What are the Best New Books Coming in August 2018?

New month, new books! Book Light is our Dandelion Chandelier curated list of the titles we’re most excited about that are being published in the coming month. Our intrepid team has been exploring the most-anticipated new books scheduled to be released in August 2018 and here’s what we found.

August brings new beach reads, but the month’s new releases also take a more sober turn as the summer winds down and autumn approaches. There are surrealist novels and tales of revenge and deception, as well as bubbly romances, road trips, and stories of friendship and family. Paris makes an appearance several times. On the non-fiction front, there are histories starring heroic women, Oklahoma City, and sports legend Arthur Ashe. Plus artificial hearts, driver-less cars and Ms. Lauryn Hill. It’s a hot list for a hot month.

Here’s our pick of the top new books – novels, essay collections, and non-fiction – that we cannot wait to read. You can preorder them now if you like.

Goodbye, Paris by Anstey Harris is a bubbly beach read about Grace, once a promising young musician, who hasn’t been able to play her cello publicly since a traumatic event in college. Since then, she’s built a quiet life for herself in her small English village, repairing instruments and nurturing her long- distance affair with a married man. When David saves the life of a woman in the Paris Metro, his resulting fame shines a light onto the real state of the relationship(s) in his life. Grace’s closest friends step in to help, but will their friendship be enough to help her pick up the pieces? We’re guessing the answer is yes. But we’ll see. – August 7, 2018

The Third Hotel by Laura van den Berg. In this surrealistic novel set in Havana, Cuba, a widow tries to come to terms with her husband’s death―and the truth about their marriage. Shortly after Clare arrives in Havana to attend the annual Festival of New Latin American Cinema, she sees a man who appears to be her late husband, Richard. Grieving and baffled, Clare tails Richard, a horror film scholar, through the newly tourist-filled streets of Havana, clocking his every move, all the while remembering her childhood and ultimately revealing her role in her husband’s fate. – August 7, 2018

A Short Film About Disappointment by Joshua Mattson is a novel about art and revenge, told in the form of 80 movie reviews. In near-future America, film critic Noah Body uploads his reviews to a content aggregator. His job is routine: watch, seethe, pan. He dreams of making his own film, free from the hackery of commercial cinema. Faced with writing about lousy movies for a website that no one reads, Noah smuggles into his work episodes from his trainwreck of a life. – August 7, 2018

Three Things About Elsie by Joanna Cannon. The bestselling author of one of our favorite novels, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, delivers a new novel about a lifelong friendship, a devastating secret, and the small acts of kindness that bring people together. Eighty-four-year-old Florence has fallen in her flat at Cherry Tree Home for the Elderly. As she waits to be rescued, she thinks about her friend Elsie and wonders if a terrible secret from their past is about to come to light. If the charming new resident is who he claims to be, why does he look exactly like a man who died sixty years ago? – August 7, 2018

Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart by Mimi Swartz. Part investigative journalism, part medical mystery, this is the dazzling true story of fifty years of false starts, abysmal failures and miraculous triumphs, as experienced by one the world’s foremost heart surgeons, O.H. “Bud” Frazier, who devoted his professional life to saving the un-savable. – August 7, 2018

Certain American States: Stories by Catherine Lacey. This quietly poignant and utterly moving collection of short stories—about characters seeking, struggling, and attempting to come to terms with the world around them—is the latest from the author of the fantastic novels The Answers and Nobody Is Ever Missing. – August 7, 2018

If You Leave Me by Crystal Hana Kim is a debut novel about war, family, and a love affair that begins in Korea during the country’s civil war. Sixteen-year-old Haemi Lee, along with her family, is forced to flee to a refugee camp. Her childhood friend, Kyunghwan and his older and wealthier cousin, Jisoo, are both at the camp, and are both in love with her. As Haemi becomes a wife, then a mother, her decision to forsake the boy she always loved for the security of a wealthy man results in profound effects for generations to come. – August 7, 2018

