18 New Books to Add to Your Reading List in July

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We’re halfway through the year, and I’m excited about the many book releases still to come. There are so many new books coming out in 2024, and since July is my birthday month, I really want to read some new reads and a few from my TBR list. So I made this list of book recommendation for July. So, I made this list of book recommendations for July. If you’re looking for some new releases to add to your reading list, check out these suggestions.

The Cliffs by J. Courtney Sullivan

Quick summary: Jane Flanagan finds an abandoned Victorian house as a teenager, which becomes her hideaway. Twenty years later, as a Harvard archivist, she returns to find it transformed by a new owner who believes it’s haunted. Jane uncovers the house’s rich history filled with secrets and tragedies.

On a secluded bluff overlooking the ocean sits a Victorian house, lavender with gingerbread trim, a home that contains a century’s worth of secrets. By the time Jane Flanagan discovers the house as a teenager, it has long been abandoned. The place is an irresistible mystery to Jane. There are still clothes in the closets, marbles rolling across the floors, and dishes in the cupboards, even though no one has set foot there in decades. The house becomes a hideaway for Jane, a place to escape her volatile mother.

Twenty years later, now a Harvard archivist, she returns home to Maine following a terrible mistake that threatens both her career and her marriage. Jane is horrified to find the Victorian is now barely recognizable. The new owner, Genevieve, a summer person from Beacon Hill, has gutted it, transforming the house into a glossy white monstrosity straight out of a shelter magazine. Strangely, Genevieve is convinced that the house is haunted—perhaps the product of something troubling Genevieve herself has done. She hires Jane to research the history of the place and the women who lived there. The story Jane uncovers—of lovers lost at sea, romantic longing, shattering loss, artistic awakening, historical artifacts stolen and sold, and the long shadow of colonialism—is even older than Maine itself.

Enthralling, richly imagined, filled with psychic mediums and charlatans, spirits and past lives, mothers, marriage, and the legacy of alcoholism, this is a deeply moving novel about the land we inhabit, the women who came before us, and the ways in which none of us will ever truly leave this earth.

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The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore

Quick summary: In 1975, a girl named Barbara Van Laar disappears from a summer camp. As the search unfolds, secrets of the Van Laar family and the surrounding community are revealed, creating a thrilling and layered story.

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.

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The Striker and the Clock by Georgia Cloepfil

Quick summary:This book provides an insight into the life of a professional female soccer player, exploring the challenges and joys of pursuing excellence in a sport still developing in recognition and support. 

An illuminating perspective on the life of an athlete and the pursuit of excellence outside the spotlight.

Georgia Cloepfil played professional soccer for six years, on six teams, in six countries. In those years, the sport became more than a game—it was an immersive yet transient way of life. In South Korea, she lived and practiced in an isolated island compound next to an airport. In Australia, she coached youth teams on the side to pay her rent. In Lithuania, she played in the European Champions League, to empty stadiums and little fanfare. She lived out of a single suitcase, chasing better opportunities and the euphoria of playing well.

The Striker and the Clock is a beautiful examination of the joy and pain of serious athletics. It’s also an eye-opening look at the still-developing world of professional women’s soccer. Written in ninety short passages—reflecting the ninety inexorably passing minutes of a soccer match—the book is a love letter to a maddening sport and a reflection on the way it has shaped a life. In vivid prose, it portrays the athlete as an artist, debating how much of herself to devote to her craft.

This finely wrought, singular book celebrates the complex appeal of sports and the fulfillment found in fleeting moments of glory.

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Private Revolutions by Yuan Yang

Quick summary: This book tells the stories of four Chinese women striving for better futures in a rapidly changing economy, highlighting the challenges they face due to entrenched societal barriers.

A sweeping yet intimate portrait of modern China told through the lives of four ordinary women striving for a better future in a highly unequal society

While serving as the deputy Beijing bureau chief of the Financial Times , Chinese-British journalist Yuan Yang began to notice common threads in the lives of her Chinese peers—women born during China’s turn toward capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, who, despite the country’s enormous economic gains during their lifetimes, were coming up against deeply entrenched barriers as they sought to achieve financial stability.

