July – August 2019 Book Releases to add to your Reading Wishlist

When it comes to fiction scheduled for publication in July and August 2019, we readers really are spoiled for choice.

July August 2019 Book ReleasesThis list features 12 books that have particularly caught my eye, including

  • highly anticipated new titles from bestselling authors such as Adrian McKinty and Kate Forsyth, and award-winning writers Deborah Levy and Yoko Ogawa
  • feisty females leads
  • quirky science fiction and social satire, and
  • what can only be described as romantic candy for bookworms

Luckily for me I already have a few of these books (in ARC) on my reading pile.

Warning: I take no responsibility for the impact reading this may have on your own book wishlist. Happy reading!

And remember, most of these titles are available in audiobook which you can download and listen to FREE with Audible’s 30-Day Trial.

New Book Releases in July 2019

Shoot Through by J M Green

Aussie author J M Green is back with the third title in her much loved Stella Hardy Series. Shoot Through features the wisecracking social worker tackling crooked private contractors, an exotic cattle scam, and a delicious Mushroom Jalfrezi. Will she ever get that romantic country getaway she’s been planning with artist boyfriend Brophy??

Stella Hardy is a wonderfully ‘modern Australian’ diamond in the rough. She forgives herself for the occasional error in judgement, lets her curiosity guide her and is quick to back herself in a fight (quite literally). She exudes guile, resilience and grit, in a similar vein to Shane Maloney’s ‘Murray Whelan’ and Peter Temple’s ‘Jack Irish’. If you’ve not yet had the pleasure of riding shotgun on one of Stella’s investigations, check out my reviews of Good Money (Stella Hardy #1) and Too Easy (Stella Hardy #2).

UPDATE: Read our review of Shoot Through

Shoot Through - J M Green The Chain - Adrian McKinty This is How You Lose the Time War

The Chain by Adrian McKinty

Author of the worldwide bestselling The Troubles / Sean Duffy Series Adrian McKinty is releasing a new standalone thriller. The Chain has been compared to The Silence of the Lambs and described as ‘Jaws for parents’ (Don Winslow) and ‘a nightmarish story that is incredibly propulsive’ (Stephen King).

The morning starts like any other. Rachel Klein drops her daughter, Kylie, at the bus stop and heads into her day. But then a phone call changes everything. A woman has Kylie bound and gagged in her back seat, and the only way Rachel will ever see her again is if she pays a ransom – and kidnaps another child. The caller is a mother herself, whose son has also been abducted, and if Rachel doesn’t do exactly as she’s told, both children will die. Rachel is now part of a terrifying scheme – The Chain.

UPDATE: Read our review of The Chain

This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone

This novella of temporal warfare and timeline-cross’d romance co-written by award-winning authors Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone has also caught my eye.

Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. And thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Except discovery of their bond would be death for each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war. That’s how war works. Right?

This is How You Lose the Time War is receiving high praise from most early reviewers with the words ‘epic’ (odd for a novella) and ‘poetic’ being bandied around. Intrigued? I sure am.

UPDATE: Read our review of This is How You Lose the Time War

Abbi Waxman The Bookish Life of Nina Hill Kate Forsyth The Blue Rose Courtney Maum Costalegre

The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman

Okay, so I’ve not read Abbi Waxman’s previous titles The Garden of Small Beginnings and Other People’s Houses, but this new novel about The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, just sounds like a tonne of fun to me.

Meet Nina Hill: A young woman supremely confident in her own… shell. Nina has her life just as she wants it: a job in a bookstore, an excellent trivia team and a cat named Phil. If she sometimes suspects there might be more to life than reading, she just shrugs and picks up a new book. So when the father she never knew existed dies, leaving behind innumerable sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews, Nina is horrified. They all live close by! She’ll have to Speak. To. Strangers. And if that wasn’t enough, Tom, her trivia nemesis, has turned out to be cute, funny and interested in getting to know her…

The Blue Rose by Kate Forsyth

Historical fiction lovers, it is time to get excited. There is a gorgeous new Kate Forsyth book to covet. If you have not experienced this author’s glorious prose and immersive storytelling, check out my reviews of some of her previous titles Beauty in Thorns, The Beast’s Garden, The Wild Girl and Bitter Greens to see what all the fuss is about.

Her new title The Blue Rose moves between Imperial China and France during the ‘Terror’ of the French Revolution and was inspired by the true story of the quest for a blood-red rose that itself was inspired by a Chinese fable of impossible love.

UPDATE: Read our review of The Blue Rose

Costalegre by Courtney Maum

Described as ‘a lush chronicle of wealth, art, adventure, loneliness, love, and folly told by a narrator you won’t be able to forget’ by Kirkus Reviews, Courtney Maum‘s new title Costalegre is apparently heavily inspired by the real-life relationship between the heiress Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter, Pegeen.

