On My Radar | July 2026

Here's my monthly roundup of books releasing this month that I've got my eye on. The MASH Up, The Great Wherever, Every Version of You, Unfinished Business, The Good Parts and Indie Darling are top of my list.

The MASH Up by Laura Marie Meyers

Released → 7th July 

Ruby Wynne is a staunch rule-follower who lives by the numbers. So when a surprising breakup – on her thirty-fifth birthday – ruins all her well-laid plans, Ruby makes an unexpected wish . . . Only to wake up inside a M.A.S.H. game from seventh grade.

Settled in a Technicolor mansion, driving a tie-dye Jeep, and running a roller-disco restaurant, Ruby is living out her childhood dreams come true—with one exception. According to the game, Ruby’s “other half” is supposed to be Penn Hayes, her brother’s annoying, and annoyingly handsome, best friend. But there’s zero romance between them. Just like in real life, all they share is sarcasm. With no rules to follow and desperate to return to reality, Ruby makes her best guess at an escape plan: win Penn’s heart so the game comes completely true and she can go home.

It’s unthinkable. On Ruby’s list of dos and don’ts, Penn Hayes is a lifelong don’t. But as Ruby navigates the magical world she dreamed up at thirteen, she wonders if, by finally throwing out her rules, she might just find her way home to the life and love she deserves.

Most Ardently Yours by Freya Sampson

Released → 7th July 

Zoe Knight, a struggling romance writer, has sworn off men for good. At least…the ones in real life. Once a believer in a happily ever after, she now curbs her loneliness with the help of the best book boyfriends in literature – and there is no better man than Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy. So when she stumbles into a classic London bookshop and argues with the annoyingly attractive store owner, Nick, who refuses to sell romance novels, she decides to liberate him of a dusty copy of Pride & Prejudice abandoned on a top shelf.

But this is no ordinary book.

After reading from the pages, Zoe finds herself in a remarkable situation: she has accidentally summoned the Mr. Darcy to the real world. Now, she's face-to-face with the man she's loved forever, and he's everything she dreamed he would be. Handsome? Check. Brooding? Check. Talks like he swallowed a thesaurus? Check and check. But even in all his regency perfection, can he ever be as good as in the novel? And if he's here, in her London apartment trying to figure out how to work a shower , what will happen to the literary world he came from? With Nick—the last man she could ever be prevailed upon to work with—urging her to send the fictional Darcy back to his own story, Zoe will have to decide what she really wants from a happy ending, before it's too late.

Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt by Ben Reeves

Released → 7th July

Travis is Death in the modern world. He wears jeans and a T-shirt and lives in a small, grey town. His job is to offer people comfort in their final hours of life. He’s stoic, gentle, and a little naive, despite everything he knows. He’s young and handsome, despite who he is. Each death he witnesses is meaningful to him; he listens, never judges, and most importantly, never tries to change anyone’s fate. He knows that every life must eventually end to maintain the balance of the universe and he respects the cycle.

Then he meets Dalia, a midwife, and her boisterous eight-year-old daughter Layla, who live across the hall. As Dalia and Layla come to embrace Travis, it becomes more difficult to maintain the detachment that’s allowed him to function for so long. Their time together teaches him what’s truly important in life—and what might be irrevocably lost in death.

Helpless by Jessica Knoll

Released → 7th July

It’s been twelve years since Faye Heron broke Henry Spalding’s heart. Henry was her college boyfriend, her first intense love, but Faye was in danger of being subsumed by him.

Now, Faye is one half of a power-producing duo with her Hollywood husband. Henry is a married father running the family business. Both of their lives have essentially gone to plan.

When a former and beloved college professor suddenly passes away, Faye and Henry find themselves back on campus for the funeral, circling something old and dangerous. Something, if Faye is honest with herself, she has been trying to duplicate for years. But Henry is one of a kind.

The kind who delivers a hypnotic apology for the way things ended.
The kind who suggests they go back to the hotel for a drink.
The kind who drugs and kidnaps her.

When Faye comes to Henry’s remote mountain cabin, she’s beside herself. Has Henry brought her here to punish her? She did, after all, write and star in a lauded episode of television based on their indelicate appetites and vicious breakup. As her week of captivity unfolds, Henry’s wanton demands intensify, and a sprawling, years-old mystery begins to take shape—one that will rewrite history as Faye remembers it and reveal an astounding, cataclysmic truth.

