WABE’s Summer Reading List can help you unwind with a great new book. Our list focuses on fiction and nonfiction from Georgia authors, as well as stories set in the South.
Be sure to check out the WABE Staff Picks to see even more summer reading recommendations.
We’ve chosen to link out to bookshop.org for purchases, but explore the Shop Local tab and visit one of Atlanta’s many incredible booksellers!
Fiction
Bantam
The Matchmaker
By Aisha Saeed
Learn More Buy BookAisha’s debut adult novel, The Matchmaker (April 8), is a romantic mystery—part of a genre publishers call “cozy mystery.” It follows the story of Nura Khan, a Pakistani American woman who runs a matchmaking agency out of Inman Park. It’s also, Aisha says, “a love letter to Atlanta,” full of references only metro residents would know: Stone Bowl House on Buford Highway, Patel Brothers Plaza in North Decatur, the upscale sushi restaurant Hayakawa.
Sophia Qureshi, founder of 285 South
Flatiron Books: Pine & Cedar
Learn More Buy BookKing of Ashes
By S.A. Cosby
“King of Ashes,” like all of Cosby’s novels, isn’t simply a book to look forward to; it’s a literary event that demands our full attention. The award-winning, New York Times bestselling author returns with a Godfather-inspired Southern crime epic. And when Cosby writes about family, just know: Drama isn’t coming — it’s already here.
Denny S. Bryce, NPR
Berkley
Learn More Buy BookGreat Big Beautiful Life
By Emily Henry
“Great Big Beautiful Life” follows journalists Alice Scott, who works for The Scratch, and Hayden Anderson, a Pulitzer-winning Rolling Stone writer, to a small coastal Georgia town called Little Crescent Island. There, the two compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of the reclusive heiress Margaret Ives, a mysterious woman who has more than a couple secrets up her sleeve.
Kaycee Sloan, Cincinnati Enquirer
The Sager Group
Learn More Buy BookGoodbye, Sweetberry Park
By Josh Green
For years, Josh Green’s day job as a journalist has been writing about what’s happening in Atlanta, especially related to development and housing and changing neighborhoods. So it probably comes as little surprise that he found enough content in those goings on to base a book, actually three books, with Atlanta as the quasi-fictional backdrop. “Goodbye Sweetberry Park,” a novel of city life, creeping gentrification, and flesh-eating snakes, is his latest.
– Jim Burress, host of WABE’s “All Things Considered”
Simon & Schuster
Learn More Buy BookFantasies of Future Things
By Doug Jones
“The Fantasies of Future Things” is an ambitious book, interweaving a political and personal story in which a city’s search for growth and identity mirrors that of its main characters. The novel adeptly switches between points of view and time periods, evoking how each of our histories is layered into the present and helps shape and determine the future.
Alex Burger, ArtsATL
William Morrow Large Print
Learn More Buy BookWhere the Rivers Merge
By Mary Alice Monroe
You can almost feel the grasses tickling your calves from the very first page of Mary Alice Monroe’s long-anticipated Where the Rivers Merge. The first of two sweeping epic novels, this one follows a young and headstrong Eliza starting in 1908, as she grows up on the forefront of a changing society in Lowcountry South Carolina. On the grand Mayfield estate, she weathers the Great War and storms both natural and familial.
Lizz Schumer, People
Little, Brown and Company
Learn More Buy BookThe Devil Three Times
By Rickey Fayne
Fayne’s debut novel does not lack for ambition. Beginning with a Faustian bargain between a woman on a slave ship and the devil, Fayne traces the fallout of this deal across the generations of her descendants that follow. This family history contains magic and despair, migrations and hauntings — and echoes of the country’s complex, often painful racial history writ large.
Colin Dwyer, NPR
Random House
Learn More Buy BookThese Heathens
By Mia McKenzie
The third novel from writer, activist, and founder of Black Girl Dangerous Mia McKenzie is a tender tale of a disenfranchised young woman coming into her own amid the Civil Rights Movement. In 1960s Georgia, 17-year-old Doris Steele travels to Atlanta, at the suggestion of her favorite teacher Mrs. Lucas, to get an abortion. Once there, she discovers a Black utopia full of local luminaries, civil rights leaders, and queer artists that look like her, but whose views on the world make her rethink everything. Namely, that being born poor in the rural south doesn’t mean she can’t follow her dreams and become a writer. With the support of this new community, Doris begins to rebel against her strict faith and conservative family in hopes of leading a life less ordinary.
