10 Most Anticipated Nonfiction and Memoirs of Summer 2024

There’s a glimpse of long, languid days ahead, with the sun warming our faces already. And new summer novels are blossoming, much like beach umbrellas that are appearing on the shore! Books ranging from fascinating real stories to juicy biographies are available to satisfy any kind of intellectual curiosity. The must-read nonfiction and memoirs we’ve compiled are sure to take you on a journey, so grab some sunscreen, a comfortable beach chair, and start adding titles to your TBR list. Here are 10 most anticipated nonfiction and memoirs of summer 2024.

A Well-Trained Wife

Tia Levings

Recruited into the fundamentalist Quiverfull movement as a young wife, Tia Levings learned that being a good Christian meant following a list of additional life principles––a series of secret, special rules to obey. Being a godly and submissive wife in Christian Patriarchy included strict discipline, isolation, and an alternative lifestyle that appeared wholesome to outsiders. Women were to be silent, “keepers of the home.” Tia knew that to their neighbors her family was strange, but she also couldn’t risk exposing their secret lifestyle to police, doctors, teachers, or anyone outside of their church.

Release Date: August 6, 2024

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The Garden Against Time

Olivia Laing

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there’s still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.

Release Date: June 25, 2024

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I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This

Chelsea Devantez

There are things Chelsea Devantez probably shouldn’t be telling you. Many of them are in this book: some are embarrassing (like when she tried to break her three year spell of celibacy using a guide of seduction tips). Some are confessional (getting sentenced to the “hell hill” at Mormon church camp). Some are TMI (a series of outrageous doctor visits that ended with one doctor misdiagnosing her as “pregnant.” Woopsies!). Then there are things Chelsea really shouldn’t be telling you: like the time her biggest family secret was publicly outed, or about the drive-by shootings and the precipitating domestic violence she survived.

Release Date: June 4, 2024

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The Shape of My Eyes

Dave Gibbons

Born to an American soldier and a Korean mother in the wake of the Korean War, Dave has spent his life struggling to blend his Korean roots and his very American upbringing. The family joins a conservative church that embraces a strict, rule-based faith, and they try to navigate life as one of the few mixed-raced families in their community. But when tragedy strikes, tearing the family apart, Dave is forced to face long- buried secrets that he can no longer ignore. As he explores his family’s difficult past, he confronts his own pain and the persistent feelings of not quite fitting in either in America or his mother’s home country.

Release Date: July 23, 2024

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Thank You, More Please

Lily Womble

It’s not your fault that dating sucks, that the patriarchy has screwed up how we find love. From addictive dating apps that were built like slot machines to advice like “Stop being so picky!” (aka “don’t trust yourself”), to single women being treated as less than because of their relationship status, dating can be a hot soup of existential exhaustion.

In Thank You, More Please, dating coach and founder of Date Brazen, Lily Womble, flips patriarchal dating on its head and challenges you to ask for and get what you want. Lily, who has set up nearly 400 dates.

Release Date: June 11, 2024

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Ambition Monster

Jennifer Romolini

After years of relentlessly racing up the professional ladder, Jennifer Romolini reached the kind of success many crave: a high-profile, C-suite dream job, a book well-received enough that reporters wanted to know the secrets to her success, and a gig traveling around the country giving speeches on “making it.” She had a handsome and clever husband, a precocious child. But beneath this polished surface was a powder keg of unresolved trauma and chronic overwork. It was all about to blow. Written with self-deprecation and wit, Ambition Monster is a gutsy and powerful look at workaholism.

Release Date: June 4, 2024

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The Most Human

Adam Nimoy

The actor was as inscrutable as the iconic half-Vulcan science officer he portrayed on Star Trek, even to those close to him.
Now, his son’s poignant memoir explores their complicated relationship and how it informed his views on marriage, parenting, and later, sobriety. Despite their differences, both men ventured down parallel paths: marriages leading to divorce, battling addiction, and finding recovery. Most notably, both men struggled to take the ninth step in their AA journey: to make amends with each other.

Release Date: June 4, 2024

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Kissing Girls on Shabbat

Sara Glass

Growing up in the Hasidic community of Brooklyn’s Borough Park, Sara Glass knew one painful truth: what was expected of her and what she desperately wanted were impossibly opposed. Tormented by her attraction to women and trapped in a loveless arranged marriage, she found herself unable to conform to her religious upbringing and soon, she made the difficult decision to walk away from the world she knew.

Sara’s journey to self-acceptance began with the challenging battle for a divorce and custody of her children, an act that left her on the verge of estrangement from her family and community.

Release Date: June 11, 2024

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When Women Ran Fifth Avenue

Julie Satow

The twentieth century American department store: a palace of consumption where every wish could be met under one roof – afternoon tea, a stroll through the latest fashions, a wedding (or funeral) planned. It was a place where women, shopper and shopgirl alike, could stake out a newfound independence. Whether in New York or Chicago or on Main Street, USA, men owned the buildings, but inside, women ruled. In this hothouse atmosphere, three women rose to the top. In the 1930s, Hortense Odlum of Bonwit Teller came to her husband’s department store as a housewife.

Release Date: June 4, 2024

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Group Living and Other Recipes

Lola Milholland

Lola Milholland grew up in the nineties, the child of iconoclastic hippies. Both her parents threw open their rambling house in Portland, Oregon, to long-term visitors and unusual guests in need of a place to stay. Years later, after college and after her parents’ separation, Milholland returned home. There, she joined her brother and his housemates —an eccentric group of stop-motion animators and accomplished cooks—in furthering the experiment of communal living into a new generation.

Release Date: August 6, 2024

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