Here are the best new books out today 📚
 Hello, book lovers! Each week, dozens of new releases hit the shelves. Here are our favorites. ❤️📚 –The BuzzFeed Books team
 Credit: Riverhead, New Directions The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken (Riverhead) "Elizabeth McCracken — whose fantastical novel Bowlaway was a 2019 BuzzFeed Book Club pick — returns to short fiction in her latest story collection about family bonds in all of their messy, beautiful, transformative glory. These stories are heavy with feeling, but often that feeling is joy as we follow newlyweds, siblings, parents and their children through uncomfortable (and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny) predicaments." —Arianna Rebolini
Get it from Bookshop for $24.83, Target for $23.49, or Amazon for $23.41.
An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector, trans. Stefan Tobler (New Directions) "The late Clarice Lispector, a brilliant and prolific Brazilian novelist who wrote until her death in 1977, has had a thrilling resurgence in the US thanks to New Directions' fleet of reissues in the past decade. Her writing is hypnotic and evocative, drawing out deep emotional truths while playing with form. An Apprenticeship — which includes an afterword by Sheila Heti — is an attempt to understand human connection and its limits, following a woman on her earnest journey out of solitude and in search of love. (I'm also a huge fan of her final, meta novel, The Hour of the Star.)" —Arianna Rebolini
 Credit: Thomas Nelson When Stars Rain Down by Angela Jackson-Brown (Thomas Nelson) "It's the summer of 1936 and Opal Pruitt can sense something amiss, beyond just the unseasonable heat in her hometown of Parsons, Georgia. Almost 18, she's excited about her upcoming birthday and the annual Founder's Day celebration in a few weeks. But her life is shaken when the KKK descends upon her neighborhood of Colored Town, forcing everyone — Black and white – to reevaluate the unspoken rules they live by. Plus, Opal finds herself in the middle of a love triangle, awakening new feelings for two different boys and forcing her to spend the summer realizing the type of woman she wants to be." —Kirby Beaton
Get it from Bookshop for $16.55, Target for $17.99, or Amazon for $15.49.
 Credit: HarperTeen, Triquarterly Books Pride and Premeditation by Tirzah Price (HarperTeen) "Pride and Prejudice gets a murdery twist with this super fun YA retelling and the first book in the Jane Austen Murder Mysteries series. Lizzie Bennet's mother and sisters want her to find a husband, but she'd rather become a lawyer like her father. After a nearby murder, Lizzie decides to dive into the case and prove she has the skills to be a lawyer. But the heir to the prestigious firm Pemberley Associates, Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, thwarts her at every turn." —Margaret Kingsbury
Get it from Bookshop for $16.55, Target for $15.99, or Amazon for $15.99
Gone Missing in Harlem by Karla FC Holloway (Triquarterly Books) "Karla Holloway's sophomore novel defies genre — it's equal parts transportative historical fiction, unputdownable mystery, and damning examination of anti-Blackness in the US. It centers on the Mosby family in early 20th-century Harlem, having left the South during the Great Migration only to land in a neighborhood struggling with corruption, poverty, violence, and racism, not to mention the flu pandemic. When young Percy witnesses a murder, his mother, DeLilah, decides the only way to keep him alive is to send him away. Years later, her daughter Selma — who's grown up knowing she can never live up to the memory of her brother — steps away from her own baby to run into a grocery store and returns to the sidewalk to find the stroller empty. The family is desperate for help, but they can't get the authorities to care about this missing Black baby — until the city's first Black police officer takes the case. It's a spellbinding story about family, grief, and perseverance, full of rich and resilient characters you'll fall in love with." —Arianna Rebolini
 Credit: Coffee House Press, Tor Teen Trafik by Rikki Ducornet (Coffee House Press) "It's hard to describe Trafik in one paragraph; its tiny size (just 88 pages!) belies its tremendous scope. In a future where all that's left of Earth are the records of random trivia, a human-ish astronaut and her robot companion decide to abandon their mission and go in search of the legendary planet Trafik, rumored to be a utopia granting all far-flung visitors their greatest desires. On this journey, the two will confront the biggest questions about existence, identity, and experience: What makes a human? Where does consciousness reside? It could all become very serious, if Ducornet weren't so skilled in absurdity." —Arianna Rebolini
Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor Teen) "Aliens brought Tina, then an infant, to her adoptive human mother. They told her mother that one day Tina's internal beacon would alight and they would come back for her. Now Tina is a teenager, and she's begun to have flashbacks from a previous life, when an assassin was trying to kill her. She's also started to glow. Part of her wants to fulfill her destiny and finally discover who she really is — but another part doesn't want to leave her friends and family and face the dangers of an uncertain, alien future. This compulsive read perfectly captures teenage voices and feelings even as it travels from a normal teenage life on Earth to galactic battles. I listened to the audiobook narrated by Hynden Walch, who made it feel like Tina was sitting beside me and telling me her story." —Margaret Kingsbury
Get it from Bookshop for $17.47, Target for $15.99, or Amazon for $15.99.
 Credit: William Morrow, Berkley Books Second First Impressions by Sally Thorne (William Morrow) "Working at a retirement villa can age you, or at least that's the case for Ruthie Midona. When the twentysomething is teased by a hot stranger about her orthopedic shoes and pearls, she finally agrees to let her assistant help her rediscover her youth and get back into the dating scene. But the last thing she needs is that hot stranger — a tattoo artist named Teddy, who happens to be the new owner's son — moving into the villa and getting in the way. And not just moving into the villa, but in the neighboring apartment that shares her wall. What starts as too close for comfort slowly turns into a comfortable friendship teetering on the edge of more. But with the villa at risk of being sold and her beloved residents re-homed, Ruthie can't leave, and with a new business venture on the horizon, Teddy has no plans to stay." —Shyla Watson
Get it from Bookshop for $14.71, Target for $12.79, or Amazon for $12.79.
