10 hot books to read in July, cool new releases from Colson Whitehead and more

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Set us as preferred Reading List10 books for your July reading listIf you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.New reads abound for your vacation tote throughout the weeks of July, with fiction picks featuring a Carnival cruise casualty, a highly entertaining jewel heist at the Waldorf-Astoria, and a Soviet-era madcap adventure.In nonfiction, authors consider how we define wild places, how we pigeonhole the aging, and how languages live or die.

Happy reading!FICTION:A Real Animal: A Novel By Emeline AtwoodCatapult: 368 pp., $29(July 7)After surviving a sexual assault, narrator Lucy stalks her college campus as a leopard.Don’t spend too much time worrying about whether this transformation is real, or not; Lucy’s knowledge of her fierceness is the point, a fierceness she employs as she struggles to negotiate her independence from parents who wish she’d come home to recover and men who offer up their desires and ignore hers.

It’s an astonishing debut with a compelling voice.Man Overboard!: A Novel By Kathleen RooneyGallery Books: 208 pp., $27(July 7)Readers expecting something akin to Rooney’s wondrous previous novel, “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk,” should remember that that book followed “Cher Ami “ and “Major Whittlesey,” a story about a pigeon and a World War I Army officer.In other words, Rooney doesn’t repeat herself, and in “Man Overboard!” she’s concocted a hilarious adventure tale of a man floating in the Gulf of Mexico, adrift with himself, his thoughts, and a few sea creatures.Astronaut!: A Novel By Oana AristidesW.

W.Norton: 272 pp., $28(July 14)Imagine a dystopia set neither in the future nor in fantasy; that’s the 1989 Romania 7-year-old Lia inhabits, its adults living in fear of Communist dict...