Three works of contemporary fiction to add to your TBR beach bag this summer.

Rachel Khong’s newnovel Real Americans explores race, class and cultural identity
In 2017 Rachel Khong wrote a slender, darkly comic novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, that picked up several accolades and was optioned for a film. Now she has followed up her debut effort with a sweeping, multigenerational saga that is twice as long and very serious.

Real Americans — the title alone suggests its weighty subject — wrestles with issues of class, race and the genetic component of disease. Though largely a work of social realism, it has a touch of science fiction, with characters experiencing “blips” in existence, when time itself seems to get stuck.

The novel is narrated by three members of the same family: May, the Chinese-born matriarch; her American daughter, Lily; and Lily’s biracial son, Nick. It opens in 1999, when 22-year-old Lily is working as an unpaid intern at a media company, a few months away from her NYU graduation.

At a holiday party, she meets her boss’s nephew, Matthew, five years older and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. Tall and “golden haired,” he is likable and self-assured. Lily, on the other hand, is insecure, unambitious and prone to ruminating about what a disappointment she is to her hard-charging mother, a brilliant scientist who specialises in — spoiler alert — genetic engineering.

Nonetheless, they fall in love, get married and, after much difficulty, have a baby. That child, a boy named Nick with blond hair and blue eyes, narrates the second section, which begins in 2021, when he is a teenager. He was raised on a remote island off Washington state by his single mother, feeling like a misfit and wishing more than anything to be normal.
Wondering why he does not, as his best friend says, “look Chinese”, the two of them search an online genetic database and find Matthew, his long-lost white father. Nick’s subsequent decision to go to Yale (Khong’s alma mater) sets up a series of dramatic encounters on the east coast with the dad he never knew.
The most vivid character in the book is Nick’s grandmother May, who grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution and fled to America after making a pact, of sorts, with the devil. She narrates the third section of the book in 2030, when she is dying. Only then are the riddles of Lily and Nick’s discombobulated lives finally explained.
Khong, who was formerly the executive editor of the now defunct food magazine Lucky Peach, has offered up a veritable smorgasbord of ideas — about IVF, genetic engineering, different cultural styles of parenting, and what it means to be a “real American”.

Emily Henry is still the modern-day rom-com queen with Funny Story

Funny Story isn’t a funny story at all. But it is a good one.
Emily Henry’s new romance novel starts with duelling break-ups that have rocked the two main characters’ worlds — and forced them to bond over their shared broken hearts.
Daphne is a planner who is always on time. She’s a buttoned-up librarian who hosts a lively children’s reading hour and keeps her personal life closed off from her colleagues.
Miles is more subdued. He’s nice, thoughtful and able to win over anyone he’s talking to, especially the regulars he sees on his weekend trips to the farmer’s market. He doesn’t have much of a relationship with his parents, for myriad reasons, but he’s very close to his younger sister.
Daphne and Miles’ story starts as they navigate their newly single lives now that their exes are dating … each other.
They go through the throes of grieving together, with a soundtrack of love songs accompanying each phase. It’s practically begging for a movie version, to go along with the several other Henry books already in various stages of production.
Early on, they decide to pretend they’re dating to make their exes jealous. But as time goes on, they discover that they see each other as more than friends, that they really are falling for each other.
Funny Story is Henry’s latest romance — and her steamiest one so far. It’s a mixture of will-they-won’t-they in a way that makes you really want them to. They’re the protagonists in separate love stories who are brought together by heartbreak. Daphne and Miles are characters you can empathise with and root for.
And Funny Story is classic Henry. It’s a meet-cute in a non-patronising way. It’s a modern love story, and one that you won’t be mad is slightly predictable — because it makes you feel good and makes you believe in a thing called love.
“So many of the most beautiful things in life are unexpected,” Henry writes.
It’s funny how life and love are both that way.

Short story anthology The Black Girl Survives in This One challenges the horror canon
Ahh, the Final Girl — a point of pride, a point of contention. Too often, the white, virginal, Western ideal. But not this time.
The Black Girl Survives in This One, a short story anthology edited by Saraciea J Fennell and Desiree S Evans, is changing the literary horror canon. As self-proclaimed fans of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Goosebumps, the editors have upped the ante with a new collection spotlighting black women and girls, defying the old tropes that would box Black people in as support characters or victims.

The 15 stories are introduced with an excellent forward by Tananarive Due laying out the groundwork with a brief history of black women in horror films and literature, and of her own experiences. She argues with an infallible persuasiveness that survival is the thread that connects black women and the genre that has largely shunned them for so long.
These are the kind of stories that stick with you long after you’ve read them.

Queeniums for Greenium! by Brittney Morris features a cult-ish smoothie MLM with a deadly level of blind faith that had my heart pounding and my eyes watering with laughter at intervals. And The Skittering Thing by Monica Brashears captures the sheer panic of being hunted in the dark, with some quirky twists.

Many of the stories are set in the most terrifying real-life place there is: high school. As such, there are teen crushes and romance aplenty, as well as timely slang that’s probably already outdated.
Honestly, this was one of the best parts: seeing 15 different authors’ takes on a late-teens black girl. How does she wear her hair, who are her friends, is she religious, where does she live, does she like boys or girls or no one at all? Is she a bratty teen or a goody-two-shoes or a bookworm or just doing her best to get through it? Each protagonist is totally unique and the overall cast of both characters and writers diverse.

And even though we know the black girl survives, the end is still a shock, because the real question is how.
The anthology has something for everyone, from a classic zombie horror in “Cemetery Dance Party” by Saraciea J Fennell to a spooky twist on Afrofuturism in Welcome Back to The Cosmos by Kortney Nash. Two of the stories have major Get Out vibes that fans of Jordan Peele will appreciate (Black Girl Nature Group by Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite and Foxhunt by Charlotte Nicole Davies). If your flavour is throwbacks and cryptids, Justina Ireland’s Black Pride has you covered. Or if you like slow-burn psychological thrillers and smart protagonists, TMI by Zakiya Delila Harris.
Overall, it’s a bit long and the anthology could stand to drop a couple of the weaker stories. But it’s well worth adding to any scary book collection, and horror fans are sure to find some new favourites.