Books We Loved, July 2026

July, well into beach season in the Northern Hemisphere, the depths of winter in the Southern one—both great times to read. Here are three books we love—all contemporary, for once—to add to your list.

Ben Lerner, Transcription  (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2026)

This short novel is a good example of the duck-rabbit effect. Look at it one way, and it is a somewhat humorous tale that begins with a successful writer/journalist who encounters one obstacle after another when he sets out to interview his former professor/mentor. Look at it another way, and it is a treatise on our times—something about how our anxiety levels can be either elevated or subdued by our proximity to our smartphones, something about the two-sidedness of everything, including memories.

The aforementioned interview belongs to the first of the three sections that divide the book. The interviewer is the narrator of sections one and two and a participant in the conversation that unfolds in three. We never learn his name. He is forty-five, married (to Mia), and they have a ten-year-daughter and live in Los Angeles. He and his daughter are extremely anxious—Mia maybe slightly less so. Thomas, the interviewee, is ninety and lives in Providence, Rhode Island. In order to meet with him, the interviewer must both travel to the east coast (by train in the time of COVID) and make a journey down memory lane, since he will have to cut through the campus of Brown University, where he was once a student, to reach Thomas’s house. The latter journey will reveal secrets about his life: his anxious nature, his finding, losing, and re-finding his wife, and his friendship with Max, who is Thomas’s son. But it is while he is still on the train that he begins to fret over what question he will use to begin his interview with Thomas. If he can get that one question right, he believes, all else will follow. But then the worst thing happens once he reaches his hotel. He accidentally drops his phone in the sink, and since the screen is cracked, it fills with water and dies.

This makes for an impossible situation (“impossible” being a kind of refrain in the book). Unlike all the other characters, Thomas is a free spirit, not bound to the world by the urgency of logic. His mind is a beautiful orb that spins through associations, real and imagined, here one minute, there the next. He is not the kind of person you can interview without a recording device. The interviewer, who is expected at Thomas’s that same evening, comes up with an idea. He will suggest to Thomas that they simply talk that night; the interview itself can be conducted the next day (after the interviewer has the chance to run to the Apple store and buy a new phone). But Thomas insists that they begin right away, and rather than admit his phone is dead, the interviewer pretends to put the thing on record and then surrenders himself to the wine bottle while Thomas recalls that his first memory was the radio, which leads him to the subject of the disembodied voices one hears in utero, which leads to Hitler’s voice, and from there to the circularity of pitch, and then to quantum mechanics and then goats that must drink their water warm … You see the problem.

The second section takes place in Spain after Thomas has died. Various of his disciples gather together to celebrate his life and his work, and the interviewer gives a speech that includes the comedy of errors that occurred when he went to interview Thomas—which is disturbing to the host of the event, and according to her, others as well, particularly Max, Thomas’s son. The last chapter is a very long conversation in which Max tells the interviewer about his daughter Emmie’s eating disorder as a prelude to a description of his last conversation with his father.

Rabbit or Duck, Transcription is remarkably compelling. It is a literary treasure box that curious readers will want to explore. Over and over again, one thing (memory, event, person) turns out to be the back side of another. The interviewer, for instance, pretended to record Thomas in section one; in section three, Max reveals that he recorded his last conversation with his father without his permission. The interviewer and Max are bookends. They are the same age, they both have ten-year-old daughters. Max started out as a writer but then turned to law. Another curiosity is when Thomas interrupts his soliloquy in the first section to admit he has forgotten the interviewer’s daughter’s name. Strangely, the interviewer answers, “I call her Eva in this book.”

These are only some of the shiny objects in the treasure box. I read the book in two days and thought about it for three … and counting. I recommend it to all readers who are compelled to puzzle over the mysteries of life generally and of our times in particular.—JS

Kelly Rimmer, The Story Keeper  (MIRA Books, 2026)

Fiona Winslow has reached a rough place in her life. Just past her fiftieth birthday, she has endured the implosion of her twenty-five-year marriage, the result of her husband hooking up with her best friend/mutual business partner. Together, the errant lovers have pushed her out of their joint company and imposed restrictions on when she can get back into the architectural restoration business. To keep herself occupied while she recovers from the triple blow of losing husband, best friend, and career, Fiona has bought her family’s abandoned estate, Wirimbirra, from her cousin Jon and intends to restore it to the grandeur she remembers from her childhood.

The estate is in sad shape when she enters it, and the locals mutter about ghosts and specters, but Fiona remembers it as a loving home, not least because of her Uncle Tad, a world-famous novelist and the father of Jon. Fiona begins her cleanup with energy, but a series of strange incidents soon have her wondering whether the locals know more than she does about the mysteries of Wirimbirra. And when she discovers a box filled with copies of a novel by an author she’s never heard of, she dives in—only to discover that someone seems to have known more about the history of her own family than she ever expected was there to know.

Fiona is a sympathetic character, and the setting—contemporary rural Australia intermixed with vintage Gothic—is refreshingly different. The book slips smoothly between Fiona’s present and the fictionalized events of the past, touching on themes such as coercive control (a form of partner abuse) and the treatment of aboriginal Australians by the white population. But it is, above all, a good read.—CPL

Caitlin Shetterly, The Gulf of Lions (Harper, 2026)

When Alice leaves her husband, Pete, in New York while she takes off for France on a writing assignment with their two daughters, Sophie and Iris, she’s not quite sure what to expect. COVID mask requirements have just ended—although not for Alice, a recent survivor of cancer—and the lingering effects of a traumatic surgery leave her feeling easily overwhelmed. The idea is to camp out in various places in Provence and the Pyrenees, then report on the experience to Get Out magazine.

But Alice, it turns out, also has another agenda—more accurately, two. First, she wants to reclaim the joy in life she felt before cancer. And second, she seeks to come to terms with her husband’s affair. Getting along better with her daughters wouldn’t hurt either, but that’s a less conscious goal and perhaps less attainable, given that Sophie, at almost fourteen, has her own complex feelings about her mother.

This all sounds interesting, and Shetterly does a good job of spinning out the various plot points before bringing them together dramatically at the end. But it’s the details of Alice’s re-awakening—the food, the scenery, the people she meets and how they influence her—that turn this novel into a spellbinding read. I felt I could taste every delicious plum and pôt de crème, feel the sun on my skin as I stood at the shore of an inlet feeding into the Gulf of Lions, and smell the fields of heather in the burned-out Pyrenees. And I loved every minute of the journey.—CPL