The Great Summer 2024 Book Preview

The Millions dropped one of their most exciting posts of the year this week, highlighting the books that readers should be most excited to get on their TBR this summer. The literary publication selected 80 books for their Great Summer Preview, creating a handy guide to must-read books for summer 2024.

Titles range genres and include both fiction and nonfiction (and let’s go ahead here and do the thing we’re not supposed to–the covers are fantastic!). You’ll find both buzzy titles and a huge array of books that may otherwise get a little lost in the noise.

Here’s a small sampling of their picks:

• Misrecognition by Madison Newbound: “Newbound’s debut novel, billed as being in the vein of Rachel Cusk and Patricia Lockwood, chronicles an aimless, brokenhearted woman’s search for meaning in the infinite scroll of the internet. Vladimir author Julia May Jonas describes it as “a shockingly modern” novel that captures “isolation and longing in our age of screens.””
• Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner: “In this particular instance, “Long Island Compromise” refers to the long-anticipated follow-up to Fleishman Is In Trouble, not the technical term for getting on the Babylon line of the LIRR with a bunch of Bud-addled Mets fans after 1 a.m.”
• The Coin by Yasmin Zaher: “Zaher’s debut novel, about a young Palestinian woman unraveling in New York City, is an essential, thrilling addition to the Women on the Verge subgenre. Don’t just take it from me: the blurbs for this one are some of the most rhapsodic I’ve ever seen, and the book’s ardent fans include Katie Kitamura, Hilary Leichter, and, yes, Slavoj Žižek, who calls it “a masterpiece.””
• The Lucky Ones by Zara Chowdhary: “The debut memoir by Chowdhary, a survivor of one of the worst massacres in Indian history, weaves together histories both personal and political to paint a harrowing portrait of anti-Muslim violence in her home country of India. Alexander Chee calls this “a warning, thrown to the world,” and Nicole Chung describes it as “an astonishing feat of storytelling.””
• In the Shadow of the Fall by Tobi Ogundiran: “Inspired by West African folkore, Ogundiran (author of the superb short speculative fiction collection Jackal, Jackal) centers this fantasy novella, the first of duology, on a sort-of anti-chosen one: a young acolyte aspiring to priesthood, but unable to get the orishas to speak. So she endeavors to trap one of the spirits, but in the process gets embroiled in a cosmic war—just the kind of grand, anything-can-happen premise that makes Ogundiran’s stories so powerful.”
• Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party by Edward Dolnick: “Within the past couple of years, three tweens found the fossilized remains of a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex in North Dakota and an 11-year-old beachcomber came upon an ichthyosaur jaw in southwestern England, sparking scientific excitement. Dolnick’s book revisits similar discoveries from Darwin’s own century, when astonished amateurs couldn’t yet draw upon centuries of paleontology and drew their own conclusions about the fossils and footprints they unearthed.”

Check out the entire preview on The Millions and load up that summer (and fall!) reading list.