Shannon Carlin, Time
Ballantine Books
Learn More Buy BookAtmosphere
By Taylor Jenkins Reid
After writing five best-selling novels about women reaching astronomic heights of fame, it seems only natural that Taylor Jenkins Reid would turn to the stars — literally — for her next work. Her new novel, “Atmosphere: A Love Story,” coming out on Tuesday, follows a female astronaut in the 1980s as she navigates her high-pressure career and a blossoming romance.
Joumana Khatib, New York Times
Simon & Schuster
Learn More Buy BookGreat Black Hope
By Rob Franklin
Franklin has a lot to say about privilege and wealth ― and how the source of that wealth, as well as race, gender and sexuality, influence social hierarchies. But “Great Black Hope” is also just a great yarn about youth, friendship and the cringey, risky messiness of young adulthood. And it’s told with thrilling verve by an exciting new voice on the literary landscape.
Suzanne Van Atten, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Non-Fiction
Crown
Learn More Buy BookThere Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
By Brian Goldstone
Features the stories of five Atlanta families struggling to find and keep safe, stable housing. These families represent the country’s “hidden homeless,” who sleep in cars or extended-stay motels but aren’t tracked by government homelessness counts. Atlanta-based journalist Brian Goldstone, who authored the book, says the working homeless is a growing phenomenon that upends the assumptions people have when they think about hard work and the unhoused.
LaShawn Hudson, producer of WABE’s “Closer Look with Rose Scott”
Crash Course Books
Learn More Buy BookEverything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
By John Green
I think for people who work in infectious disease, depending on what capacity you work in, you sometimes can be removed from the human experience and the patient experience. You know, you look at disease like a fun puzzle to solve or look at how weird this interaction is in the body. [Green] really ground[s] the impact of the disease in the human experience with Henry in just such a beautiful way.
Laurel Bristow, host of WABE’s “Health Wanted”
LSU Press
The Pool Is Closed: Segregation, Summertime, and the Search for a Place to Swim
By Hannah S. Palmer
Blending elements of memoir, reportage, environmental activism and social commentary, Palmer examines the history and contemporary landscape of Atlanta’s public pools, recreational lakes and waterways. Along the way she discovers that access to them remains restricted along racial lines.
Suzanne Van Atten, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Learn More Buy BookHannah Palmer, who lives in East Point, curated a project last year called “Ghost Pools,” which spotlights the history of swimming pools in East Point and beyond.
DorMiya Vance, WABE Southside reporter
Henry Holt and Co.
Learn More Buy BookBlessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama
By Alexis Okeowo
Braiding personal narrative with Southern history, Okeowo, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, reckons with her love for Montgomery, Alabama, where she was raised by Nigerian parents, despite the state’s legacy of chattel slavery and Indigenous dispossession and its more recent evolution into the backdrop for Amazon warehouses, auto plants and culture war lawsuits.
Miguel Salazar and Laura Thompson, New York Times
Doubleday
Learn More Buy BookThe Name of This Band Is R.E.M.
By Peter Ames Carlin
Peter Ames Carlin’s book isn’t just a cultural biography of the band going back to its formation in the-then sleepy college town of Athens, Georgia. It’s also a poetic meditation on what made so many of the band’s songs stand out, and continue to shine.
Andrew DeMillo, Associated Press
Ecco
Learn More Buy BookHuman Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet
By Kate Marvel
A highly readable argument for tackling climate change that reckons with both cold hard facts and the human heart.
Kirkus Reviews
Harper
Learn More Buy BookMisbehaving at the Crossroads
By Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
There’s much to unpack there, and Miss Jeffers does so, pointedly, with incisive critique. She charts a path from this brutal past through to her reflections on her family history, her status as a daughter to a hardworking, visionary mother and a predatory, abusive father; as a sister and granddaughter in the American South.
Joshunda Sanders, Black Book Stacks
Simon & Schuster
Learn More Buy BookThe Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne
By Chris Sweeney
For those who love niche stories of nature, science and social history, journalist Chris Sweeney’s “The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne” offers a timely story about the benefits of government-funded science, the invisibility of public safety’s most important workers, and a fascinating — and peculiar — ecosystem: one woman, and lots and lots of birds.
Genevieve Valentine, NPR
The Bitter Southerner
Learn More Buy BookJimmy Carter: Rivers & Dreams
By Jim Barger Jr. & Dr. Carlton Hicks
But a new book, just released by the Bitter Southerner, explores a lesser-known personal passion of both Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: fly fishing, an activity that cemented decades of friendships for the Carters and inspired many meaningful adventures. “Jimmy Carter: Rivers and Dreams” collects stories of the Carters fly fishing from the Georgia Blue Ridge Mountains to Mongolia
Kim Drobes, WABE managing producer for “City Lights”