Summertime is made for reading, a time to hit the beach (or the mountain cabin, or the airplane cabin...) and indulge in some solid storytime. It's escapism, sure, but also a chance to step outside ourselves and experience the joys and sorrows, the ups and downs, in the lives of others. In fact, literature is how we share ourselves with others, how we come to understand life outside our bubbles — which are smaller and more seductive than ever before these days.
Because reading is a good thing and buying books is a great thing overall, we're highlighting ten new tomes by local literati, in alphabetical order by the author's last name.
(By the way, the link in each title takes you not to Amazon, but to a local bookstore that either has the book on its shelves or can order it for you post-haste. These businesses are worthy of your patronage in ways that monolithic and draconian online retailers named for innocent rivers in South America can never be. Support your local authors and your local bookstores both. And please, please: Do not feed the Bezos.)
Blackstone
Jon Bassoff
Jon Bassoff teaches high school in Longmont — and he also happens to be a vary fine writer, who writes books that range from the weird to the very-goddamn weird in the best ways possible. His latest, The Memory Ward, is possibly his strangest. And that's saying something, because Bassoff is an author who wants throw a monkey wrench into the works. He writes unsettling stories that make readers wonder about the nature of reality, and the lies we tell ourselves.
Tin House
Nini Berndt
Desire in all its splendor is at the center of Nini Berndt’s spectacular debut novel: desire for truth, desire for understanding, desire for connection, the desire to be desired, the desire for home. This Denver is in chaos, perhaps ruined, and a place where simple survival can no longer be assumed. Even the weather can't be trusted, or even really comprehended. But there's magic and wonder to be found in the remainders of Berndt's Mile High City, a beauty that makes the ugly even more stark. This book is a gorgeous tribute to the weirdness of Denver.
Penguin Random House
Peter Heller
Colorado native Peter Heller — whose award-winning 2012 novel, The Dog Stars, is currently being made into a feature film — has long been known as a writer who evokes the mysteries of the natural world with both a sense of wonder and dirt-under-your-nails grit. While his latest novel isn't set in Colorado but in Maine, the remoteness of the wilderness and the company of men surviving within it recall the Rocky Mountains. But this is also Heller playing with the political sphere of America today; it's about state secession, with the destruction of community and facility, with how close we all are to a tipping point back into a world in which violence becomes the answer to too many questions. Gripping and beautiful...and a warning to America.
Celadon Books
Kristin Koval
Former lawyer-turned-Denver author Kristen Koval begins her debut novel with an act of violence — a thirteen-year-old girl shooting her older brother — not to delve into the melodrama of the reasons why, or the salacious details of the murder itself — but explore those that surround and survive this violent act. She focuses on the parents of both killer and victim, and how a mother and father navigate grief and blame as well as several kinds of loss at once.
Save Me, Stranger
Erika Krouse
Every good must-read list includes a solid short story collection, and Erika Krouse — whose combo memoir/true-crime thriller, Tell Me Everything, was a must-read two years ago — fills that need with aplomb. Save Me, Stranger is a set of narratives that explore other voices, other stories, a wide span of narratives that can show the sum better through its parts. It's "the biggest asset of the form," Krouse says. "If a person were to tell a story that encapsulates their entire life, that's where short fiction lives. That's the story you should be writing."
The Bible Says So
Dan McClellan
Biblical scholar and TikTok star Dan McClellan turns his sound-bite Data Over Dogma podcast into a fascinating and inspirational book that examines what the Bible really says...and what it provably does not. The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture's Most Controversial Issues is an essential guide to the intellectual discussion of one of the world's most influential texts. McClellan attended Niwot High School and was later expelled from the University of Northern Colorado in 1998 for what he freely admits was a single semester of smoking pot, drinking Southern Comfort,general carousing...and very little class attendance. Had that been the end of his education, this book wouldn't exist — but fortunately, McClellan went on to earn a bachelor's degree in ancient Near Eastern studies from Brigham Young University, a master's degree in Jewish studies at the University of Oxford, a master of arts in biblical studies from Trinity Western University, and finally a Ph.D. from the University of Exeter. In this book, McClellan provides a level of discourse regarding faith (and bad-faith politics that seek to twist religion to its own ends) that's more than refreshing in today's America. It's necessary.
Blackstone
Christopher Ransom
Denver tech-writer-turned-novelist Christopher Ransom cut his teeth on horror and thrillers back in the day — but now he's going in a new direction. The Turn is being marketed as a Caddyshack-like comedy, but Ransom describes it differently. He says it's "more about finding very real and painful situations in life, the hard awakenings some of us go through around our forties and fifties." With a light touch and some comedic elements, the way Ransom deals with that pain is far from silly — rather, he describes it as an approach that highlights "how the awkward and absurd, the disturbing and delightful, can and do coexist, even during dark days." That's the author's analysis, anyway — the experience of reading is a lot more light, and a little more of a romp than Ransom might suggest. Whether or not you walk the links, this book is pure summer.
No Lie Lasts Forever
Mark Stevens
Former Denver Post reporter and Colorado author Mark Stevens (The Fireballer) pens a thriller set in the streets of Denver in which a reformed serial murderer once called the PDQ Killer seems to have restarted his bloody hobby — or so someone wants everyone to think. The original PDQ Killer is reformed, and teams up with a disgraced local reporter to clear his name...before his old violent yearnings resurface like a re-stimulated itch. A good old-fashioned mystery, set in familiar streets? Perfect summer reading pleasure.
Circuit Breaker Books
Jeff Richards
When does a solid, non-fiction memoir become a book you can't put down? When it's about the place where you live, in a time you either recognize or mythologize. Such is the case with Denver author Jeff Richards and his new book, Nothing Left to Lose (or How Not to Start a Commune), released this spring. It's a rollicking wanderlust of a late-'60s chronicle of how Richards and a friend came to Colorado with dreams of freedom and agriculture — neither of which turned out quite the way they'd envisioned.
The Haunting of Room 904
Erika T. Wurth
Denver author Erika Wurth hit it big when her book White Horse was released a few years ago, and then again when The Haunting of Room 904 landed on shelves earlier this year. She writes not only in Denver, but largely about Denver, and from an Indigenous perspective that rightfully enthralls. This latest novel is in the horror genre, but it's also a love song to Denver history, marrying real-life records from the legendary Brown Palace to the Sand Creek Massacre through ghostly memory. This is a summer read that will still linger, much like the ghosts it details, well into the fall and the quiet winter that follows.
