Summer is here and with the (hopefully) sunny season comes a month that is jam-packed with new novels to read. So, whether you’re sitting in the garden, taking shelter indoors, or spending part of July on vacation, there are books of all kinds to keep you occupied over the warmer days ahead.
Check out our highlights below and then keep scrolling for a list of other notable new book releases coming in July 2024.
Which books will you be reading this month? Let us know by leaving us a comment below.
Please note: Some of these books might miss their expected release date (or be released on a different date in certain countries), so bookmark your favourite online bookstore for up-to-date information.
TheReviewGeek Recommends
Breaking the Dark
by Lisa Jewell
Expected Release Date: July 4
Synopsis:
Meet Jessica Jones: a private investigator and retired super hero based out of Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, who goes from job to job as a hard living, rough talking, loner.
And then a wealthy Upper East Side woman pays her a visit. Amber Randall is concerned about her twin sixteen-year-olds, Lark and Fox, who have acted and looked very different since they returned from spending the summer with their British father in the UK. She tells Jessica that her children have unnaturally perfect skin for teenagers and have lost all the tics and habits that made them who they were. They are not Lark and Fox, she tells Jessica. Something has happened to them.
To find out more, Jessica travels to Essex to talk to their father and once there meets Belle who is living a curiously isolated existence in a run-down farmhouse with her guardian Debra. Jessica knows that Lark and Fox had spent the summer with Belle―but can this unworldly teenager really be responsible for Lark and Fox’s new personas?
Jessica soon discovers that, behind Belle and Debra, evil geniuses are playing a dangerous game with technology in order to make the world a “better place”, not caring who gets hurt, maimed or even killed in the process. Can Jessica stop them from wreaking destruction on a whole generation of young people?
The Summer Pact
by Emily Giffin
Expected Release Date: July 9
Synopsis:
Four freshmen arrive at college from completely different worlds: Lainey, a California party girl with a flair for drama; Tyson, a brilliant scholar and aspiring lawyer from Washington, D.C.; Summer, an ambitious, recruited athlete from the Midwest; and Hannah, a mild-mannered southerner who is content to quietly round out the circle of big personalities. Soon after arriving on campus, they strike up a conversation in their shared dorm, and the seeds of friendship are planted.
As their college years fly by, their bond intensifies and the four become inseparable. But as graduation nears, their lives are forever changed after a desperate act leads to tragic consequences. Stunned and heartbroken, they make a pact, promising to always be there for one another, no matter how separated they may become by circumstances or distance.
Ten years later, Hannah is anticipating what should be one of the happiest moments of her life when everything is suddenly turned upside down. Calling on her closest friends, it soon becomes clear that they are all facing their own crossroads. True to their promise, they agree to take a time out from lives headed in wrong directions and embark on a shared journey of self-discovery, forgiveness, and acceptance.
In this tender portrayal of grief, love, and hope, Emily Giffin asks: When things fall apart, who will be at our sides, helping us pick up the pieces?
I Was a Teenage Slasher
by Stephen Graham Jones
Expected Release Date: July 16
Synopsis:
1989, Lamesa, Texas. A community driven by oil and cotton – a town where everyone knows everyone else’s business.
Tolly Driver, seventeen, a good kid with more potential than application, exists on the outskirts with his best friend, Amber. They navigate the hellscape of the teenage social scene, sticking together in a place that doesn’t know how to be different.
But when they go to a fateful party at Deek Masterton’s house – a party that ends in a series of gruesome, brutal and extravagant murders – Tolly’s world gets flipped upside-down. Because some slashers are born in violence and retribution, some were born that way – and some were just in the wrong place, at the wrong time…
The Lost Story
by Meg Shaffer
Expected Release Date: July 18
Synopsis:
From the author of the bestselling novel The Wishing Game comes a Narnia-inspired fairy tale for grown-ups who still knock on the back of wardrobe doors . . . just in case.
