10 books to add to your reading list in June 2023

Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and nonfiction, to consider for your June reading list.

Summer is (more less) here, and so are the books of June. New novels by Jenny Erpenbeck and Lorrie Moore are joined by a powerful debut novel about female friendships and another about Vietnamese Americans, while June nonfiction runs the gamut from a graphic memoir about racism to a history of redwoods and a New York City medical examiner’s account of the reality behind the “CSI” myths.

FICTION

Kairos
By Jenny Erpenbeck
Translated by Michael Hofmann
New Directions: 336 pages, $26
(June 6)

With the Berlin Wall not long for this world, Katharina and Hans meet on a bus in the still-divided city in 1986. Their lives could not be more different: She is 19 and consumed with the future; he is middle-aged and still ruminating over World War II. Their affair is also strained by divisions — between capitalism and communism, past and present — in a novel that pushes deep (like all of Erpenbeck’s books, from “Visitation” to “Go, Went, Gone”) into the evanescent gap between public and private lives.

You Can’t Stay Here Forever
By Katherine Lin
Harper: 304 pages, $29
(June 6)

Ellie Huang, newly widowed, flees to the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, France, with her best friend Mabel Chou after Ellie discovers her late husband had long been cheating on her. At first, hanging out in the luxurious digs suits her perfectly. But as she and Mabel discover that their attitudes toward privilege — not to mention their fellow guests — differ wildly, Ellie will have to make some painful choices about how, and with whom, she’ll move into the future.

Loot
By Tania James
Knopf: 304 pages, $28
(June 13)

As we in the present worry about AI and robots, novelist James (“The Tusk That Did the Damage”) centers her latest on an 18th century automaton of a tiger who attacks a British soldier. Constructed for Tipu Sultan, who ruled the Kingdom of Mysore in India, the wooden machine represented the monarch’s hatred for the British East India Company. James imagines a young Indian woodcarver’s journey from Mysore to France in a story that considers plundering and debt.

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
By Lorrie Moore
Knopf: 208 pages, $27
(June 20)

Moore’s first novel in nearly 15 years is a cause for celebration, not only because anyone who has ever read the author’s incisive, inventive fiction knows that Moore will deliver, but because this is a short inquest on decomposition. Yes, it’s technically about a man named Finn and his undead ex-girlfriend Lily, who take a road trip from New York — but it’s really about what’s left of our planet and our history and our collective plans for a future. In other words, vintage Moore.

Banyan Moon
By Thao Thai
Mariner: 336 pages, $30
(June 27)

Thai cleverly provides the three generations of Vietnamese American women in her debut with a sprawling mansion on the Florida coast in which to consider their choices. After the matriarch, Minh, dies, leaving the decrepit Banyan House to her daughter, Huong, Huong’s daughter Ann heads south to mourn — and to contemplate her own future with her WASP-y boyfriend, Noah, father of her unborn child. As Thai’s narrative alternates between Ann’s story and Minh’s hidden past, the granddaughter comes to discover how much more she has in common with her forebears than she ever knew.

NONFICTION

The Talk: A Memoir
By Darrin Bell
Henry Holt: 352 pages, $30
(June 6)

Bell, who grew up in Los Angeles, first heard “the talk” when he was 6 years old and wanted a water gun. His mother explained why even the youngest, most innocent Black boys could not walk around with anything resembling a gun. Now a well-regarded cartoonist, Bell connects his own experiences to that moment, as well as to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, in a vividly illustrated memoir. Will he and his own 6-year-old son soon have “the talk”? Has anything changed?

Say Anarcha: A Young Woman, a Devious Surgeon, and the Harrowing Birth of Modern Women’s Health
By J. C. Hallman
Henry Holt: 448 pages, $30
(June 6)

When we call someone “the father” of something, who is “the mother”? Dr. J. Marion Sims was known as “the father of modern gynecology” largely as a result of his surgical work on an enslaved woman known only as Anarcha. Hallman learned from his research that Anarcha was a midwife, nurse and “doctor woman” who changed countless lives herself and was never awarded her due — until now.

Soldiers Don’t Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During World War I
By Charles Glass
Penguin Press: 352 pages, $28
(June 6)

World War I changed everything for Europe, including its literature, and two of the most enduring poets from Great Britain, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, met when they both were patients at the Craiglockhart War Hospital, treated for shell shock. Their friendship, both personal and artistic, helped each to heal from the horrors they’d seen and, in Glass’ consideration, changed the way early psychiatrists understood war and mental health.

The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods
By Greg King
PublicAffairs: 480 pages, $32
(June 6)

How many people who travel to see California’s coniferous giants know why they’re still standing? King, a journalist and dedicated redwood activist, tells the story of their rescue, from 19th century land grabs on to the present. King also considers the ecosystem itself and how it affects its surroundings, using his lifelong love of these mighty “ghosts” to bring them to life.

What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator
By Barbara Butcher
Simon & Schuster: 288 pages, $29
(June 20)

Don’t let the local focus in the subtitle fool you: Butcher’s lessons from her tenure in the Big Apple’s medical examiner‘s office hold plenty of relevance for readers in any American city, and she has worked through one of the greatest mass-casualty tragedies in our history — September 11. Butcher never shrinks from explaining tough material, the better to show how essential one of the darkest jobs in the city is to our justice system.