The It Books of July 2025
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This is the Book Riot Podcast. I'm Jeff O'Neill. And I'm Rebecca Shinsky. And we're talking about the It Books of July 2025 today. We're back. We're back. Back half of the year. Also going to do a check-in on our selections and how we've done.

For 2025 so far, Rebecca, I'll tell you this. I did not have to hide anybody in the July It Books ranking. Have you looked at the July It Books and new releases? I have not done a whole lot of July new release research right now because I try not to spoil myself before we do these shows. That's very kind of you, yes. But I keep a little running list of titles I'm looking forward to so I can kind of see what I might pick each week. And it's so...

Slim pickings for most of this month and most of August. Like there are a few things I'm looking forward to, but I had not seen anything that looked like a real knockout to me. So I'm curious about how we're going to shake out here today. Again, always interesting things, but especially coming off the murderer's row of June, just as a quick reminder, King of Ashes, Susan Choi, Schwab, Feebos, Taylor Jenkins Reid, like all kinds of stuff going on there. It was a huge month. I feel like July...

I don't know if this is a Laura McGrath, a Brenna Colmer. I don't know who could tell us, but I feel like July isn't as big of a deal as it used to be. I feel like June and May are bigger, but July, we really jump off the... You know what?

Jump off the dock into the pond here. I don't remember if July ever was big. Yeah, maybe. I feel like it should be bigger. I think spring, really from the run into Memorial Day through June tends to be the big surge of summer books. But we have started getting more, it feels to me at least, more literary fiction in that same space. It's not all summer books, which is very welcome to me. But by the time we hit July, it's

pretty quiet August looks pretty quiet until the very end of August until the very end because that book is so big like we're just gonna do August yeah just put it on August 26th it's fine release the Avengers Endgame anytime you want you can do whatever you know Taylor Swift can drop a or Beyonce can drop a release like a Tuesday night with no hype it doesn't really matter there but

We're going to talk about the July It books first, and then, like I said, we're going to do a little bit of accountability corner about our selection so far. But first...

If you have the wherewithal, the interest, the ability to get to Powell's on July 9th, we will be then doing our best books of the year so far with Vanessa Diaz, a book writer, and Keith Mossman, buyer extraordinaire over there. Tickets will be available. They are available. There'll be a link in the show notes there. 7 p.m., beautiful downtown.

Portland, Oregon. I was looking at the weather. It should be nice. Rebecca's coming in. Lovely. I can't wait. We're going to have a good old time. So let us know if you're coming. I mean. But sure, get those tickets. Four book experts and 20 of the best titles of the year, plus whatever else we decide to shout out. Well, we had to lock those in a while ago, and I may have some movement on my list. There may be some. I think I have a couple that are coming in hot, at least a few honorable mentions, because we did lock them in in late May. Yeah.

And I was like, but we have a whole other month of the first half of the year to be reading for. I know. We like to cheat on these things. My recent reading has been a lot of backlist travel-based, which I'll talk about on the show we're doing a little bit later. So I don't have as many as I could, but there's a couple of contenders there. I have not read any of the July. Oh, no, that's not true. I read one of the July titles here. But first, before we get into it, let's do a sponsor break.

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I think this is my... This book was my son's. This is my son's second most anticipated book of the year. And he vamps while Edelweiss decides to... I tell you what, man. I'm all linked up. I have this stuff all ready to go. So Sunrise at the Reaping... You've gone vacation for two weeks. Sunrise at the Reaping was Ames' most anticipated book of the year and did not disappoint Ames.

I bought him Whale Fall by Daniel Krauss because he likes sci-fi and science and marine biology and like home run, home run. Can you hit three home runs simultaneously? It's been a while since I played baseball. You are barking up the wrong tree. Yeah, right. Can you explain to me the infield fly rule? Is that something we should do for a few minutes? Absolutely not. Yeah. Anyway, but Daniel Krauss has a new book coming out July 29th called Angel Down.

from Atria Books, 304 pages. It's already gotten a starred review from a couple of different spots. This one is a, I guess you'd call them sci-fi, specfic. Well, it falls a little more sci-fi, I guess. This one's a little more speculative fiction, but it's set in World War I, and a group of soldiers comes, they're walking through a battlefield, and

And they find what they seem to think is a fallen angel. And that's the story of what happens. I mean, whale fall is popular in my house. I don't either. Because it's spec fic, but it doesn't neatly fall into any particular, like whale fall and this are maybe weird fiction almost. I guess a little China Mieville is closer. Sure.

I'm really excited about this. Ames loved Whale Fall. I thought it was really interesting too. Someone who is just going to do a weird book and play it out and see how it goes. And I find very exciting. If this is good, we'll have two from this kind of author.

