Books to Read This Season If You've Already Read Everything Everyone's Talking About

There's a particular rhythm to literary conversation in the summer. Someone mentions the Booker winner. Someone else brings up the Indian novel everyone has been waiting years for. A third person says they've been meaning to read it. And then the conversation moves on, because everyone at the table has already read everything that's supposed to be read, and nobody wants to admit that the books they actually loved this season were the ones nobody assigned them.

This is a list for that person. Not the person who needs to be told what's important, you already know what's important, you've already read it, you've already had the dinner party conversation about it. This is for the moment after: when you want something that wasn't handed to you by an algorithm or a prize committee, something that arrived quietly and turned out to be extraordinary, something you found because you were paying attention to the right people rather than the right headlines.

Evenings and Weekends

By Oisín McKenna

London, one weekend, a whale in the Thames. McKenna's debut follows a loose group of people, queer, broke, loving each other imperfectly across forty-eight hours that somehow contain everything: grief, desire, a pregnancy, a party that goes on too long. It's the kind of novel that feels like it was written about people you actually know, which is either a gift or a problem depending on your weekend. Everyone will compare it to Rooney. Ignore that. It's doing something stranger.

Flesh

By David Szalay

Most people heard about this one when it won the Booker and made a mental note. The mental note is worth acting on. István is Hungarian, young, and the novel follows him across years and borders through money and sex and the particular way life shapes a man without his permission or awareness. Szalay doesn't editorialise, doesn't explain, doesn't ask you to feel anything specific. That restraint is exactly what makes it so difficult to put down, and so hard to stop thinking about after.

Small Boat

By Vincent Delecroix

Twenty-seven people drowned in the English Channel. A woman who wasn't there can't stop thinking about it. That's the entire novel, more or less, and it is one of the most quietly devastating things published this year. Delecroix isn't writing about the event. He's writing about what it means to carry something you have no right to carry, to be wrecked by a grief that technically isn't yours. Translated from the French, which means it has that particular quality of feeling both very close and slightly out of reach. Read it in one sitting if you can.

Stone Yard Devotional

By Charlotte Wood

This one has been circulating for a while now among a very particular kind of reader, the kind who doesn't post about what they're reading, just quietly presses a copy into your hands. A woman goes back, in middle age, to the religious community she left behind. What Wood does with that premise, the faith, the resentment, the body, the question of what we owe each other, is so careful and so exact that you finish it feeling slightly rearranged. Nothing is resolved. Nothing needs to be.