What's on my stack: July 2022
Books being published in July 2022 I can't wait to read
I hope your summer is in full swing and that everyone is using some much-deserved vacay days!
I’m running into the problem of more books entering my house than leaving. I know, I know, a great problem to have. But I get so sad every week featuring only one book, and there are so many I want to talk about that I just don’t have time to, or because there are so many books that I know I’ll never read them all (cue existential panic).
So, I’ve decided once a month, I’ll send out a roundup of what’s coming out that month that I’ve added to my TBR stack and am very excited about reading. There will be buy and preorder links (preorders help authors so much more than you can imagine), but all books featured will be published in the month I’m sending it out.
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So without further ado, here are the July releases I’m most excited to check out!
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield: This has been on my most-anticipated lists all year, and I finally have my hands on a copy, and I’m too nervous to read it because I’m so excited. Does anyone else feel like that? It’s about Leah, who has just come back from a deep sea mission, and Miri, her wife, notices she’s been behaving oddly ever since.
Normal Family by Chrysta Bilton: I watched Our Father on Netflix last month and have not been able to stop thinking about the horrors of it. When I read about this book, though not the same circumstance at all, it sounded incredibly intriguing. Chrysta’s mother found a sperm donor in order to have her own children, but she kept a lot of secrets from them.
The Force of Such Beauty by Barbara Bourland: This is one I haven’t seen anywhere, and the cover is breathtaking. It also follows a young woman who goes from an Olympic medal hopeful to a princess of a tiny European kingdom and feels like she’s shackled there, despite it being (seemingly) every little girl’s dream.
The Night Shift by Natalka Burian: I’ve slowly been getting into more of what I call “realistic sci-fi”—less spaceships and aliens but more regular world with some odd futuristic twists. This seems perfect to add to that pile. All over NYC, in backrooms and backalleys, are secret doors that you can only travel through one way and only at night: they allow you to jump through time and space throughout the city.
The Accidental Pinup by Danielle Jackson: A romance novel with a photographer who has a curvy body and ends up as the accidental main character? Sign me up! Cassie (nice name, heh) ends up in front of the camera instead of behind it in a luxury lingerie shoot, and turns out, she has more chemistry with the photographer than she ever would have thought possible.
Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman: This near-future environmental spec fic has me more nervous than ever about climate change, but it still sounds so compelling I can’t help but want to pick it up. As thousands of species go extinct every year, scientists try to preserve DNA information in biobanks with the hopes that one day they’ll be able to resurrect long-lost species. But one day, the data is completely gone.
Self-Portrait with Ghost by Meng Jin: I’ve been challenging myself to read more short story collections this year, and this is the next one I’m going to pick up. The author wrote these during the Trump years and the early days of the pandemic, exploring isolation and coming of age while knowing too much and being able to do too little about it.
The Half-Life of Valery K by Natasha Pulley: I’m usually not a historical fiction gal, but when I read that this one follows a nuclear specialist in a 1960s mysterious Soviet Union town and deals with some strange radiation discoveries, I was intrigued. I’ve been marathoning The 100 on Netflix the past month or so, so this is exactly the kind of follow-up to that I need.
Runners up: Briefly, a Delicious Life by Nell Stevens, Fire Season by Leyna Krow, and A Lady’s Guide to Fortune-Hunting by Sophie Irwin.
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More Books
Can’t get enough, or looking for more recommendations? Browse the archives, or check out some popular past recommendations:
Read about a lawyer fighting against an unfair justice system
Read a novel where teenagers spontaneously combust in math class
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Thanks for the amazing roundup!