Which is interesting to have someone like... I can't think of a copy. Yeah, if you can pull it off twice, that is really something. Whale Fall did not fall into my personal reading zone, but Bob loved it. I think co-read it with a friend. I feel like I'm falling down on duties here because I don't think I've told him there's going to be a new Daniel Krauss this month. Well, you've got four weeks. Right. He'll be excited to hear that. I think...

weird, like weird spec fic is maybe the way to describe it. You need Sharifa. She would know better. Yeah, it does feel like Krauss is operating in a zone that we don't have anybody else currently operating in. It does, and it feels to me, I think China Mieville is an interesting comp, that if he were still writing as frequently as he had been for a while, or if the name was still as recognizable as he was for a little bit there, we might be like...

seeing those comps more actively but I think that's probably the right kind of reader for this maybe John Darnell or Sylvia Marino Garcia who kind of moves around genres and does some different stuff yeah Garcia does something different every time yeah and stay tuned I think there was a June book I don't think it may

made on here, but I'm not going to... So I think this is pretty interesting. So Wellfall Best Book of 2023 from NPR. Crazily enjoyable was the quote from the New York Times. Love to hear that. That's great for July. Kind of the right idea. That is perfect for July. The blurb here, a polyphonic tale of survival, supernatural wonder, and moral conflict. You just don't hear the serialized descriptors like that. So I'm interested, I have to say. I love polyphonic. We need to use that more often. It's a good one. If people don't remember...

He co-wrote The Shape of Water with Guillermo del Toro, which... Weird as... I mean, it's like, what is that again? I don't know. It's a combination that on paper... Well, these are on paper. That's the bad cliche. How books work. That's how books work. Well, I don't know. Pretty exciting. Pretty exciting kind of stuff. Okay, moving on. This might win the...

Oh, this one actually loaded. Okay, we should do a little Edelweiss working for me here. This might be the messiest book of July from an author I really like, Hannah Patard's If You Love It, Let It Kill You, which is a novel based on her true life experience of getting portrayed in her ex-husband's debut. Yeah, this is...

Yeah, this is so messy. Yes. So last year, maybe two years ago, she had a book out that was more about the divorce. Like that in which it reproduced conversations between her and her husband and text messages between her and her husband. What's that called?

between the friend that her husband cheated with and that person's spouse. And then she also imagined some of the conversations and messages that they might have sent to each other or that she wished they could have sent to each other. And so this is her second book about this very unusual experience. And in this one, I was just looking at this earlier because I also really like her, that she's responding to the fact that her

husband who had been having an affair writes her into his new novel and like doesn't something terrible happen to the character? I think so. I'm trying to like fuzzily look at it. Deeply complicated is what it's called here. Yeah.

We haven't really had... The Leslie Jameson thing didn't really get to a point where they were fictionalizing each other, I don't think. Right. Yeah, no. This feels like mutual assured destruction, literary variety here. Yeah. She wrote about him, and then he wrote about her. And now that she's writing about him, writing about her, and how many more rounds...

of this will they go like this is the kind of drama that you want to like be adjacent to and pop your popcorn tube but that you don't want to be anywhere right involved in so so this like book distance this is perfect i will eat this up with a spoon yes um i think so in her bio i'm just asking this question she is the winner of the amanda davis high wire fiction award

Is that someone's name, Amanda Davis Highwire? Or is it the Amanda Davis Award for like high wire fiction? What do you think here is happening? I wish that my last name were Highwire. That's badass. The Rebecca Shinsky Bungie Award. Right.

I'm going to guess it's probably just Amanda Davis and high wire is an adjective. Should we found the book, right? High wire fiction word for the best book with the highest degree of difficult. Yes. That's a category kind of the Daniel Krauss high wire award. Sure. I think highest degree of difficulty is one we should add to our like end of the year superlatives. Difficulty book. We've talked about in some time. I have to say, I,

I mean, if it were anyone other than Percival Everett, I feel like James goes sideways like 11 times out of 25 different ways. Someone somewhere got canceled just for thinking about how James could have gone.

I'm not a supporter of thought crimes, but I get it. I understand. On that one, yes. If you are sitting out there thinking about rewriting Huck Finn, maybe not. Yeah. The comps here just show how much of a mess this petard book will be. Death Valley was a broder, which was very strange. Monsters by Claire Dedder. And then, of course, All Fours by Miranda July. Yes, I did see that. Now we're in Miranda July comp land. I mean, it's old, Rebecca. I don't know what to tell you. It did. It's fine. I understand it.

And, you know, War of the Roses is being readapted. So I think we are in a moment for like a messy marriage thing. I saw the trailer for the new one recently. A little more slapstick than I think all fours turns. And I assume this is going to be too. Yeah. Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman. And they're re-releasing the book, War of the Roses, like a new edition and paperback and e-book in July for that. So maybe we're just going to have a moment of like, look at these messy marriages. I'm here for this. I know you are. Yeah.

