I love back to school season when it feels like the smell of a fresh box of crayons is just wafting through the air. I just bought myself a Crayola water bottle and a new pack of pens in celebration! There’s still time to fit in a last bit of summer reading, though, so check out this list of some of the best new books of August!
The Hanged Man
By Katherine Conner
August 4, 2026
Black Lawrence Press: “Against the surreal landscape of the deep South, three Lebanese-American sisters encounter their missing mother six years after she vanished from their lives. Georgia, now a ghost tour guide in the French Quarter, spots her mother’s face in the crowd of tour-goers. Virginia, a receptionist at a mental health facility in Mississippi, is sure her mother walks in one day and asks to be committed. Louise, a relay operator in Birmingham, hears her mother’s voice late one night on the line. Each of these encounters is fleeting, almost ghostly, ambiguous.”
The Wound is Where the Light Enters
By Chris Young
August 4, 2026
Little, Brown and Company: “Started in solitary confinement and finished beyond bars, The Wound Is Where the Light Enters is a powerful meditation on choice, consequence, and human potential, told through the story of a man who was never given a chance — and who fought until, at last, he was.”
Meet me in the Garden
By Nina LaCour
August 4, 2026
Flatiron: “Profound and expansive, a story of love and longing, art and motherhood, friendship and desire, Meet Me in the Garden is a decades-spanning tour de force, inspired by the author’s family and tracing the history of the Great Migration.”
Night Songs
By Alli Dyer
August 11, 2026
Atria: “In this haunting family saga, a young woman must delve into her country star mother’s music to break a curse that has plagued the women in her family for generations — before her time runs out. Night Songs is an electric story of inheritance and resilience, love and freedom, and the power of music to connect across generations.”
The Watersmith
By Yance Wyatt
August 11, 2026
Regal House: “When hard-drinking handyman Jack Calloway discovers an old moonshine still behind the Smoky Mountain cabin he plans to flip, his teenage son dares him to get it running. Jack accepts — until his wife, Jolene, tries to sabotage the first batch and is horribly burned in the process. … A haunting, tender tale of love, regret, and the volatile bonds between parents and children, The Watersmith is a story of oil and water, memory and mercy — and how far one man will go to bring his family home.”
At the End of the World There Is a Pond
By Steven Duong
August 11, 2026
W. W. Norton: “At the End of the World There Is a Pond is a book about aftermaths. Each poem comes in the wake of a deep rupture — the ruptures of mental illness and addiction, of migration and displacement, of violence, familial conflict, and ecological catastrophe — and yet the speakers engage with despair and playfulness in equal measure, always allowing humor, irony, and the exuberance of contemporary life to bend darkness toward something like hope.”
Wounded Boarders
By George Singleton
August 11, 2026
Dzanc: “Crafted with Singleton’s distinctive mix of satire and charm, the stories in Wounded Boarders take readers from binocular-clad boyhood to the inbox of an adjunct professor and a host of others at the end of their rope. Undeniably Southern in nature, these stories capture the absurdity of the mundane, offering a glimpse into the routines and recollections of imperfect people whose lives are stranger than fiction.”
Unprecendented Times
By Malavika Kannan
August 18, 2026
Henry Holt: “Unprecedented Times captures the beauty, humor, pain, and straight-up chaos that exist in relationships between best friends and lovers, mothers and daughters, and between storytellers and themselves. Malavika Kannan’s fresh, arresting novel is a testament to the power of self-narrative for Gen Z American women: of writing oneself into existence where no previous script exists.”
The Book of Chuck
By LaToya Watkins
August 18, 2026
Tiny Reparations: “Set in Texas and spanning decades, LaToya Watkins’s brilliant new novel is a gimlet-eyed investigation into the bonds and boundaries of family, generational inheritance, and the power of belonging.”
The Maltese Version
By Katy Simpson Smith
August 18, 2026
FSG: “A charged, delightfully offbeat novel of four women forging their way across time, place, and language in search of desire, power, and connection. Full of mischief, charm, and wisdom, Katy Simpson Smith’s The Maltese Version upends our notions of love, language, desire, understanding, and the many ways we make meaning.”
Floodgate
By Matthew Neill Null
August 25, 2026
Blair: “In a most concrete and riveting narrative, Floodgate explores the social and economic upheavals of the era — labor unrest, political and corporate corruption, persecution of Communists, the devastation of the environment — and their powerful impact on powerless communities. It is a story of loyalty to family and community, moral responsibility for personal choices, corporate greed and environmental destruction, and the depths and limits of love.”
Daytona Teddy Riggs
By Drew Buxton
August 25, 2026
Hub City: “At once an outrageous comedy, a biting satire of the self-help industry, and an earnest look at the facets of obsession, Buxton’s riotous debut novel chronicles how masculinity, privilege, and mental illness intersect, all through the eyes of the memorable menace Teddy Riggs.”
Southern Review of Books 