New Books to Read in June 2026

And once you’ve sorted your reading list, we’ve got you covered for the rest of the season too. Head over to our guides on the songs worth streaming on repeat and the shows you’ll want to binge before everyone starts talking about them.

Scroll below to see our guide on the best new books to read in June 2026.

From the New York Times bestselling author Ann Patchett comes Whistler, a luminous and quietly devastating novel about the indelible marks left by love—however brief, however long ago. When Daphne Fuller, now fifty-three, crosses paths with Eddie Triplett at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the decades collapse in an instant: he was her stepfather for just over a year when she was nine, yet that fleeting chapter shaped the entire course of both their lives. Reunited, there is no question of ever parting again. At its heart, Whistler is a meditation on memory and courage, on the small, unassuming moments that quietly rewrite our futures, and on the profound ache of loss that eventually finds us all—but it is also, above all else, a testament to endurance.

The Great Hunger has hollowed out the land, and cartographer Tomás is determined that his survey maps will bear witness to what was lost. But when a strange encounter in an ancient copse shatters something deep within him, it falls to his ten-year-old son Liam to hold the pieces together—and somehow finish the work before the British soldiers arrive. Lyrical, haunting and devastating, Land is a story about what the earth remembers long after the people are gone, and what a child will do to bring his father home.

In the first book in the Blue Sky Bay series, Gracie Reynolds comes back to Blue Sky Bay with a broken heart, a suitcase and nowhere else to go. Staying with her childhood best friend was supposed to be temporary—just long enough to figure out her next chapter. But somewhere between old memories and late nights, the easy comfort of everything she knows starts to feel a lot like something she’s never let herself want. He’s always noticed her. She’s always known it. And now that they’ve crossed a line neither of them planned for, the question isn’t whether they belong together—it’s whether she’s brave enough to stop running toward her future and finally turn around.

For readers who like their love stories with a body count, this will certainly fit the bill. Brynne Weaver’s wickedly seductive Seasons of Carnage trilogy returns to the town where dark romance and razor-sharp suspense collide. Nolan came to Cape Carnage with one purpose: to end Harper Starling. Now he’s falling for her instead—which would be romantic, if they weren’t both killers. As true crime obsessives descend on their small town and bodies pile up beneath the surface, every alliance is tested, and every secret threatens to detonate. Harper is unravelling. Nolan is barely holding the chaos together. And love, as it turns out, may be the most dangerous weapon either of them has ever encountered.

The second instalment of the Fire and Metal series picks up four years after a single, devastating choice shattered everything between Jovie and Acker—and the fallout has set an entire world ablaze. Now on opposite sides of a war she helped ignite, Jovie is burying the Matching Bond to protect innocent people from her own mistakes, while Acker fights his father’s battles trapped in a loveless arranged marriage—and slipping, uninvited, into her dreams. But when a chilling secret about the king’s returned power surfaces, Acker is forced into the one choice he’s been avoiding: the crown, or her.

When Bex Daniels inherits her late father’s struggling travel agency, salvation arrives in the most inconvenient form: Theo Porter—straight-laced, guarded, and impossibly attractive—and a reality TV deal that requires them to play newlyweds on camera. From the sun-drenched cliffs of Capri to the candlelit streets of Paris, what begins as performance slowly becomes something neither of them planned for. The only thing standing between them and a real love story? Grief, secrets and the sneaking suspicion they might actually deserve to be happy.

The Crowne women have always been the town’s favourite scandal. Everyone knows their name, their whiskey, and their talent for quiet, unhurried revenge. What nobody knows is what really happened to the youngest one—or why she came back different. She rebuilt herself from nothing, swore herself to silence, and almost had something resembling peace. Then a charming jeweller with too many questions walked in and refused to leave. Julian Colton shouldn’t still be here. She definitely shouldn’t be letting him close. But with a dead body, a missing cop, and threads connecting him to secrets her family has spent years burying, keeping her distance was never really an option.

If Twisters left you breathless and a little lovesick, this debut is your next obsession. Wedding photographer Sloane Michaels lives for the six weeks a year she trades taffeta for tornado season—and this year, she’s chasing more than storms. She’s gunning for the cover of Nature Shots magazine. The only thing standing between her and that shot? “Wild Wes” Talbot, her reckless, infuriatingly charming decade-long rival, who ends up in her car—and slowly, dangerously, under her skin. Racing through Tornado Alley in forced proximity, Sloane starts to suspect that Wes has been paying attention to her all along, and that the electricity crackling between them has nothing to do with the weather.

Preston Armstrong has always taken what he wants and destroyed everything else—until Marcus Osborn. Captain of the rival team, equal parts infuriating and magnetic, Marcus is the one person who refuses to flinch. When their collision-course rivalry turns into something violent, addictive, and impossible to quit, neither man is prepared for what happens when two genuinely heartless people accidentally start feeling things. They set out to ruin each other. What they built instead is far more dangerous.