The product of seven years of intimate, in-depth reporting, this transporting and indelible book traces the journey of four such women as they try to make better lives for themselves and their families in the new Chinese economy. June and Siyue are among the few in their villages to graduate high school. Each makes her way to Beijing, June as a young professional and Siyue an entrepreneur. Like Siyue, Leiya lives with her grandparents in their village while her parents send money home; yearning for a different life than those of the women she sees around her, Leiya soon joins her parents in Shenzhen as an underage factory worker. Born to an urban middle-class family, Sam is outraged when her eyes are opened the poor treatment of workers, and becomes a labor activist, increasingly under threat by the authorities.

As the women grapple with government policies that threaten their businesses, their children’s access to education, their choice of where to make a home, and, in Sam’s case, their lives, a vivid, damning, and urgent picture emerges of the previously unseen human cost of China’s rising economic tide—and the courage and perseverance of those caught in the swell.

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Guilty Creatures by Mikita Brottman

Quick summary: This book is a true crime story about Denise Williams and Brian Winchester, who, after committing murder, live seemingly perfect lives until Brian’s confession in 2018 exposes the dark secrets of their past.

From the critically acclaimed author of the “enthralling” ( San Francisco Book Review ) An Unexplained Death , a breathless true crime tale of sex, religion, and murder in the deep South.

On the face of it, Denise Williams and Brian Winchester had the perfect, quintessentially Southern lives. The two were hardworking devout Baptists and together, with their respective spouses, formed a tight-knit friendship that seemed unbreakable. That is, until December 16, 2000, when Denise’s husband Mike disappeared while duck hunting on Lake Seminole on the border of Georgia and Florida.

After no body was found, it was assumed that he had drowned and was consumed by alligators in a tragic accident. But things took an unexpected turn when Brian divorced his wife and married Denise. Their surprising marriage was far from happy and in 2018, he confessed to police he killed Mike with Denise’s help nearly two decades earlier.

Now, the full, shocking story is revealed by Mikita Brottman, acclaimed true crime writer and “one of today’s finest practitioners of nonfiction” ( The New York Times Book Review ). With tenacious investigating and clear-eyed prose, she exposes the dark underbelly of far-right conservative Christianity and how it led Brian to choose murder over adultery. A fascinating and in-depth page-turner, Guilty Creatures is destined to become an instant classic in the true crime genre.

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The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst

Quick summary:  Kiela, a librarian with social difficulties, flees to her childhood home with magical spellbooks. She starts an illegal spellshop and finds unexpected friendship and romance in this whimsical fantasy.

A gorgeous hardcover edition featuring lavender sprayed edges! The Spellshop is Sarah Beth Durst’s romantasy debut–a lush cottagecore tale full of stolen spellbooks, unexpected friendships, sweet jams, and even sweeter love.

Kiela has always had trouble dealing with people. Thankfully, as a librarian at the Great Library of Alyssium, she and her assistant, Caz—a magically sentient spider plant—have spent the last decade sequestered among the empire’s most precious spellbooks, preserving their magic for the city’s elite.

When a revolution begins and the library goes up in flames, she and Caz flee with all the spellbooks they can carry and head to a remote island Kiela never thought she’d see again: her childhood home. Taking refuge there, Kiela discovers, much to her dismay, a nosy—and very handsome—neighbor who can’t take a hint and keeps showing up day after day to make sure she’s fed and to help fix up her new home.

In need of income, Kiela identifies something that even the bakery in town doesn’t have: jam. With the help of an old recipe book her parents left her and a bit of illegal magic, her cottage garden is soon covered in ripe berries.

But magic can do more than make life a little sweeter, so Kiela risks the consequences of using unsanctioned spells and opens the island’s first-ever and much needed secret spellshop.

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The Au Pair Affair by Tessa Bailey

Quick summary: Tallulah, a marine biology student, becomes a nanny for Burgess, a grumpy hockey player. They explore their growing attraction while balancing family and personal challenges in this sports rom-com.

A sports rom-com about a burly, surly, single dad who falls head-over-hockey-stick for his quirky live-in nanny…

Tallulah is smart, vivacious, and studying to be a marine biologist. She’s also twenty-six and broke. So when Burgess, a battle-scarred hockey veteran and newly single dad, offers her a job as his live-in nanny, she jumps at the opportunity to get paid while living in a super fancy neighborhood and being around Lissa, his cool but introverted tween.

