The story of John Aka Blay-Miza, a highly successful fraudster who took advantage of Ghana’s political instability to create one of the world’s most lucrative scams in the 1970s and 1980s.
Bloomsbury, 1 Aug
Tom Lake, by Anne Patchett
Patchett’s new novel explores the silver lining around pandemic lockdowns: Family stories finally got their due because there was nothing to do but listen. In “Tom Lake,” three daughters hear the unabridged version of their mother’s longtime affair with a famous actor while picking cherries in their Michigan orchard.
Harper, August 1
Think of it as a companion to Eilenberger’s previous book, The Age of Wizards, about four male philosophers who helped reinvent their discipline in the 1920s. Here, Eilenberger examines four equally prominent women thinkers who, in the dark years between 1933 and 1943, developed compelling moral visions of a free society in light of the growing authoritarian threat.
A prominent Uyghur poet, Izgil fled China with his family in 2017. His modest memoir, among the first such accounts available in English, recounts with poetic restraint the increasingly brutal treatment of the Chinese ethnic minority by a state that uses mass detentions, interrogations, surveillance, even torture to suppress dissent.
Penguin Press, 1 Aug
A horror-tinged thriller that asks, can a diver, inadvertently swallowed alive by a 60-ton sperm whale, escape before his oxygen runs out?
MTV Books, 8 Aug
At the heart of Brinkley’s sophomore collection is the question: What does it mean to be a witness? Through 10 stories, Brinkley explores how perception and being perceived shape our lives, our relationships, and our communities.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1 Aug
McBride returns with a murder mystery in Chicken Hill, a vibrant black and Jewish neighborhood in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. The novel begins in 1972 when workers dig up skeletal remains in a well; then goes back to the 1920s and 1930s to unravel the story of what happened.
Riverhead, August 8
Beloved, by Catherine Chiji
In this twisted psychological thriller, a 12-year-old Catholic schoolgirl in 1980 New Zealand grows increasingly infatuated with her glamorous and attractive new teacher, even as her class becomes the target of a series of mysterious thefts.
Europe, Aug. 8
Hartigan used personal interviews for this biography of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, a poetic chronicler of black American life who died in 2005. The book traces his formative years in working-class Pittsburgh, the creation of his 10-play Century Cycle, and his role in debates about race and representation in the theater.
Simon & Schuster, Aug. 15
Murray’s latest is a comedy of errors, an emphasis on comedy and the mistakes. The novel traces the reversal of fortunes of the Barnes family, a decline brought on by the Irish financial crash, yes, but perhaps driven by fateful moments in the family’s past.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 15 Aug
Huang, author of a biography of Charlie Chan and another book about Siamese twins Chang and Eng, now chronicles the life of Chinese-American film star Anna May Wong, who was born in Los Angeles in 1905. Wong went on to appear in more than 60 films—an astonishing number given the few roles given to non-white actors in the early decades of the 20th century.
Liveright, Aug 22
Before marrying her childhood sweetheart, a 34-year-old woman agrees to lead a group cycling from New York to Niagara Falls—a journey that’s as much about self-discovery as it is about exploring new territory on two wheels.
Atria, 29 Aug
Raised in a household split between “massive” residences in New York and Paris—her parents, conceptual artist Jennifer Bartlett and German actor Mathieu Carriere, divorced when she was 6—the author describes her downward spiral into depression, her institutionalizations, and her dissociations .
Mirror and Grey, Aug 29
When Mia’s father doesn’t come home from a hike, the man with answers can’t tell them: her younger brother, Eugene, the only family member with their father that day, has a genetic disorder that renders him nonverbal. In the course of the investigation, Mia comes to understand in a new way the difference between language and cognition.
Hogarth, 29 August