As the temperatures soar, the only warning I have for you is to not get so absorbed in a book while reading outside that you forget to apply sunscreen… although this month’s releases are so good that is a distinct possibility.

There are some great debuts out this month, in both fiction and non-fiction. Beck Dorey-Stein recounts her time working as a stenographer in President Barack Obama’s White House in From the Corner of the Oval Office, a book that is as much about friendship and love in the workplace as it is about politics and personalities. In another, yet very different memoir – Heart Berries – Terese Marie Mailhot looks at mental health and the legacy of inter-generational trauma.

Rachel Heng’s first novel Suicide Club is a dystopia, but one that feeds into our current obsession with clean eating, extreme fitness and the effects of these, while What We Owe by Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde is a slim novel about a woman who receives a cancer diagnosis with rage instead of grace, causing her to examine her life as a refugee, and her relationships with her mother and daughter.

Women full of rage can also be found in Megan Abbott’s latest, Give Me Your Hand, in which two former friends find themselves in a sinister situation as they compete to work on a scientific study about an extreme form of PMT.

In Jill Johnson’s The Time Before the Time to Come, we accompany a woman as she sets out to rediscover her Maori heritage, while in Fatal Inheritance by Rachel Rhys a dissatisfied wife receives a mysterious bequest, setting her off on a journey filled with excitement and danger. There’s another dissatisfied wife in Anne Tyler’s Clock Dance, a beautiful story showing that you can start living at any age.

Matt Haig’s Notes on a Nervous Planet explores how 21st century living is taking its toll on us, and offers advice for staying healthy and happy in the face of too much of everything.

And finally, in Slay in Your Lane: The Black Girl Bible, Yomi Adegoke and Elizabeth Uviebinene offer advice and inspiration for black British women to succeed in life, love and work.

Happy reading!

Meditations on modern life and raging women: July’s best new books