Her tween charge isn’t the only one who could use some help fitting in, though. According to…well, everyone except Burgess, he needs to get back on the dating scene, and adventurous Tallulah is just the girl to show him how. But as boundaries are slowly crossed and Burgess finds himself pulled between his daughter, who wants her parents back together, and his insane chemistry with Tallulah, a huge rift is formed, and Tallulah does the “right” thing—breaks her own heart and walks away.

Though Burgess knows it’s for the best—he’s too jaded, with too much baggage—a chance meeting, and a new push from his daughter, forces him to put everything on the line and fight to prove he learned his lessons well and is worthy of a happily ever after with Tallulah. 

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Like Mother, Like Daughter by Kimberly McCreight

Quick summary: Cleo searches for her mother, Kat, who mysteriously disappears, uncovering secrets about Kat’s life and the dangerous threats she faced, in a gripping mother-daughter thriller.

A daughter races to uncover her mother’s secret life in the wake of her disappearance in this thriller.

When Cleo, a student at NYU, arrives late for dinner at her childhood home in Brooklyn, she finds food burning in the oven and no sign of her mother, Kat. Then Cleo discovers her mom’s bloody shoe under the sofa. Something terrible has happened.

But what? The polar opposite of Cleo, whose “out of control” emotions and “unsafe” behavior have created a seemingly unbridgeable rift between mother and daughter, Kat is the essence of Park Slope perfection: a happily married, successful corporate lawyer. Or so Cleo thinks.

Kat has been lying. She’s not just a lawyer; she’s her firm’s fixer. She’s damn good at it, too. Growing up in a dangerous group home taught her how to think fast, stay calm under pressure, and recognize a real threat when she sees one. And in the days leading up her disappearance, Kat has become aware of multiple threats: demands for money from her unfaithful soon-to-be ex-husband; evidence that Cleo has slipped back into a relationship that’s far riskier than she understands; and menacing anonymous messages from her past—all of which she’s kept hidden from Cleo . . .

Like Mother, Like Daughter is a thrilling novel of emotional suspense that questions the damaging fictions we cling to and the hard truths we avoid. Above all, it’s a love story between a mother and a daughter, each determined to save the other before it’s too late.

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Reckless by Lauren Roberts

Quick summary: Paedyn Gray, after killing a king and sparking a resistance, is hunted by Kai Azer across a dangerous landscape, blending romance and fantasy in a tale of duty and desire.

The kingdom of Ilya is in turmoil…

After surviving the Purging Trials, Ordinary-born Paedyn Gray has killed the King, and kickstarted a Resistance throughout the land. Now she’s running from the one person she had wanted to run to.

Kai Azer is now Ilya’s Enforcer, loyal to his brother Kitt, the new King. He has vowed to find Paedyn and bring her to justice.

Across the deadly Scorches, and deep into the hostile city of Dor, Kai pursues the one person he wishes he didn’t have to. But in a city without Elites, the balance between the hunter and hunted shifts – and the battle between duty and desire is deadly.

Be swept away by this kiss-or-kill romantasy trilogy taking the world by storm.

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I Will Never Leave You by Kara A. Kennedy

Quick summary: Maya is haunted by her ex-girlfriend Alana’s ghost, who demands Maya help her possess another girl or face punishment for her murder, in this chilling debut thriller.

This emotional debut thriller follows a teen girl being haunted by the ghost of her toxic ex-girlfriend, who gives her a chilling ultimatum—help her possess another girl or go down for her murder.

Maya has always belonged to Alana. After four years of dating, and on the precipice of graduating high school, Maya has been too terrified to consider the idea of life outside of their volatile relationship. Until she finds the courage to break up with Alana while they’re hiking in Southern California.

Then Alana goes missing. As the police get involved and the media run wild with the story, everyone seems to think that Maya is lying about Alana’s disappearance. Secretly, Maya knows they’re if Alana’s dead, she’s the one to blame.

But that’s not Maya’s only secret. Alana isn’t gone, not really—and she isn’t going to let Maya go so easily…

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The Coin by Yasmin Zaher

Quick summary: A Palestinian woman in New York navigates teaching, engaging in a pyramid scheme, and confronting her past, exploring themes of identity, trauma, and survival in a provocative narrative.

The Coin follows a Palestinian woman as she pursues a dream that generations of her family have failed at: to live and thrive in America. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys in New York, where her eccentric methods cross conventional boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler and the two participate in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags, the value of which “increases, year by year, regardless of poverty, of war, of famine.” The juxtaposition of luxury and the abject engulfs her as she is able to con her way to bag after bag, preoccupied by the suffering she knows of the world.

