Fiction dominated my June reading list with five novels set in Afghanistan, post-war Italy, Houston, Texas, the U.K.’s Cornwall coast, and an alternate reality, and a novella set on an alien spaceship. A nonfiction book about biological warfare, the CIA, and the U.S. Freedom of Information Act completes this month’s roundup.
Read on for short reviews of all seven books:
FICTION
Air by Christian Kracht, translated from the German by Daniel Bowles
Literary Fiction. Speculative.
Liveright
July 14, 2026
208 pages
In this surreal story, an interior decorator mysteriously disappears from a massive data center in Norway. Elsewhere, a clever 9-year-old girl helps a stranger evade the pursuit of a local aristocrat’s soldiers. Recurrent images of spinning, flying, bodies of water, glass objects, and the color green give the story a dreamlike quality as the stranger and the girl flee through a series of natural landscapes. Is the stranger the missing interior decorator? Yes and no. A dramatic climax and mystical open-ended conclusion add interest to this speculative story about nature and identity. Highly recommended.
City of Widows by Nadia Hashimi
Women’s Fiction.
William Morrow
July 28, 2026
432 pages
Readers drawn to emotional mother-daughter stories will want to check out this new novel about an Afghan soldier desperate to escape Afghanistan after the US abandoned the nation to the Taliban in August 2021. Three resilient women—a mother who fled an abusive marriage, her 11-year-old daughter, and a bravehearted broadcast journalist—are portrayed with two timelines, one from 2011 to 2017, the other in 2021. Comparisons to American Dirt are apt; City of Widows wins easily with impressive depth, nuance, and authenticity. Highly recommended.
Still Life by Sarah Winman
Historical Fiction.
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
November 2021
464 pages
A chance encounter in Italy in 1944 leads to a lifelong friendship between a young British soldier and middle-aged art historian. Though their paths cross only infrequently from 1944 to 1968, they remain connected through their shared interests and colorful mutual friends. A light tone, spirited dialogue, and a wise parrot that quotes Shakespeare with spot-on relevance give this character-driven story about love, friendship, and forgiveness plenty of heart.
A Year of Marvelous Ways by Sarah Winman
General Fiction
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
June 16, 2026
288 pages
A young soldier returns to England in 1947 to deliver a dying acquaintance’s last letter to his father. After an unexpected encounter with a woman he loved years earlier ends badly, the soldier washes up in a creek, where he’s found by a 89-year-old healer and midwife. With her support, he begins to recover from the devastation of the war. A lot of slow-paced backstory, a dispassionate romance involving a local baker, and a pile-up of farfetched reveals near the end mar this story about love, remorse, and renewal. (First published by Tinder Press in 2015.)
Pleasantville by Attica Locke
Mystery. Law. Politics.
Amistad
April 2015
448 pages
A trial lawyer grieving his wife’s death defends an up-and-coming young client against a murder charge that may be politically motivated in this second installment in Attica Locke’s “Jay Porter” series. A web of political and racial intrigue in a historically Black neighborhood in Houston, Texas, overshadows the search for the killer, but adds a welcome literary layer to this well-written and fast-paced legal thriller. Highly recommended. (First published by Profile Books in January 2013.)
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
Science Fiction.
Tordotcom
July 2018
112 pages
This short novella introduces Binti, an ambitious young Himba woman who runs away from her large family in Namibia to study mathematics at a prestigious university on another planet. During her interstellar journey, aliens board the ship she’s on and kill her fellow students, leaving only the captain and the likeable and resourceful Binti alive. She’ll need to use her smarts and her ancestral magic of interspecies cooperation to win over the aliens and try to stop them from perpetrating another massacre to recover something they really, really want. Two sequels, later packaged with Binti as a trilogy, add weight to this slim first installment.
NONFICTION
Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act by Nicholson Baker
History. Journalism. Memoir.
Penguin Press
July 2020
464 pages
Did the U.S. engage in biological warfare in Korea in the 1950s? The answer should’ve been easy to discover, but it wasn’t, not even after Nicholson Baker spent years digging through government archives and filing Freedom of Information Act requests, many of which were wrongfully denied, deliberately slow-walked, or responded to with ludicrously over-redacted documents. In this nonfiction book, he reveals what he found out, what he believes might have happened, and how the government agencies thwarted the FOIA process to conceal some very nasty secrets. #
Marcie Geffner is a journalist, writer, and book critic in Ventura, California.
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