The Great Wherever by Shannon Sanders

Released → 7th July 

At thirty-two, Aubrey Lamb is stumbling into adulthood. A semi-employed gig worker in Washington, DC, she's grieving the recent loss of her father and the end of a relationship that she’d thought would lead to marriage. When Aubrey learns that she has inherited a shared stake in a sizable Tennessee farm from her father, she simply sees an opportunity to get out of the city—and the potential to erase a mounting pile of debts.

Upon her arrival in Lanyer County, though, Aubrey meets the relatives with whom she shares ownership of the farm, and discovers the backstory of the land, beginning with her great-grandfather Thomas—one of the first Black landowners in his community, who gave his four children a homestead on which they could flourish.

But the land proves to be a burdensome inheritance. Over the years, it divides the family, turning Thomas’ descendants against each other and drawing the attention of external forces only too eager to wrest the land from Black hands. These struggles come to a head when a catastrophic tragedy befalls the Lambs, splintering the family and echoing down through the decades, with repercussions for Audrey herself.

As Aubrey learns this history from her living relatives, the ghosts of her ancestors interject with their own exasperated, gossipy commentary on the flaws and foibles of relatives living and dead, and stake their own claims on the farm.

The Man by Laura Sims 

Released → 7th July 

The photos Judith Stanley takes are just for her, a private passion to fill her suburban days. But when she shares them with Paul Sorenson, her new photography instructor, she's unprepared to hear his astonished praise. "Stunning," he calls her photos. "Extraordinary." She has an uncanny eye, he says, and should consider publication. He could help. Except Judith has no interest in sharing her work; in fact, the mere idea of it frightens her.

Still, emboldened by Paul’s encouragement, Judith ventures out beyond her quiet neighborhood to the city in search of increasingly striking images. When she starts to notice the dark shape of a man in the corner of her self-portraits, Judith is certain he's an attacker from her past. She doesn't know why he has returned, but she's sure of his the hoarse sound of his breathing, his hard grip on her elbow. Perhaps it would appease the man if she were to put her camera down and give up her private passion. But she can't; she refuses. Until one night when the man finally emerges from the shadows, and Judith’s story suddenly and irrevocably becomes his own.

Habits of the Sea by Shea Ernshaw

Released → 7th July 

The night Clay Lockhart’s wife dies, a violent storm tears their home—and the eight hectares of land beneath it—away from the Scottish coast, sending it adrift into the Atlantic. Thirty years later, twelve-year-old Ellie Mills discovers the fabled floating island off the coast of Nova Scotia and finds Clay still living in the weatherworn farmhouse perched on its highest hill.

When the island vanishes overnight, Ellie is left questioning whether it ever existed at all. But decades later, now in her thirties, the island resurfaces—and Ellie returns, determined to uncover the truth. What she finds is even Clay hasn’t aged a single day.

Faced with the impossible, Ellie learns that some mysteries aren’t meant to be solved—and that a life shaped by wonder may hold more promise than one bound by certainty.

Man Overboard! by Kathleen Rooney

Released → 7th July 

Patrick “Kick” Kilpatrick hates the ocean. Has always been terrified of it. And now he’s in a real pickle.

Drifting alone in the sea after falling (or jumping? He can’t remember as the all-inclusive drinks on the cruise he was taking with his extended family were, well, inclusive) Kick must survive. Breath by breath, hour by hour in the lonely sea.

As the waves crash over him, so too do the thoughts and memories of just how he got there. A Thanksgiving cruise with an obnoxious brother-in-law he has to bite his tongue to keep from screaming at. A father who gives the Great Santini a run for his money. And a mother, who already left the family boat, so to speak, a long time ago. His family may be complicated, and the pains of life may seem unbearable—infuriating enough to leap from the deck—but maybe the will to survive is stronger.

Every Version of You by Natalie Messier

Released → 7th July 

Joey Vasquez’s life is the definition of good on paper. At thirty-two, she’s a Los Angeles lawyer on the cusp of making partner, but while she’s a professional success, she’s a personal disaster. Her social life mostly consists of nights spent watching TV with her elderly cat. Life isn’t quite what she dreamed when she was younger, but really, whose life is?

