It was touch and go for a while there but summer has finally – finally – arrived. As you're compiling your perfect holiday wardrobe, figuring out how to squeeze your cleanser, toner, moisturiser and sunscreen into your carry-on, and pondering whether you can really pull off those cat-eye sunglasses everyone seems to be wearing, give some thought to your reading matter.
Tara Isabella Burton's gripping debut Social Creature has been described as a cross between The Talented Mr Ripley and The Secret History – a poolside page-turner if ever we heard one – while at the other end of the spectrum, Rachel Kushner dives into the American prison system in The Mars Room. There's a hugely anticipated memoir from poet, model and LGBTQ activist Yrsa Daley-Ward, and Meg Wolitzer's engrossing and characterful The Female Persuasion. Whether you're after intelligent escapism, a lyrical coming-of-age tale or something in between, this month's new releases have you covered.
Read on for the books we're taking to the beach this June.
The Terrible
Yrsa Daley-Ward
"All of a sudden I arrived at an age when things began to shift a little, and for the first time men started to behave differently. Whistled in the street. Smiled at me in the supermarket. I was no longer invisible, growing into something very different – still a child at 13, only I didn’t look like one. I took attention and desire for love, and would go on to confuse them for a good many years. At 15 going on 16, perhaps I smiled when my friend’s father said something strange to me in the back of the car. Perhaps I told my mum I was sleeping at a friend’s and went out drinking underage. Perhaps I kissed the 40-year-old chef in the restaurant I was working in after my shift one night, because he’d been aggressively flirting with me for months and I didn’t know what else to do."
Read the rest of Yrsa Daley-Ward's exclusive essay for Refinery29 here, then run out immediately and buy a copy of her memoir, The Terrible.
Out 5th June
The Mars Room
Rachel Kushner
Any book by literary darling Rachel Kushner will be highly anticipated, and The Mars Room is no exception. The Mars Room is a bleak look at an American woman whose life has veered off track; an American woman who never had much hope in the first place. For years, Romy worked as a stripper at the Mars Room, a seedy San Francisco club. Then, after killing her stalker, Romy is sentenced to prison. While in prison, Romy loses contact with her son and becomes numbed by the difficulties and mundanities of institutional life. The Mars Room is a bleak, affecting read.
Out 7th June
The Female Persuasion
Meg Wolitzer
If you read The Interestings, you know that Meg Wolitzer has a knack for creating a whirlwind of rich, complicated lives to get lost in for the duration it takes to complete her mammoth novels. So a few years after completing The Female Persuasion, you might mistake Greer Kadetsky, the book’s protagonist, as your old friend from college — that’s how real she feels. Greer is a freshman in college when she meets Faith Frank, the Gloria Steinem equivalent who snaps Greer out of a funk and pushes her down a path towards, hopefully, fulfilment. As Greer’s career moves one way, towards a feminist organisation and a move to Brooklyn, her longtime boyfriend’s life veers sharply and unexpectedly in another. Greer and the other characters in this bustling, large-hearted book negotiate their dreams along with the curveballs. The Female Persuasion discusses timely issues of feminism (and second-wave feminism’s struggle to adopt intersectionality), but does so through fully realised characters.
Out 7th June
Social Creature
Tara Isabella Burton
Louise is 29 years old. Louise has three miserable jobs and sublets a nasty apartment in a nasty part of town. Louise dreams of becoming a Great Writer but they say if you haven't made it in New York by 30, you never will.
Lavinia is 23 years old. Lavinia dresses in feathers, breaks into Central Park Zoo in the middle of the night – just because she can – and dances drunkenly in the fountain outside Lincoln Center. Lavinia takes Louise under her wing, propelling her into New York's drug-fuelled, decadent, head-spinning party scene. Finally, thinks Louise, this is it.
And then everything starts to unravel.
Out 14th June
Crudo
Olivia Laing
We've been huge fans of Olivia Laing since reading The Lonely City, her compelling exploration of art and loneliness in New York, so we're champing at the bit to get our hands on a copy of Crudo, which promises a witty and raw account of a writer wrestling with love during the relentlessly awful summer of 2017.
Out 28th June
Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?
Get To Know The Sad, Funny & Sexy Work Of This Coming-Of-Age Photographer
I Was 6 When I Found Out My Dad Wasn't My Dad – Here's What Happened Next