10 best books to read in June: New release from Dave Eggers, James Ellroy and more

As beach season begins in earnest, so should beach-reading season be given its due. June’s new fiction releases include a darkly gothic novel, a totally charming novel and a novel filled with 1960s L.A. dread. Nonfiction features a cross-country road trip, an important celebrity memoir (yes, they exist!) and a buzzy account of corruption in chess. Happy reading!

FICTION:

The Children: A Novel
By Melissa Albert
William Morrow: 416 pp., $32
(June 2)

Famous artists who use their own children in their work include Henri Matisse, Sally Mann and here, a fictional children’s book author named Edith Sharpe — an excellent choice for YA author Albert in her first book for adults. Ennis and Guin Sharpe, now in their 30s, spent six idyllic years in Vermont before their mother’s death in a fire. The ways the siblings cope with their versions of reality are quite different, quite haunting and quite thought-provoking.

Alan Opts Out: A Novel
By Courtney Maum
Little, Brown and Company: 352 pp., $29
(June 2)

Maum has said that she was inspired to write this novel about an affluent, Greenwich-based ad exec by the superabundance of enormous plastic water bottles covered in stickers: “Who’s thinking about the landfills where all these bottles are going to go?” Her 50-something protagonist, Alan Anderson, and his socially striving wife Vivian, are at least about to start thinking about where their family is going to go, once Alan retreats to a backyard playhouse.

Contrapposto: A Novel
By Dave Eggers
Knopf: 432 pp., $32
(June 9)

All hail a new Eggers book that’s character-driven, focusing on the long friendship between Robert “Cricket” Dibb and Olympia Argyros, close in age but years apart psychically. Both manage to grow up and leave their limited Indiana environs and both develop as artists (the drawings of nudes Cricket specializes in are Eggers’ work). But the real meat of the story lies in how two artists inspire, compete with and support each other through six decades.

Red Sheet: A Novel
By James Ellroy
Knopf: 544 pp., $35
(June 9)

The titular color (which refers to communists, natch) aside, Ellroy’s latest is among the noir-est of the noir, set during some dark Cold War days. It’s stuffed as full of conventions as it is famous names: Robert F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, H.R. Haldeman, all the men with initials, along with Hugh Hefner, Charles Lindbergh, and Quincy Jones, in a post-Cuban Missile Crisis salmagundi featuring the author’s LAPD officer (and addict) Fred Otash.

Villa Coco: A Novel
By Andrew Sean Greer
Gallery Books: 288 pp., $30
(June 9)

When 21-year-old Geoffrey, an American college student, takes a job as an archivist for Baronessa Elisabetta, an Italian nonagenerian, all sorts of sparks fly — sometimes of her impatience, sometimes from his affair with her married nephew, sometimes literally from the enormous fireplace in the Baronessa’s eccentric home. As Greer states in his letter to readers, he intended to write a “charm novel,” and he has succeeded, con sprezzatura.

NONFICTION:

Checkmate: Genius, Lies, Ambition, and the Biggest Scandal in Chess
By Ben Mezrich
Grand Central Publishing: 304 pp., $30
(June 2)

Think back to your high-school chess club. Now consider that the site Chess.com once received a billion-dollar valuation. Try to reconcile these facts. Somewhere in your thoughts you’ll understand how weird, wild and corrupt the world of chess can be. Mezrich’s “Checkmate” focuses on the 2022 Sinquefeld Cup scandal, where world champion Magnus Carlson accused Hans Niemann of cheating in his upset. Drama of the nerds and the geniuses.

When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class
By Chris Smalls
Pantheon: 304 pp., $30
(June 2)

Taking on an enormous corporation isn’t for the faint of heart; thank goodness Smalls, who first organized the Congress of Essential Workers and then the Amazon Labor Union, has a heart strong enough to keep struggling for his colleagues against a monolithic management team. As he lays out his tumultuous personal journey (evictions, divorce, job loss) here, the author also lays out a manifesto for embracing change, even when it’s imperfect.

Decoding the Devil: Black Women Codebreakers and the Secret War Against Stalin’s Bomb
By Sarah Valentine
Harper: 368 pp., $30
(June 2)

Valentine won the 2025 National Endowment for the Humanities (RIP) Public Scholar Award for this astonishing story of how Black women in segregated code-breaking units helped our country defeat Soviet plans for decades. Despite having their unit nicknamed The Plantation (its geographical location still classified), about 100 women of color — linguists, cybersecurity experts, cryptographers — worked from World War II through the Cold War, brilliantly.

Transcendent: A Memoir
By Laverne Cox
Gallery Books: 256 pp., $30
(June 9)

From her star turn as Sophia Burset in 2014’s “Orange Is the New Black” (for which she became the first transgender person to be nominated for a prime-time Emmy) on to her trailblazing activism in the LGBTQ community, Cox has walked a line in high heels most people couldn’t navigate barefoot. In her account of a life that began with abuse and included plenty of tough years, the author proves herself “in service to something bigger than me.”

Monster of a Land: On the Road in Search of Modern America
By Lauren Hough
Pantheon: 336 pp., $30
(June 16)

The acclaimed essayist (“Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing”) and her dog Woody Guthrie set out in real life to see the land that is our land, but not quite hers, as a queer woman with deep reservations about late-stage capitalism. Why do friends offer her guns for the trip? Why do people in New Hampshire fly Confederate flags? Why, oh why, does Buc-ee’s exist and since it does, is it possible to avoid it? Alternately funny and angry, it’s a travelogue for our times.

Patrick is a freelance critic and author of the memoir “Life B.”