Can Bombach adapt it, please? It's about writers and it's about marriage.

I know. And there's like a screaming cat with hard eyes on the cover. I don't know. So this is If You Love It, Let It Kill You by Hannah Pittard. I'm going to say Daniel Krauss is going to carry on here. Oh, I forgot we had that part to do. I'm just talking about books now. I know. It just occurred to me that I have to do a knockout round because you've been gone for so long. I don't know how to do this anymore. I don't know what's going on. Yeah, I think Daniel Krauss is going to carry on. Like, Whalefall had a huge audience. Pittard is wonderful, but in a pretty specific, I think, like literary fiction niche. And this sounds like...

carving more into that space. Like she's going into some weird places. It's not slapstick or a straightforward memoir or even like just a straightforward novel about this. Because as you said, the cat talks. So we'll pass Daniel Krause through. Speaking of Sylvia Moreno-Garcia, July 15th, our next contender is The Bewitching.

And there's a little bit of, remember when we were teenagers, or maybe you were a tween, when Deep Impact and Armageddon came out at the same time? Oh, yes, yeah. Armageddon was very important. So I'm not sure that July of 2025 is the time you want to be releasing a multi-generational saga about witches. Because that's what that's, it's on its own sounds amazing. Mm-hmm.

But boy, does it look if you squint or maybe really have to not squint for this not to sound like barrier bones. Yeah. Bad luck to do a multi-generational witch book right after multi-generational vampires. But Marina Garcia is like very popular and beloved by her readers. And she does manage to do a different thing in every book, which I think is a really special magic trick. Daniel Krauss is probably going to be more widely read and

I don't know that we've, I don't think any of these three so far are probably really an award contender. And all three of these are tricky for big book club stuff. But Krauss, I do think, has the most it book potential that we've heard. It feels like Marino Garcia, and I don't have the sales numbers, has found kind of a

spot. Like Mexican Gothic did, I think, quite a bit better and it raised her profile. But then Silver Nitrate and some other things, it feels like they're kind of going to be in this zone and people like this zone and I like this zone. I do too. I think that's right. She's in a good zone, a dedicated readership. She sells well enough to continue getting book deals. She does interesting things. And she's done enough different things that I think her readers have confidence that whatever the

next experiment is that will be good and interesting as well it's not like she's done one thing for 20 books and then she throws a curveball like she has demonstrated that she can really do this

So I don't know that it's exactly multi-generations of witches themselves, but there is witchcraft. There's multi-generational. The main character is a grad student focusing on the history of horror literature, looks into a manuscript, and I know you're going to be shocked. It doesn't turn out to be just a bunch of pages at that point. You read them out loud and things happen? It's set in Massachusetts. You can maybe extrapolate from there with the directionality and everything.

verticality of what that may happen to some of these witches at some point. But yeah, I think a cool book, I don't know, we get a lot of witch books and do they sell very well? We sign a lot of these, but when you come to best books of the year or most popular books of the year, it hasn't really been, I don't know. I think witches are kind of in the same zone that we're talking about Silvia Marino Garcia being in as well. Like there is a consistent audience for a witch book, but it's not a top tier book.

subject matter. We haven't looked at Barrier Bones or Atmosphere. I don't know how those books are selling. They're doing very well. Right now in hardcover fiction, it's Atmosphere and then Barrier Bones and The Midnight as well. Well, well, well. Turns out the big books turned out to be the big books. Okay. That's The Bewitching. And I don't know if I said, but it's Del Rey, July 15th. Up next, one of the authors of our heart,

Gary Stangard has a new book out July 8th from Random House called Vera, Kama, or Faith. A family struggling to stay together. And it's told through the eyes of their precocious 10-year-old daughter. And it's set contemporary. It's a contemporary novel and it's about what's going on in the country. I think...

Is there anyone you trust more than Steingart to do a comic satire contemporary dealing with real things going on right now? No, no. I don't know who else I'm picking. Steingart at the top of his game, skewering the present moment is just genuinely and consistently delightful.

blurbs from Karen Russell, Yves Barouman, and Michiko Kakutani, who I guess they just send books to? Would you mind? Every now and then, Kakutani just appears to blurb a thing. Also, Steingart probably has as much blurb

You know, probably as many chits in the blurb circuit. He's got a lot of goodwill in the blurbing game. It's like one of those poker players, the end of World Series of Poker. There's just like this giant mound of chips. And you can call anyone that he wants to to see what's going on there. So...

