Summertime, even if the living isn’t exactly easy, is the time for lying in a hammock with a great big novel. Don’t fret if you’re out of PTO—these delicious novels, all written by LSA alumni and faculty, can be just as immersive on the train as they are on the beach. Go ahead and use a Popsicle stick as a bookmark, if you must.

FACULTY:

  • Julie Buntin (faculty, HZWP) Marlena, Henry Holt and Co., 2017. Michiganders will recognize the small town, Up North setting of Buntin’s novel about a life-altering friendship, teenage misadventure, and tragedy. Rolling Stone calls the novel “the millennial Midwestern version of the celebrated Elena Ferrante Neapolitan Novels.”
  • Gabe Habash (faculty, HZWP) Stephen Florida, Coffee House Press, 2017. Habash’s novel is a character study of a Midwestern college wrestler slowly losing his grip on reality and falling in love during his final season in the ring. Coffee House Press describes Stephen Florida as “Profane, manic, and tipping into the uncanny, it’s a story of loneliness, obsession, and the drive to leave a mark.”
  • Peter Ho Davies (faculty, HZWP) A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself, Mariner Books, 2021. Davies’s sixth book takes on the vicissitudes of parenthood and marriage, and all of their perilous tests of shame, impossible choices, and intimate labors, as it explores the boundaries between public and private life, fiction and fact.

ALUMNI:

  • Dur e Aziz Amna (M.F.A. ’21) American Fever, Arcade, 2022. In Amna’s novel, a teenage Pakistani girl arrives in rural Oregon in the 2010s for a yearlong student exchange program, and experiences homesickness, romance, volleyball practices, illness, and Islamophobia. Despite some of its heavier themes, the debut is described as witty, fresh, and laugh-out-loud funny.
  • Natalie Bakopoulos (M.F.A. ’05) Archipelago, Tin House, 2025 (to be published August 19.) An impulsive road trip from the Dalmatian coast of Croatia to Greece? Yes, please. Bakopoulos’s third novel alludes to The Odyssey and asks smart questions about translation, middle age, and home.
  • Roohi Choudhry (M.F.A. ’11) Outside Women, University of Kentucky Press, 2025. Choudhry’s debut takes place over a hundred years, in India, South Africa, and New York City, intertwining the narratives of two women carving their existences outside of patriarchal and colonial spaces as they search for kinship and strength in solidarity.
  • Meg Waite Clayton (A.B. ’81) Typewriter Beach, Harper, 2025. Clayton’s latest novel takes place between Hollywood and Carmel-by-the-Sea, spans the 1950s and the 2010s, and involves a blacklisted screenwriter and an actress who aspires to be a Hitchcock Blonde, a mystery-laden cottage, and a joyride along the California coast. In the first week of the novel’s release it was named a Top 10 Library Read, a Washington Post 5 Works of Historical Fiction to Read This Summer, and a Los Angeles Times 10 Reads for a Beach Day.
  • Leigh N. Gallagher (M.F.A. ’11) Who You Might Be, Henry Holt and Co., 2022. Gallagher’s intricately constructed novel has elements of intergenerational family drama, artmaking, and self-deception, and even a section set in Ann Arbor.
  • Chigozie Obioma (M.F.A. ’14) The Road to the Country, Hogarth, 2024. Longlisted for a slew of international awards, Obioma’s fourth novel traces the story of a university student in Lagos trying to save his brother and himself amid the chaos of Nigeria’s civil war.
  • Hanna Pylväinen (M.F.A. ’10) The End of Drum Time, Henry Holt and Co., 2023. Pylväinen’s second book was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award and is described by the publisher as “an epic love story in the vein of Cold Mountain and The Great Circle.” Religious conversion in the Scandinavian tundra of the 19th century, the cultural traditions of the Samí people, romance, and of course, reindeer, are the heart of this novel.
  • Rebecca Scherm (M.F.A. ’12) A House Between Earth and the Moon, Penguin Books, 2022. At the intersection of literary fiction and science fiction, Scherm’s second novel inhabits the world of the Parallaxis, a luxury residential space station, in which a group of lab scientists plot the future of human existence. High-stakes family drama, eerie tech companies, and a holy grail superalgae make this a propulsive read.