All the hot books dancing and waving

reading a deep dishy cut on the pub world while gobbling popcorn and watching the action

It’s book-buying season, kids! Which means it’s book selling season, and also authors and editors and publishers nibbling their fingernails and watching and waiting, because every summer there is… ONE BOOK.

One book everyone reads, or thinks about reading, or buys and carries around and doesn’t read, or refuses to read because it’s too popular. You KNOW this is true, think Little Fires Everywhere, The Last Thing He Told Me, The Guest List, Every Summer After, The Vanishing Half. Daisy Jones. Crawdads. They’re fun smart page-turners, mostly—meaty enough to be memorable, pulpy enough to be gobble-able.

It’s actually too soon to dub THE summer books of the past couple summers—The God of the Woods and The Wedding People, All Fours, Yellowface, The Women, The Maid, The Housemaid…all of those are recognizable, but what really makes that one summer hit is that people keep reading it, pressing it on their friends, talking about it, and the next summer it’s everywhere in paperback—we spot the real cultural moments only after they’ve passed.

But the glorious thing is that they recur! They keep happening. So now we can watch all the fresh new books, the new hopes, dancing around and waving to us in the hands of various book-fluencers, on most-anticipated lists, etc, etc. And to really enjoy not just what you get to read but watching the pageant with your popcorn—I suggest you dig deep into the past and load Olivia Goldsmith’s The Bestseller onto your e-reader of choice. Hesitating? Then let me tell you that a) she was the author of The First Wives Club and the original angry first wife and b) she died of complications from plastic surgery. This is a woman who was BORN to write dishy tell-alls, and sadly died for it as well.

It’s a blast from the past, a novel that names names—should you happen to time travel back to a publishing party in 1996 you will have ALL the goss—and also very much stylistically a novel of its time, in which five compellingly melodramatic stories (each of an author and their book) converge to land one on the bestseller list—but will it be the ripped-from-the-headlines thriller written by the downtrodden second wife and stolen by her no-good former professor husband? or the clever Americans abroad satire by the almost-30 spinster tour guide (it’s 1996 people, and our author was born in the 1940’s, this girl is ON THE SHELF) who may have also found love in the form of an editor’s brother? or the posthumous work of literary genius marketed by the angry mother whose daughter hung herself in an apartment plastered over with rejection slips?

I don’t even know yet, but thanks to

Kate McKean

I’m spending many happy hours finding out.

Look, I don’t know what the book of the summer will be. You know I loved Mansion Beach and We Are All Guilty. I’ve pre-ordered Everyone Is Lying to You. You should DEFINITELY grab Dying to Meet You if you’ve ever liked anything I’ve recommended—it’s a line drive straight up the middle. And I just got Jane Rosen’s newest, Songs of Summer—she’s a solid bet, and same can be said of Annabel Monaghan (It’s a Love Story). I also pre-ordered Amy Poeppel’s (Far and Away).

Looking ahead at the line-up… I still don’t know, I can hardly hazard a guess. I suspect it’s not going to be any of the obvious picks (I’m here for the new R.F. Kuang, but I dunno—it’s rare to see fantasy hit this barrier, although maybe we could argue for The Ministry of Time). A lot of the big push authors have been around this block a few times, which may mean it’s hard to get super excited about a new Taylor Jenkins Reid (I’m not, but that’s because I find space stressful unless we’re in Becky Chambers/Star Trek mode).

My bet is on an unsung, come-from behind dark horse, someone on her 7th or so novel that seems to be an “overnight success”. But I want your bets!! Who thinks they’ve got the book of the summer pegged? Winner gets bragging rights.