But a dinner party with the best friend she’s secretly pined after for years and its aftermath changes everything.

When Joey is given a second chance at life, she finds herself in college again. Armed with memories from her first life, Joey is certain she’s come back to finally convince the one man she ever loved to love her back—so why does she find herself strangely drawn to the man she thought she hated?

Single Girls by John Searles

Released → 7th July 

In 1965, Helen Gurley Brown, a soft spoken, self-professed “mouseburger,” is fresh off the runaway success of her book Sex and the Single Girl, a revolutionary call to single women urging them not to rush into marriage on anyone’s timeline but their own, and, even more radically, to enjoy their sex lives, gloriously free of shame. Upon the book’s publication, half the country is outraged (her mother, for one, hates the book), and the other half will follow her anywhere. Moved by the thousands of letters arriving at her doorstep from readers desperate for advice, she marches from one Manhattan magazine conglomerate to another, looking for a perch from which to dispense her unconventional wisdom. At her last stop, she finally gets her just three issues to turn around the flailing magazine Cosmopolitan.

Helen quickly assembles a team of smart, savvy single girls up to the task. Soon, their lives become the stuff of magazine cover the gorgeous Book Editor’s doomed romance with a man she didn’t know was married—and her bold idea for revenge. The (unofficial!) Sex Editor’s trip to soak in the world’s first champagne glass hot tub, which takes a very wrong turn. The Entertainment Editor’s clash with Joan Crawford and interview with a Park Avenue call girl that leads to unexpected revelations.

Single Girls begins at the dawn of Helen’s legendary tenure and journeys back to her youth, envisioning the devastations and people who forged her into a controversial legend.

An Infinite Love Story by Chanel Cleeton

Released → 7th July 

When Joe Mitchell launches into space, the world is watching. It’s 1968, and the country waits with anticipation and excitement for another successful mission, another celebration as America sets its sights on the Moon. And then comes the knock at the door.

Joe Mitchell’s spacecraft has lost contact. He and his fellow astronauts onboard are feared to be dead. It’s his wife Vivian’s worst nightmare come to life, her grief suddenly taking center stage as the nation waits and mourns. In her quiet moments, Vivian relives their memorable story, unable to accept that this is the end to a love that felt as though it was written in the stars.

As the investigation surrounding Joe’s lost spacecraft intensifies and the mishap is written off as an operator error, Vivian is determined to clear her husband’s name and uncover the mystery of what happened in space. When someone starts sending Vivian messages—messages she believes only Joe could send—she begins to wonder if their love is stronger than space and time, and she’ll do whatever it takes to bring her husband back to her.

Augusta Pine Does Not Exist by Emily Lloyd-Jones

Released → 7th July 

After a hack gone tragically wrong, a teen girl is given an ultimatum: accept a harsh prison sentence or leave her old life behind and use her talents in the service of a shady government agency.

Three years later, the newly-named Augusta Pine has become a skilled wraith, one of the Identity Security Division’s secret operatives. She has no home, no family, and her only friends are her coolly professional handler and a snarky AI spybot. So when she is sent to Portland for an assignment, she seizes the chance to catch a glimpse of her beloved grandmother and rents the apartment next door.

What begins as nostalgic stalking turns into a fight for survival when a group of cyberterrorists hacks the building and imprisons the residents. Augusta doesn’t know exactly what they want, but she does know they are ready to murder for it. With her quick wits, tech savvy – and help from an intriguing fellow hostage – Augusta must race against the clock to stay one step ahead of the killers.

Moss'd in Space by Rebecca Thorne

Released → 7th July 

Torian Razner finally bought a starship, and contrary to Amelia’s assessment, it was not “a meteoric sign of stupidity.” Sure, the alien starship may have been abandoned for a century, and it may be covered in moss now… but it’s Torian’s ticket to freedom, regardless of what her ex… ah, captain… said.

Except Torian’s first flight reveals a surprise passenger: the moss is actually an organic computer with a snarky attitude and serious abandonment issues. The target of its loathing? The immortal alien who built it (and then parked the starship, with Moss inside, and forgot about it). The same alien who just found Torian and accused her of “stealing” the ship.

