Waist Deep, by Linea Maja Ernst
An instant best-seller in Denmark after its release in 2024, Linea Maja Ernst’s slim novel is perhaps best described as a cross between Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection (winner of the inaugural AIR MAIL Tom Wolfe Literary Prizes) and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Seven friends in their early 30s spend the week at a Danish lake house, discussing monogamy, sexuality, and the intellectual radicalism of their university days over tastefully appointed tablescapes and craft cocktails. In between languid lake swims and sensual forest escapades, old crushes surface and new anxieties rear their heads in this deft portrait of millennial disenchantment. —Paulina Prosnitz, Associate Editor
The Palm House, Gwendoline Riley
If you prefer your summer reading with a twist of venom, Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House is for you. Riley stands in a long line of British miniaturists—from Penelope Fitzgerald and Barbara Pym back to Jane Austen—who turn understatement into a weapon. Here, Laura, a magazine writer in London, drifts through old friendships, failed romances, and the gothic banalities of family life. No one writes mothers like Riley: if you have one, and feel even slightly ambivalent toward her, this book will deliver a short, sharp shock of recognition. —George Pendle, Senior Editor