She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill by Joan Morgan. To mark the twentieth anniversary of the acclaimed and influential debut album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill comes this exploration of the artist and her legacy. Released in 1998, Hill’s first solo album is often cited by music critics as one of the most important recordings in modern history. Artists from Beyoncé to Nicki Minaj to Janelle Monáe have claimed it as an inspiration, and it was recently included in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress. It’s an incredible journey by a young, fierce, and determined singer-rapper-songwriter who made music history – August 7, 2018

The Bucket List by Georgia Clark is a beach read about a 25-year old woman who, after discovering she has BCRA1 gene mutation – the breast cancer gene – embarks on an adventure. Lacey Whitman’s high hereditary risk forces a decision: increased surveillance or the more radical step of a preventative double mastectomy. To help her make her choice, she and her friends create a “boob bucket list”: everything she wants do with and for her boobs before a possible surgery. This kicks off a year of sensual exploration and an exploration of her relationship to her body and her future. Both are things she thought she could control – both turn out to be more complicated than she imagined. – August 7, 2018

Baby, You’re Gonna Be Mine: Stories by Kevin Wilson. The author of the collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth and the novels The Family Fang and Perfect Little World is back with stories that make the strange all at once funny, fractious, and familiar. – August 7, 2018

Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History by Keith O’Brien. As in Hidden Figures and Girls of Atomic City, this tome reveals a little-known slice of history. Between the world wars, no sport was more popular, or more dangerous, than airplane racing. The male pilots were hailed as dashing heroes who cheerfully stared death in the face. The female pilots were more often ridiculed for what the press portrayed as frivolous efforts to horn in on a “manly” pursuit. Fly Girls recounts how a cadre of 5 women banded together to fight the effort to keep them out of the sky. From a high‑school dropout who worked for a dry cleaner to a mother of two young children who got her start selling coal, they fought together for the chance to race against the men — and in 1936 one of them would triumph in the toughest race of all. – August 7, 2018

Severance by Ling Ma is an “apocalyptic satire” featuring Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower. She goes to work, following a comforting routine, and barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers? A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, it’s also a tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive. – August 14, 2018

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft won the Man Booker International Prize. It’s a series of interwoven stories that explore what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? This is one storyteller’s answer. – August 14, 2018

A River of Stars by Vanessa Hua is a debut novel about immigration, motherhood and adventure. It follows Scarlett Chen, an expectant mother, from China to Los Angeles, where she has been sent to give birth, and from whence she flees, embarking on a journey toward a future of her own making. -August 14, 2018

His Favorites by Kate Walbert. The bestselling National Book Award finalist and author of A Short History of Women returns with a novel about a teenaged girl, a charismatic older teacher, and a dark, open secret. Jo flees her hometown after a tragic accident involving the death of her best friend, and enrolls at a prestigious boarding school. She is ready to begin again, but she finds treachery in her new world. Told from her perspective many years later, her story describes the series of violations she experienced as an ambitious and vulnerable young woman. – August 14, 2018

The Carrying: Poems by Ada Limón. This latest collection from the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist explores the cruck of the moment in life between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility. A nation convulses: “Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal.” Throughout, the there is also hunger, love, and joy, the elements of a full life, well lived: “Fine then, / I’ll take it,” she writes. “I’ll take it all.” – August 14, 2018

All Happy Families: A Memoir by Jeanne McCulloch. On a mid-August weekend, two families assemble for a wedding at a rambling family mansion on the beach in East Hampton. But before the festivities can begin, the father of the bride suffers a massive stroke from alcohol withdrawal, and becomes comatose. So begins this memoir of the author’s wedding weekend in 1983 and it’s after effects on her family, and the family of the groom. The wedding goes on at the insistence of the bride’s theatrical mother. Instead of a planned honeymoon, wedding presents are stashed in the attic, arrangements are made for a funeral, and a team of lawyers arrive. The repercussions from that weekend will ripple throughout both families, as they grapple with questions of loyalty, tradition, marital honor, hope, and loss. – August 14, 2018