It is 1937, and Europe is on the brink of war. In the haute-bohemian circles of Austria, Germany, and Paris, Hitler is circulating a most-wanted list of “cultural degenerates”—artists, writers, and thinkers whose work is deemed antithetical to the new regime.  To prevent the destruction of her favorite art (and artists), the impetuous American heiress and modern art collector, Leonora Calaway, begins chartering boats and planes for an elite group of surrealists to Costalegre, a mysterious resort in the Mexican jungle, where she has a home. Continue reading…

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New Book Releases in August 2019

Deborah Levy The Man Who Saw Everything Yoko Ogawa The Memory Police Emma Kennedy The Things We Left Unsaid

The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy

While I may not have connected with twice-Man Booker-shortlisted author Deborah Levy‘s characters, it was hard not to be enthralled by her literary prose in Swimming Home. Her new novel The Man Who Saw Everything about old and new Europe and old and new love sounds intriguing…

Slipping slyly between time zones and leaving a spiralling trail, Deborah Levy’s electrifying and audacious new novel examines what we see and what we fail to see, until we encounter the spectres of history – both the world’s and our own.

This title has also recently been longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

Whether deeply moving or confronting, the Yoko Ogawa titles I have read have been thought-provoking. And her next title to be released in English (translated by Stephen Snyder), The Memory Police is sure to be the same.

Hat, ribbon, bird, rose. To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed.

When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately wants to save him. For some reason, he doesn’t forget, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for him to hide his memories. Who knows what will vanish next?

The Things We Left Unsaid by Emma Kennedy

Already a successful author of memoir and children’s fiction, The Things We Left Unsaid is Emma Kennedy‘s adult fiction debut. Sounds unabashedly heartwarming…

Rachel’s relationship with her mother, Eleanor, has always been far from perfect. Eleanor is a renowned artist born from the swinging sixties, and Rachel has forever lived in the shadow of her success. When Rachel is left by her fiance on the morning of their wedding she has no choice but to move back into her family home and spend an unbearably hot summer with a mother she feels distant from – in the presence of many painful memories. It will take another turn of events before Rachel realises that sometimes the past holds exactly the comfort we need. And that behind the words left unsaid are untold stories that have the power to define us.

Louisa Treger The Dragon Lady  Rob Hart The Warehouse  Zach Powers First Cosmic Velocity

The Dragon Lady by Louisa Treger

It is hard not to look twice at the retro cover art of The Dragon Lady, a novel that according to Bloomsbury ‘subtly blends fact and fiction to paint the portrait of an extraordinary boundary-breaking woman in an era of great social and cultural change’. This is Louisa Treger’s second novel. Her first The Lodger (2014) was highly rated and described as ‘impeccably researched’.

Opening with the shooting of Lady Virginia ‘Ginie’ Courtauld in her tranquil garden in 1950s Rhodesia, The Dragon Lady tells Ginie’s extraordinary story, so called for the exotic tattoo snaking up her leg. From the glamorous Italian Riviera before the Great War to the Art Deco glory of Eltham Palace in the thirties, and from the secluded Scottish Highlands to segregated Rhodesia in the fifties, the narrative spans enormous cultural and social change.

The Warehouse by Rob Hart

Rob Hart is the author of the Ash McKenna series. This, his first standalone novel, has already been optioned for film by Ron Howard. The Warehouse has been described as ‘an inventive, addictive, Crichton-esque, page-turning, near-future dystopian thriller’.

Set in the confines of a corporate panopticon that’s at once brilliantly imagined and terrifyingly real, The Warehouse is a near-future thriller about what happens when Big Brother meets Big Business–and who will pay the ultimate price.

First Cosmic Velocity, A Novel by Zach Powers

According to Random House, award-winning short story writer Zach Powers‘ debut novel First Cosmic Velocity is ‘a stunningly imaginative novel about the Cold War, the Russian space program, and the amazing fraud that pulled the wool over the eyes of the world’. The dark satirical whimsy has me intrigued…

It’s 1964 in the USSR, and unbeknownst even to Premier Khrushchev himself, the Soviet space program is a sham. Well, half a sham. While the program has successfully launched five capsules into space, the Chief Designer and his team have never successfully brought one back to earth. To disguise this, they’ve used twins. But in a nation built on secrets and propaganda, the biggest lie of all is about to unravel. Because there are no more twins left. Combining history and fiction, the real and the mystical, First Cosmic Velocity is the story of Leonid, the last of the twins.

Which of these July & August 2019 book releases are you eager to start reading?

In the comments below, tell us about any other titles that have got your bookworm radar buzzing.

And remember, most of these titles are available in audiobook which you can download and listen to for FREE with Audible’s 30-Day Trial.

Related Article: September – October 2019 Book Releases to add to your Reading Wishlist