I am really looking forward to this. We both liked our country friends and I've been on the GS bandwagon really since Super Sad True Love Story, which I would be fascinated to read now because it feels only more and more prescient than, boy, is that 2015? I think I was blogging maybe, so it could have been even pre-BR. Yeah, we'll take a look at it. Take a look for that in the future. August is looking in

Well, this is for July. July's a little quiet. Maybe we'll... If we both read it, we'll talk about it. I don't know if we'll officially book club it. That's not on the calendar, but we'll both be reading Steingart. And it'll give me an excuse, which I always take, to remind us all that Gary Steingart is the only author who should ever be sent to review his experience on a cruise. Yeah. I mean, it's like...

David Foster Wallace meets Jesse Eisenberg is kind of the Gary. David Foster Wallace. If he didn't take himself so seriously. Yeah. Who wouldn't mind doing some selfies with martinis. Yeah. Yeah. He ends up wearing that. If folks, if you're listening to this and you have not read this, Google yourself, the Gary Steingart cruise review.

They send him on like the world's biggest cruise ship for a week and he basically has an existential crisis and ends up with a T-shirt that says something like daddy's little meatball. And it's just amazing.

The next one is Cancer Corps. Well, we got to make decisions. Oh, sorry. Gollies, I'm just moving on. So, Vera of Faith against Angel Down is where we're at right now. I think we're going to keep Daniel Krauss going. That makes sense to me as well. Steingart will be appreciated by people like us, but I think Daniel Krauss is going to sell very well. Yeah. The next one is Maggie Semicolon or A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar by Katie Yee.

I think this is my only debut pic. I'm not sure. This is Cancer Corps. It's fiction, so this may not be one for you. But a man and a woman walk into a restaurant and instead finds out that there may be some infidelity going on with someone called Maggie. She then gets a chest ache, discovers it's cancer, and then calls the tumor Maggie. And then over the course of the next months...

Great work. It's this sort of what comes after, and I guess it's told in vignettes. I'm in on this one, man. I've been seeing it everywhere. Yeah, and she creates this guy. I guess the person, I don't know if she said that's having an affair, is her husband. She's married to him. She starts to create this document called Guide to My Husband, a user's manual for the other Maggie. It sounds...

There's a version of this which is a little precious and sentimental, but actually feels a bit sharper than that. So I'm not sure what to do with this. I don't have any experience of this. I was thinking that I would like the Nora Ephron screenplay with this pitch. Because it would be... If this is done with some sharpness and the guide to my husband, because I'm going to die and you're going to be left with him, is kind of sweet, but also kind of like...

here is the really annoying thing that he does and how to deal with it or what will shut him down or any of those kinds of things that long married people have like that would make it a really enjoyable satisfying read i'm definitely going to pick this one up because i've seen it coming up everywhere i don't have enough confidence in it because it's a debut author to bump her ahead of daniel krauss but this has big book club potential i would not be surprised i

Under 200 pages. You love to see it. It was a Book of the Month Club selection, so some people are going to give it a shot there because it's part of their subscription or whatever. I'll be curious to see. I think for me to be interested in this, I need to hear that it's very funny. Yeah, I will report back. Very funny. I feel like I'm either going to make it 20 pages in or I'll read the whole thing in one sitting. So that is Maggie or A Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar by Katie Yee.

And I've lost my release date. It's coming out sometime in July. That's all I can tell you right now because it's freezing on me here. We're going to do... This is on my audiobook list. And I am not a conventional kind of true crime person. So I need something that's a little bit different. But this sounds that way.

It is coming out from Random House on July 29th. The story here, the author is The Carpool Detectives, A True Story of Four Moms, Two Bodies, and One Mysterious Cold Case by Chuck Hogan. Okay. And in 2020, this group of moms, you know, they're momming it up. And, you know, the kids are growing up and they're trying to figure out what to do, what comes next. Right.

And they find out that they all love true crime and that there was a double homicide in their hometown many years ago. And so they decide to try to solve it. And it's the true crime of this. So I'm in. That sounds like fun. Yeah, I think so. I'll wait for your review of that one. So Chuck Hogan wrote the book Prince of Thieves, which got turned into the movie The Town. And he wrote the crime novel Prince.

Gangland, which I didn't read. What a fascinating next move for him. I mean, if you're a crime writer, even a novelist, and you hear this story, I think you just take it on. I'm surprised that some podcast hasn't picked this up. Maybe they have already. It sounds very podcast-worthy. Yeah. The Carpool Detectives by Chuck Hogan. Okay. Daniel Krauss is going to continue with Angel Down, but Carpool Detectives has real potential. Yeah.

I mean, if this gets, it maybe is optioned already, but you can see a murderer's row of like 40 something actresses lining up to do a. Oh, a hundred percent. Put it on Apple. Big little lies, a lion majority, but like true crime situation. Next up, July 8th from Riverhead.

The author's, it's called A Marriage at Sea, colon, A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhurst. I like a book about relationships. I like a book about a boat. I like a nonfiction book that clocks in at 256 pages. So these two people are kind of an odd couple, and they're afraid of wasting their lives. But what if they quit their jobs and bought a boat and sailed?

