128 new books coming out July 30 – August 26, 2024

By Kobo • July 30, 2024New eBooks and Audiobooks

Highlights among the new books coming out through the back half of summer

Don’t let the height of your TBR pile distract you from all the great new books coming out this summer.

For romantasy fans, Jennifer L. Armentrout’s Born of Blood and Ash continues her Flesh & Fire series. And Michelle Sagara’s Chronicles of Elantra adds its 19^th (!) entry with Cast in Atonement. And for fans seeking a fresh start, Ilona Andrews’ novella Sanctuary kicks off her Roman’s Chronicles series.

Slow Dance marks Rainbow Rowell’s return to writing books about normal people (i.e. people without superpowers and/or skills in magic) feeling big things about each another. The author of Eleanor & Park has never been fully committed to happily-ever-after as a destination, but this new book is most definitely a love story, and the protagonists do end up together—but they also start out together, and the nature of their togetherness is a whole thing they need to sort out.

And of course there are plenty of new thrillers, with fresh installments in series by Kathy Reichs, Jesse Q. Sutanto, Karin Slaughter, James Rollins, M. P. Woodward, Brad Thor, and others.

Shari Lapena, who’s earned her dominant position in the genre the hard way—by writing twisty novels that each stand on their own—returns with What Have You Done? And Lapena’s debut novel Things Go Flying is also seeing a re-release. Though fans should note: prior to Lapena’s breakout bestseller The Couple Next Door, the darkest thing in her books was their sense of humour.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia has made genre-hopping and -blending the foundation of her writing career. In The Seventh Veil of Salome, the author of Mexican Gothic tells a mythology-infused story of old Hollywood.

Readers wondering whether P. Djèlí Clark’s The Dead Cat Tail Assassins continues takes place in his Dead Djinn Universe will be disappointed to learn it is a standalone work set in its own world. However, readers wondering whether it brings together everything that has made Clark a must-read author of speculative fiction—magic-infused technology, secret organizations bound by arcane rules, tensions between duty and destiny, amazing fight scenes—will be utterly delighted.

Is a story set almost exactly 4 years ago correctly described as “historical fiction”? Regina Porter’s The Rich People Have Gone Away is a story about two couples divided socioeconomic circumstance when they make very different choices about how to wait out the initial wave of pandemic lockdowns: Theo and Darla heading upstate to their summer cottage, leaving their Brooklyn neighbours behind. But they’ll soon be reunited—at least with Theo—when they come together with Darla’s family to search for her after she goes missing somewhere in the bougie wilderness.

In On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, Nate Silver delves into a subculture called “the River,” where people who’ve mastered principles of risk and forecasting—and have probably read Silver’s fascinating 2012 bestseller The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t. He reveals how these people see the world, and how radically it differs from the perspective that’s so intuitive to most of us.

One wonders if Silver’s book might have helped Lunden Roberts, author of Out of the Shadows: My Life Inside the Wild World of Hunter Biden, who was no doubt expecting a very different US presidential race from the one now charging ahead to the November election. Fred C. Trump III, nephew of the GOP candidate for president, appears to have a more certain path to bestselling status with All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way.