It’s entirely possible that Amelia was right about this meteoric stupidity.

Country People by Daniel Mason

Released → 7th July 

Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales, and increasingly haunted by a sense that he's become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the far away forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be his year to finally move forward with his life.

But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, one who possesses, in Kate’s words, “a great capacity to fall in with anyone, anywhere.” And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, a Shakespearean temptress and a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world’s delusions in a “Inventory of Wrong Ideas.”

The new friends, the enchanted woods, the sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre—perhaps ridiculous—local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all.

Everything to the Sea by Alicia Upano

Released → 14th July

Home for one final summer, Jane is working and saving cash for her senior year of college before she leaves her island town behind forever. At first, she doesn’t remember Kenji, but he quickly becomes someone she can’t forget: square jaw, a dimple in his cheek. A Hilo boy. To Kenji, she’s Janie, nose perpetually buried in her old high school sketchbooks. Jane tells herself it’s only a fling—one perfect, carefree summer, on her way to achieving her dream of becoming an architect and moving to the continent.

Then a tsunami sweeps their families out to sea, and their all-consuming affair breaks with the weight of grief, pulling them in opposite directions. Kenji remains in Hawai’i, bound by duty to rebuild their hometown. Jane, shattered by the loss, follows her best friend to California. For seven years, an ocean lies between them, until Jane and Kenji meet on another coast . . .

The Half Life by Rachel Beanland

Released → 14th July 

When twenty-three-year-old Eileen O’Malley meets charismatic naval officer Paul Archer in a Charleston department store, she doesn’t expect to fall so hard, so fast. But Paul is funny and ambitious, and soon, Eileen’s got a ring on her finger and is following him to the tiny, sun-drenched Mediterranean island of La Maddalena, where Paul will be heading up Radiological Controls aboard a submarine tender.

In La Maddalena, Eileen joins a makeshift community of Navy wives, who are hell bent on making the island feel a little more like home. But for Eileen, whose brother died in Vietnam, home is a loaded word, and as she settles into life on the island—taking Italian lessons and learning to make culurgiones—she begins to love the place for all the ways it is not like where she comes from.

Still, it doesn’t take long for Eileen to be confronted with the complexities of being an American abroad. The decision to send nuclear-powered subs into the La Maddalena Archipelago was a contentious one, and the US government is doing whatever it can to ensure that the island—not to mention all of Italy—doesn’t go communist in the next election.

When Italian activists and scientists begin to sound the alarm about possible nuclear contamination in the water, the island erupts in a series of protests, made worse by the ongoing mishaps of the US Navy. Soon, Eileen’s marriage falters and her loyalties begin to shift as she is drawn into a web of secrets—and to a local journalist who forces her to imagine a life beyond the one she’s been handed.

Lady X by Molly Fader

Released → 14th July

Los Angeles, 2024. After learning that her A-List actor husband sent explicit photos to multiple girls on social media, Margot Cooper runs away from the world—and the paparazzi—by fleeing to her childhood home with her teenage daughter in tow.

But home isn’t the sanctuary Margot was hoping for. In a cardboard box in the corner of the attic, she finds damning evidence of an infamous urban legend, the mysterious vigilante “Lady X”—including a blurry newspaper photo of a woman who looks an awful lot like Margot’s mother.

New York City, 1977. In the midst of an infamous summer, Ginger Daughtry and her two beloved roommates are able to shield each other from the chaos—until one of them is assaulted. Astounded by the lack of response from police, the young women decide to engage in some light payback, signing their handiwork as “Lady X.”

Soon copycats appear, and a movement inspired by acts of vandalism against terrible men spirals out of control, with criminals running amok under the guise of the enigmatic “Lady X.” When a body is found fallen—or pushed—from five stories high, the hunt reaches a boiling point.

But Lady X has vanished into thin air.

The Intrigue by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Released → 14th July 

Handsome con artist Ulises has long charmed lonely women via letters to steal their money, but money is hard to come by in 1940s Mexico. Ulises knows his looks won't last forever, and he's desperate to get his hands on a real fortune.