Summer by Karl Ove Knausgaard is the fourth volume of the Seasons quartet, a collection of short prose and diaries written by a father for his youngest daughter. In this final entry, the author mines his difficult memories of his childhood and fraught relationship with his own father. His publisher notes that “documenting his family’s life in rural Sweden and reflecting on an eclectic array of subjects, including mosquitoes, barbeques, cynicism, and skin, he braids the various threads of the previous volumes into a moving conclusion.” – August 21, 2018

Arthur Ashe: A Life by Raymond Arsenault. Just in time for the US Open comes the first comprehensive, authoritative biography of American icon Arthur Ashe—the Jackie Robinson of men’s tennis—a pioneering athlete who, after breaking the color barrier, went on to become an influential civil rights activist and public intellectual. – August 21, 2018

Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, its Chaotic Founding… its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis by Sam Anderson. The staff writer at the New York Times magazine shares the idiosyncratic mix of American history, sports reporting, urban studies and more to tell the strange but compelling story of an American city whose unique mix of geography and history make it a fascinating microcosm of the nation. With characters ranging from NBA superstars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook; to Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne; to legendary meteorologist Gary England; to Stanley Draper, Oklahoma City’s would-be Robert Moses; to civil rights activist Clara Luper; to the citizens and public servants who survived the notorious 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building, this is an insightful look at an urban tapestry woven from control and chaos, sports and civics. – August 21, 2018

Ohio by Stephen Markley is a topical novel about life in in an archetypal small town in northeastern Ohio—a region ravaged by the Great Recession, an opioid crisis, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—depicting one feverish, fateful summer night in 2013 when four former classmates converge on their hometown, each with a mission, all haunted by the ghosts of their shared histories. Bill is an alcoholic, drug-abusing activist; Stacey, a doctoral candidate reluctantly confronting the mother of her former lover. Dan is a shy veteran of three tours in Iraq, home for a dinner date with the high school sweetheart he’s tried to forget; Tina is pursuing a rendezvous with the captain of the football team. By the end of the night, someone will be gone. – August 21, 2018

Vox by Christina Dalcher. In the spirit of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Power, this dystopian novel is about those who have been silenced. On the day the government decrees that women are no longer allowed more than one hundred words per day, Dr. Jean McClellan is in denial. This can’t happen here. Not in America. Not to her. Soon women are not permitted to hold jobs. Girls are not taught to read or write. Females no longer have a voice. Before, the average person spoke sixteen thousand words each day, but now women have only one hundred to make themselves heard. Jean decides to make every one count. – August 21, 2018

Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car—And How It Will Reshape Our World by Lawrence D. Burns and Christopher Shulgan is the story of the engineers and other unlikely thinkers who continue to pursue the quest to develop and perfect the driverless car. It’s an innovation that could be the most disruptive change to everyday life since the smartphone – what will it mean for individuals and society, and how should we best navigate this brave new world? – August 28, 2018

French Exit by Patrick deWitt is a darkly comic novel about a wealthy widow and her adult son who flee New York in the wake of scandal and financial disintegration. Frances Price – tart widow, possessive mother, and Upper East Side force of nature – is in dire straits, beset by scandal and impending bankruptcy. Her adult son Malcolm is no help, mired in a permanent state of arrested development. And then there’s the Price’s aging cat, Small Frank, who Frances believes houses the spirit of her late husband, an infamously immoral litigator and world-class cad whose gruesome tabloid death made his family social outcasts. They decide to cut their losses and head for in their beloved Paris. What transpires is a ‘tragedy of manners,’ a send-up of high society, and a moving mother/son caper – August 28, 2018

Whether you exit to Paris, Martha’s Vineyard, or some other wonderful place in August, we hope this list will help you choose a couple of great traveling companions to tuck into your bag. Happy reading.

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