And then what if it went crazy with a wild ocean and you're alone together for a long time and you're trying to survive? And it's a true story.

And also the comps are Stay True by Huashu and The Art Thief by Michael Finkel. I couldn't be more excited, Rebecca. Yeah, that sounds great. I'm checking this out. That sounds great. The nonfiction of it all means that it probably will not be up for the big book clubs. Nonfiction, again, doesn't tend to sell as well unless it sells really, really well, which maybe. This also sounds like there's adaptation potential there.

Daniel Krauss rolls on. He's having a good month. I wondered if something like this might happen. Okay, we're going to take our second break here before we go to the last. I guess we're just down to three now. We're kind of cooking through it today. Today's episode is sponsored by Twice Baked Books and Whirl Away, The Rule of the Sea by Robert Wittner.

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Textile artist Sadie Fox did not sign up for this. When she agreed to come home to P. Blossom, Indiana, it was to care for her father's beloved pumpkin patch. The deal was that, just for the summer, she would grow a ginormous pumpkin, win the Indiana State Fair's pumpkin contest, and finally win back her father's grudging respect. Instead, a horde of wild hogs destroyed the entire patch. Which is precisely when the annoyingly sexy, sunshiny next-door neighbor shows up.

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And we'll probably get a lot of juicy excerpts and interviews about it because Nicholas Boggs' Baldwin, A Love Story comes out this month. Oh, I just got this updated. This is an August 19th release. Oh, okay. I had my spreadsheet for July. I don't know if it got moved or I screwed it up. But we can do a little preview. We can talk about it here. The number one blurb is a long thing from Zadie Smith.

And then we also get Jacqueline Woodson and a whole bunch of other people going. The early reviews have been great. It's super long. It's 720 pages. I myself would love to say I would get to this. Maybe I have some time to throw together a first edition interview, see if Boggs will come talk to me for a minute or about some section of it. But I was just in the East Coast and doing a bunch of museums, and Baldwin's appearing in a lot of museums, and he's there. And he's one of those people that...

I think he has become one of those mid-20th century literary icons alongside like your Joan Didion's, where people now know him more than they know his work. Yes. And I hope this is a grain of sand around a pearl of discourse and attention can coalesce. But there's this new archival material and reporting and interviews. There hasn't been a big biography of Baldwin in three decades, right?

And I think the world is different and an approach to Baldwin right now could be radically different and unearth new things at this point. It's going to be really interesting. I think this has big award potential. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So anyway, that's a lot about a book that's not coming out this month. So it's not even in the running and Daniel Krauss rolls off. Yeah, that's an easy one for him. This one I have read. My interview with Benedict Nguyen is coming out on Thursday on first edition. I wondered about this one. The book is called Hot Girls with Balls, which certainly wins the award for best title of the month. It's fiction. It's from Catapult on July 1st. So it's out today. And it is a story about two women

trans volleyball players who, Asian American trans women who play professional volleyball in this sort of not our world but not not our world, right, where there is a men's pro indoor volleyball league that's sort of on par with the NBA, it seems like. There is no real discussion, or there's no controversy about trans athletes playing in this or that sport under this or that gender. That's one thing that I talked to Benedict about. It's like,

she wasn't interested in that discussion was interested in transness bodies athletes um fans their influencers as well as athletes um and and fell in love with volleyball uh benedict is a ballet aficionado and sort of was watching youtube one day and saw like high-level volleyball and thought it was just so beautiful interesting um so there's some really fascinating descriptions of just volleyball play that i hadn't seen before

So it has a little... There's a little near-future satire element to it, but I also really like these characters. I don't know...

if it's sort of book club friendly enough or not in terms of plot, like there's plot and things happen. Catapult makes me kind of wrinkle my brow about that. Those tend to be a little on the more literary side. It's very readable. It's not hard to, it's very readable in that way. But, and I don't think it's a topical thing either. That's not my reservation here. No, plenty of book clubs would read a book about a trans athlete. It just feels more, it's a little stranger. Yeah.

Like higher concept than a book club tends to roll with. Yeah. I think Daniel Krause then continues to carry the day, but I expect we'll see a lot about hot girls with balls. It's a really like also just standout cover. Like the title's great. The cover is bright. Um,

Um, there's a lot of potential and maybe some paperback juice next year. Center for fiction, first novel awards or pen first novel. I think I don't know how old Wynn is, but it also does feel like a, you know, national, um, book foundation 30 under 30 or the New Yorkers is New Yorker. Somebody does 35 under 35. Like there's a lot of ways that this book and Benedict Wynn could get. I don't, I don't actually know. Um,

Benedict's age, I think on the younger side, but I don't know if it's a 35 cutoff or not, but I can see that. So I liked it. I liked the book. Cool. And up last, ninth out of 10. You only had to knock out eight this month. Yeah. A follow-up with some books in between to her ginormous hit,

The Woman in Cabin 10. This is a direct follow-up. She's written other books, but this is actually a follow-up with the same characters. Okay. It's called The Woman in Suite 11. July 8th, Simon and Schuster. For a second there, I thought you were joking. Like, let's just jump off of Cabin 10 and move on to Suite 11. No, The Woman in Suite 11. You know, I would always prefer to go from a cabin to a suite. In fact, I just skipped the cabin right into the suite. Yeah.

