Releasing in Aug we have a coming of age tale from Korean- American author Chang-Rae Lee and a dark fantasy drama from Chuck Wendig. Enjoy 5 Wonderful New Books for August 2026!
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5 Wonderful New Books for August 2026
The Calamities by Chuck Wendig
Mourning Mayne knows he’ll one day bear the duty of managing his family’s vast empire of wealth and power. But the feckless Mourning has always struggled to accept this legacy of cruelty, domination, and exploitation . . . and something even darker.
Because the Maynes are no ordinary family: Hidden in our world are the fiends—half-human, half-demon, and possessed of a dark magic born from buying human souls—and the Maynes are one of the oldest and most influential fiendish families.
But when Mourning’s estranged father, the formidable and terrifying Hadrian Mayne, demands that Mourning return to the fold, he has to decide whether to accept his legacy and embrace his role in the family or to forge his own destiny, and with it, change the course of the world.
Because along the way home, he will meet Key, a black-market seller of human souls, and Quinn, an artist who may hold the dark truth behind the fate of the fiends. Alone, they have all struggled with the darkness of their natures. Together, they might find a path out of the shadows
Sunrise by Téa Obreht
Three lives, one hundred years, one forgotten town.
In 2024, Nina’s small aircraft crashes into a lake in the Wyoming mountains. Lost, freezing and alone, she stumbles upon Sunrise – an abandoned frontier town that is strangely well-maintained.
In 2003, Sunrise’s golden boy Coll is about to start rehearsals for the town’s annual historical reenactment when he is linked with a scandalous incident at a local bar. When an author comes to him with questions about one of Sunrise’s most beloved figures, Coll is forced to reassess everything he thought he knew about the city – and himself.
In 1902, town founder, gunslinger and adventure-novel hero Anton Vargas returns to Sunrise and helps the search for a missing boy. But who really is Vargas? What does he know about the boy’s disappearance? And why has he returned after so many years away?
These three are strangers, separated by time. But Sunrise has secrets which lie in waiting like gunpowder: quiet, until they encounter a spark.
Etna by Paul Yoon
Set in a fictional country in the present day, this is a story told through the eyes of an ex-military dog, Etna. After surviving years of a devastating war, Etna decides one night to leave the men he has fought alongside and return home – to the place where he was taken from when he was young, in the thin but persistent hope that if a home exists for him, it might be there.
Thus begins an exhilarating odyssey told through the eyes of a dog as he traverses across ruined landscapes and fights to survive in a world that proves, even in peacetime, to be just as precarious as in war. Along the way, he encounters other animals and humans who are trying to resume their lives again. What makes a life when there is no home to go back to? How do we begin to trust each other again after such devastation?
This is a novel about the power of an idea, about never giving up and, ultimately, about finding hope in the most dire of times
Appraisals by Claire Boyles
Maggie Brandt, a third-generation farmer, is cultivating a few acres of organic vegetables in rural Colorado―a place where industrial farming reigns supreme―when the Great Recession hits. After months of unemployment, her husband, Fish, takes a job with an oil and gas company, a decision that threatens their once happy marriage and alienates their teenage daughter, Ozzie, a budding environmental crusader.
As the wider community organizes against a billionaire outsider who is buying farmland and, more worryingly, water rights in the moisture-starved county, Maggie’s grandmother Flora grapples with the painful echoes of her own past. Flora and Ozzie’s already close bond deepens as they join a local activist group, but Fish and Maggie’s conflicting approaches to surviving circumstances that are out of their control drive them further apart. Faced with intolerable layers of loss, each member of the family is forced to consider what they are willing to compromise and what they are, or are not, able to forgive.
At once tender and urgent, Appraisals is a moving portrayal of ecological and financial catastrophe, the powerful generational bonds between women, and the fierce impulse to protect the places we love.
A Tender Age by Chang-Rae Lee
A spellbinding exploration of masculinity and family dynamics as seen through the confused eyes of a prepubescent child of immigrants, A Tender Age joins the rich tradition of the coming-of-age novel. The natural descendent of characters like Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caufield, Korean-American Jeon-Gi is torn between competing ideas of himself. At home, his working-class parents dote on him. Outside, he is part of a roving pack of kids with dominion over a derelict baseball field, weedy parking lot, and rusty jungle gym. Getting into and out of trouble is all-consuming. But the summer he turns eleven, he becomes embroiled in a staggering series of events reverberating far beyond himself and his family.
Devastating in its emotional precision, A Tender Age captures a family and community in striking distance of the American dream, and a young person on the precipice of adult knowledge, looking at his own culpability and looking away – then thinking about it for the rest of his life.
If you enjoyed 5 Wonderful New Books for August 2026, check out Most Anticipated Translated Fiction 2026 Part 2 (July – Dec)