We might not have months of summer holidays anymore, but we can still enjoy summer with a stack full of books.
Thankfully there are plenty of brilliant novels hitting shelves in the coming weeks.
Here are six books coming out in June that we’re seriously obsessed with!
The Heart in Winter – Kevin Barry
A hard winter approaches the Rocky Mountains in Montana in 1891.
The city is rich in copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate.
Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington.
Love sparks between Tom and Polly, that will see them strike out west on a stolen horse. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunsmen are soon in hot pursuit of the lovers, and closing in fast.
Out June 6th
Bloodguard – Cecy Robson
Gladiator meets Game of Thrones in this dark fantasy series full of epic battles and forbidden romance.
Leith of Grey thought coming to this new land and volunteering to fight in the gladiator arena—vicious, bloodthirsty tournaments where only the strongest survive—would earn him enough gold to save his dying sister. He thought there was nothing left to lose.
He was wrong—and they took everything. His hope. His freedom. His very humanity.
Out June 25th
The Midnight Feast – Lucy Foley
Lucy Foley is known for her incredible thriller novels and her latest is no different.
The night after a big party at a stunning luxury resort, a body turns up in the sea.
The resort owner Francesca (cruel but very entertaining), her husband Owen, mysterious hotel guest Bella, and restaurant dishwasher Eddie bring the reader through the story as we get to the bottom of what happened.
Out June 6th
Spoilt Creature – Amy Twigg
Iris is adrift: thirty-two, newly single, living at home with her mother and working a dead end job.
Her life changes when she meets the mysterious and beguiling Hazel, who lives at a women’s commune on a remote farm hidden in the Kent Downs. At the farm, the women can be loud and dirty, live and eat abundantly, under the leadership of the gargantuan Blythe. Drawn to Hazel and the possibility of a new start away from a world of men who have only let her down, Iris throws herself into this alternative way of life, seizing on new experiences and hidden desires.
But even among the women, she witnesses power struggles, cruelty and transgressions that threaten their precarious existence. When a group of men arrive on the farm.
Out June 6th
Exile – Aimee Walsh
Fiadh’s life is turned completely upside down on a night out in Belfast. Pretty soon everyone has heard about what happened; it is impossible to keep the rumours from spreading, the gossip from spiralling out of control.
And just as she was beginning to finally figure everything out: she was feeling positive about her move to Liverpool, she was starting to get on top of her uni work and had made some new friends.
Now her life is in freefall and Fiadh is helpless to do anything about it.
Out Now
Mouthing – Orla Mackey
Narrated by several generations of villagers, Mouthing traces the misadventures of one small community from the mid-20th century to the early 21st in a series of highly confessional, darkly humorous, sharply observed monologues.
These are people who delight in twisting the knife, perfecting the art of schadenfreude over many decades. And, it becomes clear, that none of them are entirely reliable witnesses.
As each one tells their version of events, revealing contradictory versions of ‘the truth’, we see how feuds are passed down through the generations, how families are estranged or reunited and fortunes made or lost, how strict social expectations can shift and loosen over time (and how some things remain stubbornly unchanged).
Out May 30th