Coming this summer we have a fascinating account of life in ancient Babylon by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones and a touching memoir of Appalachian life by Emilee Hackney. Enjoy 5 New Non Fiction Books July 2026!
This post may contain affiliate links that earn us a commission at no extra cost to you.
5 New Non Fiction Books July 2026
A Vast Horizon by Anna Thomasson
Late summer 1937. Europe is inching towards war. In the South of France a group of friends picnic in a secluded clearing. The women have peeled down their dresses to their waists. A couple kiss playfully while the others look on, laughing. The moment is captured in Lee Miller’s now-iconic image.
Some of the friends are well known, others less so: the dancer Ady Fidelin, the poet Paul Éluard and his wife Nusch, the Surrealists Man Ray and Roland Penrose. They are spending the summer with fellow artists Dora Maar, Eileen Agar and Pablo Picasso.
In A Vast Horizon biographer Anna Thomasson tells the story of their creativity, friendships and pursuit of freedom set against the tense political backdrop of the 1930s, the Second World War and its aftermath. Tracing their lives through their photographs, artworks, poems and letters, from the heady weeks of creativity, sex and collaboration of that Mediterranean summer through the tumultuous years that followed, it is the story of rebellious lives and the redemptive power of art.
Dad, Love, Me by Matthew Quick
On the surface, Matthew Quick seemed to have it all—a loving wife, a thriving career as a novelist, and a beautiful home. He’d traveled all over the world advocating for mental health awareness, standing before crowds as a success story. But secretly, he was depressed and some days, he didn’t want to live.
Years earlier, when he first told his father he wanted to be a novelist, the response was immediate and brutal: “Idiot!” That voice—angry and belittling—would echo through Quick’s mind for years. He channeled his pain into his debut novel, The Silver Linings Playbook, crafting a complex father-son dynamic drawn straight from his own life. The book became a New York Times bestseller and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. Still, the approval Quick longed for never came. His father remained cold and withholding. The deeper the rift between them grew, the deeper Quick sank into anxiety and addiction.
In this book, Quick takes readers deep into his psyche, as he wrestles with both his own mental health and his father’s cognitive decline. A health scare finally forces Quick to get sober, but then, overcome by creative paralysis, writer’s block threatens to end his career. The blank page is unbearable. As his desperation for healing peaks, Quick turns to a Jungian analyst he nicknames “Zeus.” In the safety of analysis, as Quick’s repressed pain and shame surface, he finally cracks. Just as he is putting himself back together, his father is diagnosed with dementia.
Suddenly, the clock is ticking. If there is ever going to be reconciliation, it has to happen now. Quick and his wife pack up their lives in coastal North Carolina, drive eight hours, and move into a house just around the corner from Quick’s parents, on an island right outside of Beaufort, South Carolina. There, as his father slips further and further away, Quick races to make a healing connection.
Dad, Love, Me is Quick’s raw, vulnerable, and deeply moving account of what it means to forgive a parent who never really knew how to love you. It’s about wounds that never fully heal, and the power of showing up anyway. This beautifully brave and life-affirming memoir is a must read for anyone who has been starved of love but wants to keep loving anyway.
Babylon by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
Babylon often appears more myth than history. Purportedly the site of the Hanging Gardens and the Tower of Babel, its infamous presence in the Bible has made it a byword for sinful decadence. But Babylon was a real place teeming with life, a bustling mega-city on the Euphrates where schoolteachers, artisans, priests, slaves, prostitutes and soldiers rubbed shoulders in maze-like streets and busy marketplaces.
The city was home to some extraordinary rulers, from Hammurabi the great lawgiver to Nebuchadnezzar II, the conqueror-king, under whose reign the city glistened in gold and lapis lazuli.
In Babylon, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones brings the city vividly to life, tracing its foundation through to its world domination, and subsequent decline, fall and ruin into dust. From ribald drinking songs to acerbic letters between rival kings, the extraordinary ancient sources help inform what is both a stunning work of scholarship and a fascinating evocation of a long-lost world.
All That’s Unseen by Emilee Hackney
Born and raised deep in the hollers of the Appalachian Mountains, Emilee Hackney knew little beyond the ridgelines and coalfields of southwest Virginia. As an eighth-generation Appalachian, her childhood was steeped in the stories of her grandparents—tales of the coal mines’ brutal grip and the way the land, both beautiful and unforgiving, never quite let anyone go. At fourteen, Emilee meets Sam, a senior at her high school, who offers her a glimpse at a promising future together. But as they begin attending services at Deliverance Christian Church as a couple, Emilee is thrust into the radical realm of Pentecostalism. In a culture where marriage at nineteen isn’t uncommon, Emilee is engaged to Sam. Eager to make her relationship work, she embraces the extremist doctrines of the religion, submitting herself fully to God, to Sam, and to a life of repentance. But what she doesn’t yet know is the man she plans to marry is not who he claims to be.
Years later, Emilee finds herself isolated from friends, family, and her own sense of truth. Wracked with shame and self-doubt, she reaches a breaking point. On the verge of spiraling out of control, in a stunning act of defiance and hope, she applies to Harvard; against all odds, she is accepted. From the magisterial mountains of Tazewell to the storied halls of Cambridge, Emilee begins the arduous process of reinventing herself and her relationships with her home, faith, and values against the backdrop of the divisive 2016 election. All That’s Unseen is Emilee Hackney’s fiercely honest memoir about spiritual entrapment, hard-won liberation, and the courage to reclaim her voice after she had been taught to stay silent.
Exit Stalin by Mark B. Smith
With Stalin’s death, the Soviet Union remained a repressive, harsh and belligerent place, but one which became more predictable for its citizens and one which made a genuine attempt to create the egalitarian, progressive country that the Russian Revolution had once promised. That this attempt would fail was not clear until the 1980s.
Mark B. Smith’s remarkable book recreates the day-to-day life of this vast state, the largest ever to exist. What was life like in a country which made such absolute claims for the future, which claimed to be on its way to creating a people’s utopia and which, like the USA, owned enough atomic weapons to end human life on Earth?
Exit Stalin is filled with extraordinary stories about those who lived in the USSR and the distinctive and functioning civilization that they built. Many of them embraced its values, understood its goals and could not imagine life outside such a vastly ambitious and progressive project. The shortages, coercion and incompetence that underlay the USSR – and which by the late 1980s would doom it – has to be understood alongside the acceptance it always had from many of its citizens. And this in turn is a crucial issue for understanding Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union in the 21st century.
If you enjoyed 5 New Non Fiction Books July 2026, check out Most Anticipated Translated Fiction 2026 Part 2 (July – Dec)