Eventually, her body and mind go to war. America is stifling her—her willfulness, her sexuality, her ideology. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her feelings of existential statelessness, and the narrator unravels spectacularly.

Enthralling, sensory, and uncanny, The Coin explores materiality, nature and civilization, class, homelessness, sexuality, beauty—and how oppression and inherited trauma manifest in every area of our lives—all while resisting easy moralizing. Provocative and original, humorous and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.

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Long Island Compromise, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Quick summary: In 1980, Carl Fletcher is kidnapped but returns home safely. Forty years later, unresolved issues resurface when the family reunites, revealing lingering trauma and secrets.

In 1980 a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway in a cloistered town on the nicest part of Long Island, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly worse for wear, and the family begins the hard work of moving on with their lives. They resume their prized places in the saga of the American dream, comforted in the realization that although their money may have been what endangered them, it is also what ensured their safety. But nearly forty years later, when Carl’s mother dies and the family comes home to mourn her, it becomes clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything.

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The Black Bird Oracle by Deborah Harkness

Quick summary: Diana and Matthew face challenges to their family’s future as they return to Diana’s ancestral home to confront dark pasts and seek greater power in this continuation of their magical saga.

Deborah Harkness first introduced the world to Diana Bishop, Oxford scholar and witch, and vampire geneticist Matthew de Clairmont in A Discovery of Witches. Drawn to each other despite long-standing taboos, these two otherworldly beings found themselves at the center of a battle for a lost, enchanted manuscript known as Ashmole 782. Since then, they have fallen in love, traveled to Elizabethan England, dissolved the Covenant between the three species, and awoken the dark powers within Diana’s family line.

Now, Diana and Matthew receive a formal demand from the Congregation: They must test the magic of their seven-year-old twins, Pip and Rebecca. Concerned with their safety and desperate to avoid the same fate that led her parents to spellbind her, Diana decides to forge a different path for her family’s future and answers a message from a great-aunt she never knew existed, Gwyneth Proctor, whose invitation simply reads: It’s time you came home, Diana.

On the hallowed ground of Ravenswood, the Proctor family home, and under the tutelage of Gwyneth, a talented witch grounded in higher magic, a new era begins for Diana: a confrontation with her family’s dark past, and a reckoning for her own desire for even greater power—if she can let go, finally, of her fear of wielding it.

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The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

Quick summary: After King Arthur’s death, a young knight named Collum joins a group of misfit knights to restore Camelot and uncover the truth behind Arthur’s fall, in a quest filled with magic and conflict.

A gifted young knight named Collum arrives at Camelot to compete for a spot on the Round Table, only to find he’s too late. The king died two weeks ago at the Battle of Camlann, leaving no heir, and only a handful of the knights of the Round Table survive.

They aren’t the heroes of legend, like Lancelot or Gawain. They’re the oddballs of the Round Tables, from the edges of the stories, like Sir Palomides; the Saracen Knight; and Sir Dagonet, Arthur’s fool, who was knighted as a joke. They’re joined by Nimue, who was Merlin’s apprentice until she turned on him and buried him under a hill. Together this ragtag fellowship will set out to rebuild Camelot in a world that has lost its balance.

But Arthur’s death has revealed Britain’s fault lines. God has abandoned it, and the fairies and monsters and old gods are returning, led by Arthur’s half-sister Morgan le Fay. Kingdoms are turning on each other, warlords are laying siege to Camelot, and rival factions are forming around the disgraced Lancelot and the fallen Queen Guinevere. It is up to Collum and his companions to reclaim Excalibur, solve the mysteries of this ruined world and make it whole again. But before they can restore Camelot they’ll have to learn the truth of why the lonely, brilliant King Arthur fell and lay to rest the ghosts of his troubled family and of Britain’s dark past.

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The Future Was Now, by Chris Nashawaty

Quick summary: This book recounts the impact of eight iconic sci-fi films released in the summer of 1982 on Hollywood, exploring their creation and lasting influence on cinema.

