The dog days of summer have arrived, the air feels like a wet sock, and the news cycle is, as always, a carnival of misery. Here is your permission slip to go inside, close the blinds, and read something good. NPR has rounded up the best new fiction hitting shelves in August, and the lineup is legitimately strong.
A Dog Writes the Odyssey. Yes, Really.
The most arresting premise of the month belongs to Paul Yoon's slim novel Etna, reviewed by NPR's Colin Dwyer. The title character is a dog, a veteran of a catastrophic war, scarred in body and mind, trying to find his way home. It is, deliberately, an Odyssey riff, and Dwyer says it earns the comparison. "Epic" is the word he uses, despite the book's short length.
This is the kind of novel that sounds like a gimmick in a pitch meeting and then quietly breaks your heart on a Tuesday afternoon. Yoon has always written with unusual restraint and emotional precision, and putting that sensibility into the perspective of a dog navigating the aftermath of war is either a disaster or a masterpiece. Based on Dwyer's review, it is the latter.
Téa Obreht Goes Great Plains Gothic
Téa Obreht, whose debut The Tiger's Wife made her a literary star, is back with her fourth novel, Sunrise. According to NPR, it weaves three separate narratives around the same mysterious location on the Great Plains, spanning from roughly the present day back to the early 20th century, when a charismatic traveler named Anton Vargas sets the whole mystery in motion.
Obreht has never written the same book twice. She followed a Balkan myth-soaked debut with an Old West novel, then something closer to urban literary fiction. The Great Plains gothic feels like exactly the kind of ambitious genre-straddling she does better than almost anyone working right now. If you liked Where the Crawdads Sing but wished it had more structural ambition and fewer movie tie-in covers, start here.
Liane Moriarty's Sequel Has a Severed Finger in It
Here is the hook, and NPR buries it almost criminally deep in the write-up: the long-awaited sequel to Big Little Lies, titled Big Little Truths, involves what appears to be a severed human finger. Celeste, Jane and Madeline are back, a decade after the death that bonded them, and apparently things have gotten considerably worse.
Moriarty spent years quietly writing sequel material just to keep the HBO show running. She finally turned that energy into an actual novel meant for bookshelves, and given that the original Big Little Lies was one of the more purely satisfying thrillers of the 2010s, the bar is set high. A severed finger is a reasonable opening bid. The Emmy-winning miniseries adaptation of the original, for what it is worth, remains some of the best television of that decade.
If you have not read Big Little Lies before picking this up, fix that first. It is a quick read and you will not regret it.
Rachel Cusk Got Herself Into a Tabloid Story
This one requires some context. Rachel Cusk, celebrated author of the Outline Trilogy, what NPR's Fresh Air critic John Powers called "one of the great fictional achievements of the new millennium," has a new novel out called Life of M. The book depicts the fraught relationship between a writer and a world-famous actress. And per NPR, Cusk has found herself in the middle of a tabloid firestorm over speculation about who inspired the actress character.
NPR wisely tells readers to go look that up separately and focus on the book itself. Which is good advice. Cusk is one of the most formally interesting novelists alive, and the fact that her notoriously plotless style has apparently produced something with enough narrative drive to generate real-world controversy is reason enough to pay attention. The gossip will fade. Good fiction does not.
The Rest of August's Heavy Hitters
Richard Russo, who won the Pulitzer for Empire Falls, returns with Under the Falls, another novel set in the kind of threadbare blue-collar mill town he has been writing about his entire career. This time, NPR reports, a musician who escaped his hometown gets lured back by a gig. Russo told NPR's Morning Edition back in 2007 that his fictional towns are full of people "hanging on by a thread." Nothing about that description appears to have changed, which is either comforting or devastating depending on where you grew up.
Chang Rae-Lee's seventh novel, A Tender Age, follows a 10-year-old son of Korean immigrants narrating, from the vantage point of adulthood, a formative year involving identity, first romance, and summer camp. Peter Rock's Makeshift rounds out the strongest entries of the month, a post-apocalyptic novel following three young sisters, sole survivors of a massacre, living quietly on a small island surrounded by shipwrecks. NPR describes it as a vision of apocalypse where the world ends without anyone seeming to notice or mourn. Given the current news cycle, that premise feels a little on the nose.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to spend August doom-scrolling through whatever fresh catastrophe has parked itself on the front page. That is the expectation. The algorithm demands it. The engagement metrics require your cortisol.
Skip it. Not permanently, not forever, just for a few hours at a stretch. Because this is a genuinely good month for fiction, and a genuinely bad month for brain health if you spend all of it staring at your phone. Paul Yoon writing the Odyssey from a dog's perspective is more interesting than another hot take about whatever is happening in Washington today. Téa Obreht building a Great Plains mystery across a century of American history is more interesting. Rachel Cusk accidentally generating tabloid drama through the sheer force of literary ambition is, frankly, delightful.
Books do not fix anything. But they are better company than most of what is competing for your attention right now, and August is long, and the heat is real, and the air conditioning is right there. Use it.
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