Readers will be rapt." (June 10; $26, Amazon; $29, Simon & Schuster)
'The Mobius Book' by Catherine Lacey
Named after the "twisty single-sided mathematical strip," Lacey's experimental book, "neither straightforward novel nor memoir," presents readers with "two distinct narratives" that begin on either cover, Jasmine Vojdani said at Vulture. One story is an "intimate chronicle of the aftermath of the author's sudden breakup with a man she refers to as The Reason"; the other is a story where "friends Edie and Marie process their relationships while ignoring what appears to be blood leaking from a neighbor's apartment." Recurring themes in both include "friendship, memory, broken teacups, broken hearts and faith." Lacey's "The Mobius Book" is a "curious and unique work." (June 17; $27, Amazon; $27, Macmillan Publishers)
'Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh' by Robin Givhan
This biography of Virgil Abloh, the late former men's wear chief at Louis Vuitton, "doubles as a lens into a staid luxury industry undergoing rapid transformation," said The New York Times. Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Givhan "deftly lays out how streetwear's grassroots revolution challenged fashion's stuffy notions of taste, exclusivity and their consumers" while paving the way for "a hip-hop provocateur like Abloh to rise to the top." (June 24; $21, Amazon; $35, Penguin Random House)