From legendary entertainment journalist and author of Caddyshack comes a rollicking history of 1980s cinema―how eight legendary sci-fi films changed Hollywood forever

In the summer of 1982, eight science fiction films were released within six weeks of one another. E.T., Tron, Star Wrath of Khan, Conan the Barbarian, Blade Runner, Poltergeist, The Thing , and Mad The Road Warrior c hanged the careers of some of Hollywood’s now biggest names―altering the art of movie-making to this day.

In The Future Was Now , Chris Nashawaty recounts the riotous genesis of these films, featuring an all-star cast of Hollywood luminaries and gadflies Steven Spielberg, at the height of his powers, conceives E.T. as an unlikely family tale, and quietly takes over the troubled production of Poltergeist , a horror film he had been nurturing for years. Ridley Scott, fresh off the success of Alien , tries his hand at an odd Philip K. Dick story that becomes Blade Runner ― a box office failure turned cult classic. Similar stories arise for films like Tron, Conan the Barbarian, and The Thing. Taken as a whole, these films show a precarious turning-point in Hollywood history, when baffled film executives finally began to understand the potential of high-concept films with a rabid fanbase, merchandising potential, and endless possible sequels.

Expertly researched, energetically told, and written with an unabashed love for the cinema, The Future Was Now is a chronicle of how the revolution sparked in a galaxy far, far away finally took root and changed Hollywood forever.

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Someone Like Us, by Dinaw Mengestu

Quick summary:  Mamush, facing a crumbling marriage, returns to his Ethiopian immigrant community in Washington, D.C., uncovering family secrets and confronting his past in a journey of self-discovery.

After abandoning his once promising career as a journalist in search of a new life in Paris, Mamush meets Helen-a photographer whose way of seeing the world shows him the possibility of finding not only love, but family. Now, five years later, with his marriage to Helen on the verge of collapse, he returns to the close-knit immigrant Ethiopian community of Washington DC that defined his childhood. At its center is Mamush’s stoic, implacable mother, and Samuel,the larger-than-life father-figure whose ceaseless charm and humor have always served as cover for a harder, more troubling truth. But on the same day that Mamush arrives home in Washington, Samuel is found dead in his garage.

With Helen and their two-year old son back in Paris, Mamush sets out on an unexpected journey across America in search of answers to questions he’d been told never to ask. As he does so, he begins to understand that perhaps the only chance he has of saving his family and making it back home is to confront not only the unresolved mystery around Samuel’s life and death, but his own troubled memories, and the years spent masking them. Breath-taking, commanding, unforgettable work from one of America’s most prodigiously gifted novelists.

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Business Casual by B.K. Borison

Quick summary: Nova, a tattoo artist, and Charlie, an investment banker, explore their unexpected attraction and personal ambitions in this romance, part of the Lovelight series.

Two opposites will find out if one night together is enough to get each other out of their systems in the final book in the beloved Lovelight series.

Nova Porter isn’t looking for love, and she certainly has no explanation for her attraction to buttoned-up, three-piece-suit-wearing investment banker Charlie Milford. Maybe it’s his charm? Or maybe it’s his determination to help her fledgling business however he can. Either way, she’s distracted every time he’s around. With her new tattoo studio set to open in her hometown of Inglewild, she doesn’t have time for frivolous flirtations. 

In an effort to get Charlie out of her system once and for all, Nova offers a proposition. One night. No strings. They’ll kick their uncomfortable attraction to the curb and return to their respective responsibilities. But their explosive night together scatters their expectations like fallen leaves. And with Charlie in town as the temporary head of Lovelight Farms, Nova can’t quite avoid him. 

And Charlie? Well, Charlie knows a good investment when he sees one. He’s hoping he can convince Nova he’s worth some of her time.

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The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry

Quick summary: Tom Rourke, a poet and degenerate, falls in love with Polly Gillespie. They flee west together, chased by a posse, in this lyrical and adventurous love story set in the Rocky Mountains.

October 1891. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad-maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen are soon in hot pursuit and closing in fast. With everything to lose and the safety and anonymity of San Francisco still a distant speck on their horizon, the choices they make will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

In this love story for the ages—lyrical, profane and propulsive—Kevin Barry has once again demonstrated himself to be a master stylist, an unrivalled humourist, and a true poet of the human heart.

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Stephy George
Stephy George

Hi I am Stephy ! I became a bookworm in my late twenties. So I created this little corner of books online to share my love of reading with YOU! I want to help you find the best books to read so you won’t ever have to worry about your next read!

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