He thinks he's found it when he captivates his newest correspondent, Perla, the owner of a small-town boardinghouse in picturesque Veracruz. But when he meets her, he finds something he didn't expect. The woman has a niece, Inés, who is as observant as she is desperate to escape her aunt’s household.

When Inés discovers Ulises' true intentions, she wants in on the scheme. They’ll convince her aunt that Ulises is a great catch, Perla will marry him, and her money will vanish. Easy, fast and clean.

But Perla is not the desperate, silly spinster Ulises imagines. She harbors secrets. And although Ulises does not believe in true romance, Inés is more alluring than he bargained on. Suddenly, a simple plan may become perilously complicated.

Scary Movie Night by Miranda Smith

Released → 14th July 

Tippi is ready for a fresh start. After breaking off her engagement to an increasingly demanding, controlling, and emotionally unstable man, she is newly inspired to do whatever it takes to put herself first. Plus, her thirty-fifth birthday is coming a perfect occasion to ring in this new era. Tippi’s friends see the opportunity, too, and lean into her love of horror films by throwing her a lavish theme party at a secluded mansion, where everyone dresses as characters from iconic scary movies. But Tippi's attempts to enjoy the night are shattered when she starts receiving terrifying messages from her ex, Oliver, to expose a secret she was ready to take to the grave.

At first, Tippi can’t believe her eyes. Oliver moved across the country after they broke up—he can’t have crashed her party. Could one of her friends have found out? But when her guests begin to disappear one by one, it becomes clear that the threats have very real consequences. And the messages make clear one the call is coming from inside the house.

As Tippi is forced to navigate the deception of those closest to her, she realizes that in the end, some things are indeed like in the movies, and she’ll do whatever it takes to just survive the night.

Sex Diaries by Alyssa Shelasky

Released → 14th July

Polyamory is hardly a new cultural touchstone, yet as it continues to enter the mainstream dating world, its realities often remain opaque. What does the everyday life of someone with multiple partners actually look like? How do you navigate the daily logistics and the competing schedules? How do you deal with jealousy? In this candid, groundbreaking compilation of anonymous accounts, told by real people navigating sex and dating outside the bounds of traditional monogamy, Alyssa Shelasky pulls back the curtain.

A 67-year-old woman keeps a collection of well-endowed lovers in various corners of the world; a restaurant owner is jolted back to life when she gets illicit messages from a married man; a Brooklynite plans a porn brunch for her birthday, reveling in the fact that she finally feels at ease in her body.

Some diarists are just beginning to question their relationship with monogamy, others have been polyamorous for a long-time. Some accounts are graphic and dishy, while others focus on the search for lasting connections that feel genuinely liberatory. Every single one is strikingly honest and authentic, revealing expansive tales of love, lust, longing and desire.

Misery's Wife by Joan Tierney

Released → 14th July 

Elixane lives in a village ravaged by waves, storms, and the encroaching forest. When she was too young to remember, her elder sisters each picked a flower and were whisked away: Borboleta to marry the King of the Air, Adelina to marry the King of the Sea, and her favorite sister Dores to marry the King of Misery, who promised: No one will ever love you as I will.

So when Elixane receives a mysterious message from a toad, she sets out to rescue Dores from the Kingdom of Misery. She is aided by the jester-like Marquês of Luck and his sister Jinx, the contrary and beautiful Marquesa of Misfortune. On the way, she’ll have to reunite with her sisters and their magical husbands, break several unbreakable curses—and, perhaps, find a magical love of her own.

Hot Girl Murder Club by Ashley Winstead

Released → 14th July

Ten years ago, aspiring singer-actress Scout Sage lost the only thing that mattered: her sister, Georgia. Ever since Georgia’s mysterious death at a Hollywood party, Scout’s done her best to honor her memory, clawing her way through the industry and collecting a network of climbers along the way, fellow hot girls in stilettos with cutthroat ambition, a new Hollywood order.

But when a slew of targeted murders makes headlines across LA, all pointing to Scout as the killer, she turns overnight from a mid-tier pop star into the world’s most famous (alleged) murderer. Now everything she’s worked to build—including the justice she wants for Georgia—will fall apart unless Scout can prove she’s not guilty.