The main character, Lo Blacklock, returns to attend the opening of a luxury hotel, only to find herself, shockingly, in a white-knuckled race across Europe, which got me a little bit interested. It's a Swiss luxury hotel, and...

Things happen. Sure. You got to go figure them out and how, who are we going to save? And can we trust everyone? And, um, I, you know, where it was a bookseller and a waitress and an English teacher, um, and worked in the press. So she knows this world a little bit too. This will probably sell very well. If it's good, it could knock out Daniel Krause, um,

but again like not much book club potential i don't think like a kind of a straight up thriller doesn't really do that very often and the expectation after a hit like woman in cabin 10 is some regression to the mean because it's also been a while since woman in cabin 10 like some other stuff and i think they've sold well but again how on the hooker readers to like revisit this character yeah i don't know so i think daniel krauss is gonna win this month in

In December, when we're reviewing the second six months of the year on It books, I don't know how we're going to feel about having made that declaration. But I don't feel bad about it. I think if anything comes up and just is obviously the pick over Angel down, it will be a surprise. I think so. Because if I look at these, I'm like, I'm not sure one that I would have even as a dark horse tsunami situation. I'd love a dark horse moment.

in the middle of July in publishing. Yes. That never happens. It would be really fun. Yeah, really interesting to see. So that's the list there. Angel Down proceeds. Just to give you the other ones we went through. If you love it,

Let It Kill You by Hannah Pittard, The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Vera or Faith by Gary Steingart, Maggie or a Man and Woman Walking to a Bar by Katie Yee, The Carpool Detectives by Carl Hogan, Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhurst, Baldwin Alive by Nicholas Bogg is coming out in August, but I did mention it, so I'll do it there, Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyen, and The Women in Suite 11.

All right. Yeah. And as always, Patreon members get access to the running list of all the titles that we talk about. You can find us at patreon.com slash bookriotpodcast, where you can also get the whole back catalog of bonus content from like three years now of making bonus content. And next week we are doing something really fun. So you'll not want to miss that. All right. Let's go through the first six months just to make sure that there's nothing avoidably barbaric that we...

have to atone for. January, easy. We nailed it. Onyx Storm, Rebecca Gannis. Easy. February. Oh boy. February was a rough look for us. Takes Me by Christina Rivera Garcia, which we talked about with Vanessa, which is...

Abstruse to the point of excruciating in some degrees. I blame this one on the blurb. Marketing, yeah. Because the pitch for this sounds like it's going to be a rip-roaring thriller of a time, and it ends up being quite experimental. I think my February pick would have either been, from the ones that we talked about that month, Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley, which performed really well. Big debut. There's already an adaptation with Austin Butler attached to it, so come on.

Or Stoneyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood was the, I think, lit for a pick. I'm going a different way. I think One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against Us by Omar Al-Khad. I've seen that all over the place. It's made some best books of the year so far list, and that, of course, is great. We had good contenders then in February. And we picked the one that doesn't work. Really. Yeah. At all. March, we screwed up. Yeah. We had The Dream Hotel by Leila Lalami. Should have been Sunrise on the Reaping. That was my fault. I can own this one.

I don't know how I let us get away with that. I just didn't know if it was going to be good. Yeah, that was the question. I didn't know if it was going to be overheated. We just didn't know. If it was on the level of Sauerberg's and Snakes, I would have felt okay about taking a shot at Leilami. I think that book is doing okay-ish. But Sunrise and the Reapies turned into a bit of a juggernaut. The Dream Hotel had just gotten one of the big book club picks as we recorded that. So it really looked like it was teed up to go places. Yeah. April...

Well, I picked this as my favorite book of the year. It seems to be doing okay. I think if you put in a different month, it could have been outmatched by some others. But I don't have something in April that really competes all that well with Audition, but you could talk me into something else. Yeah, I don't think so either. I think Audition by Katie Kitamura was the one. Of the other ones that we talked about, they're...

in some circles, including ones I'm in, there was maybe a case for searches by Vahini Vara. That continues to be mentioned. And then Heartwood by Amity Gage got one of the big monthly book club picks. I think it was also on either Barnes & Noble or Amazon's best books of the year. It was. It was on Amazon's. So far, I had not, at the time we did this in April, I had not tried to read it. But after it got that book club pick, I was like, let me give this a try. I made it like 20 pages. Really? The voice just wasn't for me. Oh.