Love in Color: Mythical Tales From Around the World, Retold by Bolu Babalola (William Morrow) "In this debut collection, Bolu Babalola puts a modern twist on some of history's most beautiful love stories, including magical folktales from West Africa, ancient legends from the Middle East, and myths from ancient Greece. In the 13 stories — featuring one about 'a high-born Nigerian goddess, who has been beaten down and unappreciated by her gregarious lover, longs to be truly seen,' and another about 'a young businesswoman attempts a great leap in her company, and an even greater one in her love life' — Babalola showcases her writing style, which is beautifully graceful. The author is someone who loves love and you feel that on every page. Read an excerpt." —Shyla Watson
Get it from Bookshop for $23.91, Target for $21.99, or Amazon for $21.99.
Hana Khan Carries On by Uzma Jalaluddin (Berkley Books) "Sure, Hana Khan waits tables part time at the only halal restaurant in town, but what she really wants to do is tell stories on the radio. And if she outshines the other intern at the radio station, she just might have a shot to do that. Until then, she puts her heart and soul into her podcast, where she connects with listeners...or, rather, one in particular. But Hana's dreams take a backseat when a competing restaurant with a very attractive, somewhat familiar owner pops up, putting her job at risk. And then there's the arrival of her mysterious aunt and an attack on the neighborhood that complicates everything." —Shyla Watson
Get it from Bookshop for $14.72, Target for $14.49, or Amazon for $14.49.
Now in paperback: These Women by Ivy Pochoda: In South LA, six women are unwittingly connected by one dangerous man: Dorian, a woman trying to solve her daughter's murder; Feelia, a sex worker who was almost killed by the same man; Julianna, a dancer; Essie, a vice cop; Marella, a boundary-pushing performance artist; and Anneke, a neighbor who'd rather pretend "these women" don't exist. When a murderer strikes again, their worlds collide.
Becoming Duchess Goldblatt by Anonymous: Dealing with the lingering trauma of a rough childhood and bad heartbreak, a reclusive anonymous writer invents, and creates a Twitter account for, a fictional persona: 81-year-old Duchess Goldblatt. The plan is to lurk and be snarky from a distance, but as her following grows she finds she appreciates the many connections she makes.
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts by Christopher Beha: Sam Waxworth is a data journalist and staunch believer in the idea that everything in life is knowable and quantifiable. After successfully predicting the outcome of the 2008 presidential election, he's offered a job as a columnist for a cushy magazine, and he's quickly assigned a profile of Frank Doyle — a disgraced opinion columnist who covered both politics and baseball. But Sam likes Frank more than he expects to, and his previously very neat life philosophy gets muckier as he comes to know Frank's family — his wife, Kit, whose family-run investment bank is failing; his son, Eddie, who's just returned from a tour in Iraq; and his daughter, Margo, an academic who'd rather be a poet. Beha's third novel is a masterful interplay of big, fraught themes of privilege, race, wealth, and ethics. Read an excerpt. (Best Books of 2020)
All Adults Here by Emma Straub: When matriarch Astrid witnesses a school bus accident, the trauma uncovers a long-repressed memory that forces her to question the kind of parent she was to her now-adult children — who are floundering in their own ways. It's a heartfelt, grounded story about family dynamics, forgiveness, and the unavoidable effects we have on those we love.
Perfect Tunes by Emily Gould: Perfect Tunes is a candid, big-hearted story about choices and consequences, following young Ohioan Laura, who is a 22-year-old recent transplant to early 2000s NYC. She's chasing her dream of making it as a singer-songwriter, spending her nights waitressing and doing drugs and/or having sex with Dylan, an up-and-coming musician. In the span of just a few months, everything changes — the Twin Towers fall, Dylan drowns while high, his band asks Laura to step in as lead singer, she declines, and finds out she's pregnant. The rest of the book tracks the aftermath of these events, jumping ahead in time to see Laura struggling as a single mom, while her former roommate — who ended up joining the band in Laura's stead — enjoys the critical success Laura so desperately desired. The years progress, and Laura's daughter starts asking about her cult icon father — and through their complicated, parallel journeys of self-discovery, Gould poignantly and carefully explores what happens when plans go awry, expectations and priorities shift, and people adapt in their pursuit of love, meaning, and fulfillment. (Best Books of Spring 2020)
The Carrying by Ada Limón: The Carrying is a masterful blend of the personal and the political — a piercing look into the nature of pain and impermanence. It is a deeply intimate book, but through Ada Limón's generous accounting of her bodily struggles with a crooked spine as a child and infertility as an adult, we see overarching themes of life and death, growth and decay, grief and acceptance. In many ways, it is a paean to nature itself, to the peace in knowing it's both part of us and greater than us — especially when everything else in the world can seem like it's falling apart. (Best Books of 2018)
Why We Swim by Bonnie Tsui: Tsui's history of the human relationship with water is compelling and profound, in writing so fluid it mimics the flow of her subject — that is, at its most peaceful. But water is deadly too, and it's this characteristic that gets at the core question of Tsui's investigation: If we are not built to survive in water, then why are we drawn to it again and again? She attributes this to five motivations — survival; well-being; community; competition; and the physical, emotional, and nearly sublime experience of it, which she calls "flow" — and explores each through personal experience and firsthand research. It captivated me from start to finish. (Best Books of Spring 2020)
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