Meanwhile, the young and unusual detective assigned to her case, herself no stranger to tragedy, begins to unearth secrets not even Scout knows, let alone her millions of new fans. Particularly about the ways Georgia’s death connects to an even older pattern of crimes long hushed over in Hollywood—an old reign of terror that, if brought to light, could be the fuel that ignites a reckoning the world over.

Unfinished Business by Clare Osongco

Released → 14th July 

A few months ago, Ruby Ocampo’s mother, Adela, died at her desk at work. Now, lost and driven by a misplaced sense of obligation, Ruby’s taken a job at the megacorporation where Adela worked for decades—and, to her horror, she discovers her mother’s ghost is trapped in the company Slack.

Ruby has never lived up to her mother’s expectations in life, but to set her free, she’ll have to resolve Adela’s unfinished business. She makes a list of all the ways she could live more like her mother would have wanted, covering everything from her stunted career to her love life (#5 on the list: date someone in a higher tax bracket!). Soon her quest to free Adela gets Ruby entangled with two men at the office who might be able to help: the estranged childhood friend her mom never approved of—who's the only one she can confide in about this supernatural crisis—and the hot but vaguely sinister junior executive who's been paying her a confusing amount of attention.

In order to give her mom a chance at the afterlife, Ruby must address her shortcomings one by one—and reevaluate her inherited ideas about love, work, and what’s truly important along the way.

A Last Time for Everything by Evan S. Porter 

Released → 21st July

The only thing Arthur and Wren are sure about is each other. But even after ten years together, they hardly feel like adults. They’re living in the same Craigslist-furnished one-bedroom Baltimore apartment that they moved into after graduation. A surprise pregnancy is the last thing either of them expect, and a baby is the last thing they feel ready for.

Wren is desperate for one final adventure before the baby comes. So when they find the Bucket List they made in their early days together, Wren convinces Arthur that they better tick off every item. It’s their last chance to do all the things they wanted to do as wistful teenagers, like spend an entire day in bed, get on the jumbotron at a pro football game, or . . . go skydiving? Is that allowed?

But as their due date gets closer, and the items on their list dwindle, Arthur and Wren find they’ve got more questions than answers. What do they want their life to look like as a family? Do they have what it takes to be parents? And the big Are they really meant to be together forever?

Mudlark by Mary Helen Specht

Released → 21st July 

Jenny Sweet's marriage is ending—and with it her band and maybe even her fragile relationship with her thirteen-year-old daughter, Neko. A reluctant wife and mother, Jenny plans a new journey of self-discovery after one more gig at Burning Man. But when Neko disappears amid the chaos of the festival, Jenny fears that everything that mattered to her has been lost. As she races against the dark, Jenny finds herself thrown into the past, and into the heart of a gathering storm.

Now twenty-five, Neko is a a trained recruit who braves the rival factions and feral survivalists in the ruins of a crumbling, flooded Manhattan for resources that grow scarcer by the day. When she stumbles upon the master of her mother’s long-lost solo album and later hears that someone else is searching for it—someone who could be her mother, missing for over a decade—she embarks on a perilous adventure with a ragtag crew that will take her from treetop societies to decadent raves to the underground bunker where she will, finally, confront her mother's fate—and her own.

The Good Parts by Evann Normandin

Released → 28th July 

When Landon receives a letter from Rose—the woman he once planned forever with—he learns their love story is over. She’s undergone a radical memory-erasing treatment, leaving behind her grief, her past… and him. But Landon can’t bear to lose the love of his life. If she fell for him once, couldn’t she fall for him again?

Now living in Edinburgh, Rose’s world is a blank canvas, and she’s dating someone new. When Landon re-enters her life as a stranger, they become fast friends, their lives entwining once more. But what Rose doesn’t know is that this new friend carries the weight of everything they once shared: their firsts, their marriage, and the heartbreak they barely survived. And when she starts exhibiting strange symptoms, it becomes clear their history isn’t gone—it’s just buried. And remembering could come at a devastating cost.

Fishbone Cinderella by Elizabeth Lim

Released → 28th July 

Guangdong, 1940. When Ha Yut Ying narrowly escapes Japanese soldiers by turning invisible, she knows her new-found magic must be kept a secret. But her mother, whose dreams foretell the future, suspects her daughter has changed, and warns her of a curse upon their family. For her protection, she gives her a gold bracelet whose links are shaped like fishbones.​

After the war, Ha Yut Ying is sent to live with her father and his second wife, who have become wealthy factory owners in Hong Kong. Her stepmother, jealous of her beauty, forces her to work in the family's shoe factory.