So I would have had some bias there anyway, if I had tried it. I think we can stand by Katie Kitamura. And I still think that there's real award potential for her there. Plus, like New York Times Best Books of the Year potential. It rings some book bells. Yep. I don't know how well Matriarch by Tina Knowles has sold. It's got some Amazons and Barnes & Noble's Best Books of the Year so far, I think. I haven't heard much about it.

It's not, you know, that's not the, I tend not to do celebrity memoirs and that's not what I'm super interested in, but, yeah.

I could be convinced there's another that's so like crazy. Like, I don't know that edition is selling very well. I don't care right now because I think it's going to be around at the end of the year. Yeah, I agree. May, we nailed Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong. I think we called that before the Oprah pick and then he got the Oprah pick and that book has just continued to soar. So we did well there. And then June, I think we also nailed. We picked Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid and Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil like carried the day until Atmosphere came out.

came in and those are the correct one and two for Jane. Yeah, it feels that way though. I don't know. I think Atmosphere is okay for right now. I am feeling Bury Our Bones is going to have a little bit longer legs. I don't know why we've got no data for that, but I think...

That's going pretty well. I liked them both, but yeah, I think barrier bones just feels like it will endure a little bit longer. Um, and King of Ashes, S.A. Cosby that like that sold, it did really well. I saw it in a bunch of places. I think that he's finding his real readership. And, um,

I'm learning that like that really deep like crime fiction is not my vibe like the early essay Cosby was more where I was going to land but seeing how well King of Ashes has performed helped me recalibrate expectations around that like oh a lot of people really are into the direction that he's going and so like pay attention to that and not the fact that it's kind of a

diverging from and becoming a lot darker than the first few. Yeah. I was in a lot of bookstores in the East Coast and I saw Spent by Alison Bechdel out a lot. I mean, it's a May title. It was cover out. I think, again, a lot of independent bookstores, which makes sense. Seen a lot of profiles of her. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't picked it up. I hope to into the future. But that's another one I've seen a lot. I'm trying to look at what else here. I think The Dry Season by Phoebus has some

Has some fans. I know you're one. Yeah, it'll have some juice. I think we'll see her on end of year lists. Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin. I saw on some best books of the year so far lists and some of the other like what to read in June. I read that one. I thought it was very strong as a debut, had some debut novel problems, but like pretty good.

I'll read whatever he does next. And then I think you and Sharifa talked about Flashlight by Susan Choi from the June list and weren't in the love column for that one. I'll guess one other above. What's your sense of the Chernow situation? Oh, I don't think anybody's really talking about it. Not that much.

It's the Mark Twain. I think it's this interesting place where the book about Mark Twain is not very much about Mark Twain's writing and the literary world then doesn't know what to do with like just a story about Mark Twain, the guy. Yeah.

Yeah. And we had some listeners write in and say they liked the book, which I'm thrilled by. Great. I don't know. That's annotated. It's so big. It's quite chunky, to be sure there. Yeah. So that's so far so good. What would you give us a B plus on our picks? A minus? I think so. I mean, we really only like totally tanked it in February. Yeah. Not doing Sunrise, we can't get an A.

Yeah.

I guess I'm looking at Kitamura. I hadn't read the book when we did a, I don't think I had. But you know. But I knew. You know what we're getting. Katie Kitamura is one of our authors. Yeah. All right. Bookriot.com slash listen for show notes. Check out the Patreon there. Email us at podcast at bookriot.com. You'll also find a link to the July 9th Best Books of the Year So Far panel with Vanessa, Keith, Rebecca, and I. Powell's in beautiful downtown Portland, Oregon, 7 p.m. Eastern.

Come down. The weather's supposed to be good. Come walk around. Can you make a little weekend out of it? You know, like an early week, you know, get, get out there. It's going to be light outside because it stays light till 1149 PM right now in Portland. Um, much to my sleep to chagrin and delight. Seriously? No, like nine Oh four. It's like, it's not, it's not the, it's not known. You got to get on team. I'm ask.

You know, with my mouth guard and eye mask, I feel like there's a little bit of just put me under at that point. That's exactly how I want to go to sleep at night. Like in a coffin in the ground. I'm not under general anesthesia. I have no apologies. Eye mask, earplugs, white noise machine. Just like put me in a cave and call it a night. Yeah. All right. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Rebecca. Talk to you later.

Thanks so much for listening today. We hope you'll enjoy this audiobook excerpt of A Bookseller in Madrid by Mario Escobar, performed by Lauren Etso. My father was a writer. We had loads of books at home. Our huge library bigger than anyone else's I knew except my grandfather Gabor's. He was a well-known playwright who passed away when I was young. I inherited another passion from my father. His love for the French language.