Once upon a time, two boys went missing in the woods. Six months later, they reappeared, with no explanation for where they’d been or how they’d survived.
Fifteen years on, Rafe is a reclusive artist with no memory of what happened during those months, despite the scars he bears. Meanwhile, Jeremy is a famed missing persons investigator. With his uncanny abilities, he is the one person who can help vet tech Emilie Wendell find her long-lost sister, who vanished in the very same forest as Rafe and Jeremy.
Jeremy also keeps a secret: the fantastical truth about the magical realm they made home for those six months. And it’s there they may find Emilie’s sister.
Alongside Emilie, Rafe and Jeremy must return to the enchanted world they left behind – for only then can they get back everything and everyone they’ve lost.
What Have You Done?
by Shari Lapena
Expected Release Date: July 18
Synopsis:
Nothing ever happens in sleepy little Fairhill, Vermont.
The teenagers get their kicks telling ghost stories in the old graveyard. The parents trust their kids will arrive home safe from school. Everyone knows everyone. Curtains rarely twitch. Front doors are left unlocked.
But this morning all of that will change.
Because Diana Brewer isn’t lying safely in her bed where she belongs. Instead she lies in a hayfield, circled by vultures, discovered by a local farmer.
How quickly a girl becomes a ghost. How quickly a town of friendly, familiar faces becomes a town of suspects, a place of fear and paranoia.
Someone in Fairhill did this. Everyone wants answers.
And one innocent question could be deadly.
The Briar Club
by Kate Quinn
Expected Release Date: July 18
Synopsis:
The New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye and The Rose Code returns with a haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.
Washington, D.C., 1950
Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, an all-female boarding house in the heart of the US capital, where secrets hide behind respectable facades.
But when the mysterious Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbours – a poised English beauty, a policeman’s daughter, a frustrated female baseball star, and a rabidly pro-McCarthy typist – into an unlikely friendship.
Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their troubled lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. And when a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst?
Capturing the paranoia of the McCarthy era and evoking the changing roles for women in postwar America, The Briar Club is an intimate and thrilling novel of secrets and loyalty put to the test.
Slow Dance
by Rainbow Rowell
Expected Release Date: July 23
Synopsis:
Everybody thought Shiloh and Cary would end up together – everybody but Shiloh and Cary.
Slow Dance follows these star-crossed best friends from their inseparable teen years on the wrong side of the tracks to their far-flung adulthoods – through her marriage and motherhood and his time in the Navy – as they try to work out what they’re actually supposed to be to each other.
Told with Rowell’s trademark sensitivity and abundant wit, Slow Dance is a big, beaming power ballad of a novel about a love so true, it refuses to be forgotten.
Five Brothers
by Penelope Douglas
Expected Release Date: July 30
Synopsis:
On the other side of town are five brothers. . .
Macon is the oldest. I’ve never seen him smile.
Army is a single dad with beautiful green eyes.
Iron will be in prison soon.
Dallas is the one I hate.
Trace used to be mine.
I need to go home. Away from the swamps and these men. I’ll leave tomorrow. Tonight I’ll crash on the couch tonight.
Everyone is asleep. Except for one. He sees me crying. I let him wrap his arms around my body and hold me.
I don’t think it was Trace.
Which means it was another brother.
I don’t know who, but I can’t help but want him to hold me again. . .
Notable New Book Releases in July 2024
July 2
A Darker Mishchief by Derek Milman
On the Bright Side by Anna Sortino
We Don’t Have Time for This by Brianna Craft
July 4
Hearts Overboard by Becky Dean
How to Die Famous by Benjamin Dean
July 16
The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman
Cursed Boys and Broken Hearts by Adam Sass
Dashed by Amanda Quain
The Ping-Pong Queen of Chinatown by Andrew Yang
July 23
The Lost Souls of Benzaiten by Kelly Murashige
July 30
The Loudest Silence by Sydney Langford
What books will you be reading in July 2024? Let us know in the comments below.