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Literary Fiction July 2025 |
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| Flashlight by Susan ChoiFlashlight follows American Louisa Kang and her family across locations and years, but focuses on the night young Louisa and her ethnically Korean father walk on a beach in Japan. Later, she washes ashore, amnesiac and clinging to life, but her dad can't be found. Covering family relationships and geopolitics, this slow burn novel is "never sentimental, never predictable" (Kirkus Reviews). Try this next: Kyung-Sook Shin's I Went to See My Father. |
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| Great Black Hope by Rob FranklinAmid the glitz and glamour of New York, a 20-something gay Black man from a well-to-do Atlanta family flounders after the mysterious death of his roommate, the daughter of a famous singer. Grief-stricken, he's soon arrested for cocaine possession and caught between the worlds of race and class in this debut that's perfect for book clubs. For fans of: Rumaan Alam's Entitlement; Vinson Cunningham's Great Expectations. |
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| The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie HartnettPJ Halliday is a 63-year-old hoarder who drinks too much. When he learns his old high school girlfriend is newly single, he sets out on a cross-country road trip from Massachusetts to Arizona, bringing along his newly orphaned grandniece and grandnephew, his 26-year-old daughter, and Pancakes, a death-predicting cat. Funny and bittersweet, this novel works for fans of Steven Rowley's The Guncle and Kevin Wilson's Run for the Hills. |
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| Open, Heaven by Seán HewittIn this lyrical and poignant first novel by a poet and memoirist, librarian James looks back on his youth as a shy, gay 16-year-old. Growing up in a remote northern English village in 2002, James feels isolated from most people, except his ill younger brother, but he soon develops a friendship and consuming crush on the troubled new boy in town. For fans of: Douglas Stuart. |
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| Awake in the Floating City by Susanna KwanIn a flooded near-future San Francisco, grieving artist Bo lives in a high rise and hopes for the return of her mother, missing for two years. On the verge of finally leaving the city, she instead stays to help her 130-year-old neighbor, whose stories inspire Bo's creativity. Exploring grief, art, memory, climate change, and multi-generational friendships, this is a "marvelously graceful debut" (Kirkus Reviews). Read-alike: Eiren Caffall's All the Water in the World. |
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An oral history of Atlantis : stories
by Ed Park
In Ed Park's utterly original collection, characters question the fleetingness of youth and art, reckon with the consequences of the everyday, and find solace in the absurd, the beautiful, and the sublime. Throughout, Park deploys his trademark wit to create a world both strikingly recognizable and delightfully other. All together, these fifteen stories have much to say about the meaning--and transitory nature--of our lives.
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Vera, or faith : a novel
by Gary Shteyngart
The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in life: to make a friend at school; Daddy and Anne Mom to stay together; and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love's survival in this great, mad, imploding world.
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| So Far Gone by Jess WalterIn a divided 2016 America, retired Rhys Kinnick decks his son-in-law Shane at Thanksgiving and then goes off-grid in Washington State. A few years later, his grandkids show up, brought by a neighbor at the request of Rhys' daughter. But then Shane sends members of his church militia after the kids, leading Rhys to team up with an eccentric group of old friends. Read-alike: The Feral Detective by Jonathan Lethem. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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