But when Yut Ying collides with a boy on a bicycle on her way to work, she loses her bracelet. The boy is Tommy Yeung, scion of a local soymilk tycoon. And their encounter will change both of their destinies forever...

Time Travel for Beginners by Jaclyn Moriarty

Released → 28th July 

On a quiet road nestled within the bustle of Sydney lies a nondescript storefront known simply as the Time Travel Agency. At once a confounding mystery and a beacon of hope, the Agency seems to attract those who need it most. Single mother Anna is in desperate need of change, and the Agency gives her the chance to begin her career—and life—anew. Teddy is a genius at salvaging businesses but needs saving himself, and he’s drawn to the Agency hoping to travel back in time to untangle his troubled childhood and his recently imploded marriage. Jade has no interest in the Agency at all, because there’s no way people are literally time traveling, right? Jade’s present is challenging enough, with her spirited, increasingly bad-tempered daughter and a deeply buried secret too painful for words. As Anna, Teddy, and Jade’s paths converge, the question of just how legitimate the Agency’s ventures into the past are becomes a mysterious, provocative, tantalising, and even heart-wrenching one to parse—but there is no denying that the ripple effects through all three of their lives are very, very real …

Meet Me in Paris by Kristin Harmel 

Released → 28th July

Julia Glover has brought her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Piper, to Paris for the first time—but they know it will also be their last trip here together. Julia is dying, and as the mother and daughter desperately try to make memories together as the clock ticks down, the world opens up around them. Piper meets a cute French waiter, who might just understand her better than anyone she’s ever met, and Julia meets a man at a dive bar and struggles with how to tell him the truth about her future.

Rock star Jackson Quick’s glory days are behind him. He had a handful of hit songs thirty years ago, but he hasn’t toured in a decade. This week, he’ll launch his reunion tour in Paris, the city where it all began. But he wants more out of life than being defined by fame. When he meets a woman who finally sees him for who he is at his core, the ground shifts beneath his feet.

Henry McGee has been writing hit songs for decades—including Jackson Quick’s biggest hit, City of Light. But his secret is that every love song he’s ever written is for a woman named Celeste, whom he loved a lifetime ago, when they were both teenagers in Paris during World War II. He has spent eighty years believing she died—but when a letter arrives telling him the opposite, he’s on the first flight to France. Can he break through the haze of her dementia, using the songs he’s written all these years, to remind her of who they once were to each other—and to tell her he came back for her?

Henry’s granddaughter, Melody, has just discovered that her husband of twenty years, Gilles, a French cosmetics executive, is having an affair. When she confronts him, he tearfully apologizes and begs her to forgive him. But can she? And, perhaps even more importantly, does she want to? Or is there a different kind of life out there for her if she chooses to be alone?

Indie Darling by Lauren Nossett

Released → 28th July

Nashville is a city of two faces, where the glitter often masks the grit.

Kelly Williams helps women. Sisters in search of lost siblings. Wives determined to uncover affairs. Daughters haunted by men lingering outside their windows. Clients trust her because she listens, she believes them, and over the years she’s honed a specialized skill set.

Kelly is a Dolly Parton–loving, sports-car-driving private investigator in Nashville, Tennessee. Her latest client, Sarah-Faith Owens, comes to her after receiving threatening messages. Something about the woman feels familiar, and Kelly realizes she’s Seraph, the magnetic, polarizing lead singer of the indie music sensation The Garden Snakes. With feminist anthems, cryptic lyric easter eggs, and an electrifying stage presence, Seraph has built a fiercely loyal following—and attracted a number of critics. At that level of fame, her stalker could be anyone.

Then, in the middle of a Nashville performance, Seraph is shot on stage—and the ambulance carrying her disappears. As the city reels and conspiracy theories swirl, Kelly is pulled into a dangerous web of secrets involving Seraph’s bandmates, her troubled past, and the high cost of stardom.

Which books being released in July are you excited for? Let me know in the comments and Happy Reading!