The Best New Book Releases Out July 5, 2023

This looks like a quiet, heartwarming story about a retired librarian looking back on his life. Bob Comet has felt unmoored since his retirement. When he finds an elderly woman lost and confused in the grocery store, he takes her back to the senior center and begins volunteering there to add some purpose to his days. He shares his life story with the friends he makes there. It promises to be “imbued with melancholy but also a bright, sustained comedy.” This is the newest from the author of The Sisters Brothers, among others.

Trinity follows three generations of a Black family living in the American South. Lottie is determined to unearth the atrocities that have left scars on her family, particularly her father and paternal grandfather, and begin their ability to heal. This is being compared to The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, The Turner House, and The Love Songs of W. E. B. DuBois. Imani Perry explains, “If we are ancestrally haunted, we may also be ancestrally healed. This is the lesson of Zelda Lockhart’s Trinity.”

Olivia Chang is used to blending into the background. In fact, she prefers it. This is her fourth school in seven years, and she’s determined to keep her head down and get through it. When “it-girl” classmate Mitzi Clarke makes a racist remark about her in class, though, that plan dissolves. She defends herself, and she is then approached by a group calling themselves the Nerd Net who are scheming to stop Mitzi’s reign of terror. They might be able to change the school — but first, Olivia will have to learn to trust other people.

When Beth Nguyen was eight months old, her family fled Saigon to America. At least, most of her family did: her mother decided to stay behind. She didn’t see her again until she was 19. In this memoir, Nguyen explores her life as a refugee as well as growing up without her mother — and Nguyen’s experience of the handful of meetings she had with her mother as an adult. This relationship becomes even more complicated when Nguyen becomes a mother herself.

If there’s one thing book lovers can’t resist, it’s a book about books. This sounds like a story that will appeal to fans of Gabrielle Zevin’s The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry! It follows elderly German bookseller Carl Kollhoff, who delivers books to his top customers in the evening after the shop closes. When he loses his job, he finds an unexpected friendship with a 9-year-old girl who helps to remind him about what really matters.

Alice is struggling to reconcile Pete’s betrayal with what she thought of her marriage. So she decides to get away for a while, packing the family up from New York City and into their vacation home in Maine. It’s 2020, though, and things aren’t so simple. Alice is now quarantining with her husband and two kids, and she feels more trapped than ever, especially in the face of hostile neighbors. Christina Baker Kline describes this as a “tender, big-hearted, clear-eyed portrait of a marriage, and a family, in crisis.”

Matt Browning has spent more than 25 years investigating white supremacist groups, infiltrating them in the hopes of having participants arrested. In The Hate Next Door, Browning explains how these aren’t fringe elements, but an interconnected and powerful movement. January 6th should be a wake-up call that these groups are on the rise. Browning teaches readers how to identify white supremacist groups — and how to fight them.