We Germans have always had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with the French, swinging between deep admiration for their culture and literature and complete disdain for so many other things. Yet, since Adolf Hitler's rise to power and relentless attempt to take over every aspect of German society, France had become just one more enemy to take down.

My other grandfather, Klaus, came from a much humbler background, and his family trade was woodworking, though he became a pastor. I was just a child when he built me a lovely little bookshelf for my room in our house on the outskirts of Berlin. From then on, I played at being a bookseller. I practiced all the time with my two sisters and my friends.

When I finished my degree in French philology, it was the most natural thing in the world for me to start working at a highly acclaimed bookstore in downtown Berlin. The store belonged to a well-known Jewish family. The owner was one of the women I admired most in the world. Ruth Friedman inherited the business from her father, who had inherited it in turn from his. Initially selling only books in Yiddish, the store evolved into a niche for foreign language literature, especially French.

"'That girl's a tough cookie,' Mrs. Friedman said, flipping through the magazine for German booksellers. Hitler had threatened to do away with all non-Aryan cultures, but so far nothing had come of it. Mrs. Friedman believed his words were just a political maneuver to secure the support of all the racist, nationalist citizens. "'What girl?' I asked.

Francoise Frankel, the Polish woman who runs La Maison du Livre, the French bookshop. The Nazis have been giving her grief for a decade now, though I don't know if it's because she's a Jew or because she sells French books. I had heard glowing reports about that meeting place for book lovers, but had never been able to visit. As soon as my workday ended, I would head straight there to continue my research.

My goal was to finish my doctorate in French philology and then to open my own store. On top of all that, I was an editor for a few small publishing houses that translated books from French. "Why don't the police do something to stop them?" I asked. Ruth burst out laughing at my naivete. "The police? Hermann Goering is their boss. You think he'll lift a finger to protect the Jews or the Polish immigrants?"

My father, a Social Democrat, had a seat in Parliament and had already experienced the wrath of Adolf Hitler and his henchmen. After the burning of the Reichstag a month prior, the Enabling Act passed in March granted dictatorial powers to Hitler. Communist and Socialist representatives were denied access to their seats in Parliament, and many of them were locked up in jails or in Dachau, the fearful concentration camp outside of Munich.

My father had friends in the Center Party and among the non-Nazi ministers. For the moment, that had kept him out of jail. Everyone advised him to get out of the country, but he was not yet willing to leave our family home and all the memories, especially everything he had shared with my mother, Magda.

That day, when my shift was over, I removed the pink apron all the female employees wore to reveal a floral dress, which was a celebration of the long 1933 summer, and went to pay my first visit to the bookstore of Mrs. Frankel. From the outside it looked like a little French hole in the wall, but inside it was open and welcoming, the kind of place you never wanted to leave. There was a poster on the door about an upcoming lecture by a famous French author.

Several French newspapers lined the front table. Many Berliners bought French papers because censorship had already stifled most of the German periodicals. A man with round glasses looked up as I entered. Besides us, the place was oddly empty for that time of day, when people were generally out and about doing their shopping. My presence clearly surprised the man. "'May I help you with anything, young lady?' he asked. "'Oh, I'm just having a look.'

The man nodded and went back to his book. I wandered between tables and mahogany bookshelves, carefully opening the cover or running my fingers down the spine of one volume after another. I loved the smell of books and wood, of ink and paper, the aroma of libraries and bookstores. For me, that smell was the gateway to paradise lost, where nothing bad could happen to me.

After a while, a handsome man in a double-breasted, pinstriped suit walked in. He had a thin mustache, and his black hair was combed back, revealing dark eyes that devoured everything in his path. I observed him discreetly as he greeted the man at the counter, and began looking through German and French titles. I had lost my concentration. Every few seconds I glanced up cautiously at the stranger.

I wondered where he was from and what he was doing in a store that so few Germans dared to enter anymore. Then, an attractive, slender woman emerged from the back room, emanating simple, natural elegance. She introduced herself to me as the owner, Françoise Frenkel, and asked if she could help me find anything. Good afternoon. My name is Barbara. I'm looking through your French collection. I'm finishing my doctoral thesis about Honoré de Bolzac.

Well, in fact, it's about why he became one of the greatest authors in French literature despite being rejected by scholars and other famous authors." A smile played at Francois' lips. "Ah, Balzac's importance cannot be understated. One of the greatest writers of all time," she replied. "Not every book will go down in history, of course, but he painted a precise portrait of society in his day. No other author has hit the nail so squarely on the head.

I think people were miffed at how easily storytelling came to him. Balzac could churn out a masterpiece in a matter of weeks. With a click of her tongue and a sigh, she continued, the envy of his contemporaries was bound to come. The main difference between the genius and the artist is that the first does not need the effort and tenacity of the second.