Something shifts in summer. The news doesn’t stop — it never does anymore — but there’s a particular quality to a June afternoon that makes you want to put the phone down. Not scroll Instagram stories about the apocalypse. Not doomscroll into a 37-part thread. Read something. A real thing, with pages.
This summer also happens to be an unusually good moment to be a reader. Between a wave of breakout literary fiction, a couple of faith books that are already changing the conversation, and some long-overdue nonfiction about why we all feel the way we feel right now, the shelf is stacked. We at RELEVANT spent a lot of time combing through recent releases to find the books most worth your attention this season — the ones that speak to the actual questions our readers are living with.
So whether you’re flying somewhere, sitting poolside or just looking for a reason to put your feet up and disappear for a few hours, consider this your guide. There’s something here for everyone.
For Growing in Your Faith
Practicing the Way: Be With Jesus. Become Like Him. Do as He Did. by John Mark Comer
The ECPA Christian Book of the Year and a New York Times bestseller, Practicing the Way is probably the most talked-about discipleship book in several years — and it deserves the attention. Comer, the founder of the Practicing the Way organization and author of The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, picks up the thread of that earlier book and asks the harder follow-up question: OK, you slowed down. Now what? His answer is ancient and urgent at the same time — the idea that following Jesus isn’t primarily about intellectual agreement or moral management but about becoming his actual apprentice. About rearranging your life around proximity to him.
The Narrow Path: How the Subversive Way of Jesus Satisfies Our Souls by Rich Villodas
In a culture that relentlessly tells us more is better, Villodas — lead pastor of New Life Fellowship in Queens and author of the Christianity Today Award-winning The Deeply Formed Life — makes the case that Jesus had it exactly backwards. And that’s the point. The Narrow Path is a deep dive into the Sermon on the Mount that manages to feel both ancient and urgently relevant, working through everything from anger and money to anxiety and loving enemies. Villodas writes with a pastor’s warmth and a theologian’s precision, and the result is one of the most practically challenging faith books of the last couple years.
What Grows in the Weary Lands: Perseverance, Hope and Healing for Life’s Difficult Seasons by Tish Harrison Warren
Few writers are better at articulating modern spiritual exhaustion than Tish Harrison Warren. In What Grows in the Weary Lands, the Anglican priest and New York Times columnist turns her attention toward grief, disappointment, chronic pain and the long stretches of life where God can feel frustratingly silent. But this isn’t a book about “winning” suffering or finding five easy lessons in hardship. Warren writes with honesty about endurance — about the kind of faith that survives not because everything gets fixed, but because God remains present even in seasons that feel barren. It’s thoughtful, deeply comforting and probably one of the most important faith books of the year for anyone running low on hope.
Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools: An Invitation to the Wonder and Mystery of Prayer by Tyler Staton
Staton, lead pastor of Bridgetown Church and national director of 24-7 Prayer USA, makes a case that prayer is the most countercultural act available to us — not because it’s hard, but because it requires a kind of dependence that modern life is designed to train out of us. Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools is honest about the awkwardness of prayer, funny where it should be funny, and consistently grounded in the real and the practical.
For a Great Story
Land by Maggie O’Farrell
Following her Booker Prize–nominated Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell returns with her most ambitious novel yet — a sweeping, multigenerational saga rooted in the Irish landscape and the long shadow of the Great Famine. Land opens in 1865 on a windswept Irish peninsula, where a father and son are mapping famine-ravaged territory for the Ordnance Survey. What follows is a centuries-spanning story of the same land and the same family: buried treasure, ancient woodland, colonization and rebellion, survival and loss, and the way certain histories refuse to stay buried.
O’Farrell writes with the same qualities that made Hamnet so devastating — an extraordinary sense of place, deep empathy for her characters, and prose precise enough to make you feel like you’re standing in a cold field with mud on your boots. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review and called it “a devastating yet tender portrait of Irish history.” Land is the kind of novel that reminds you why you read. Published June 2, 2026.
Homeseeking by Karissa Chen
A stunning debut tracking the decades-long love story of Suchi and Haiwen — childhood friends in pre-WWII Shanghai separated by war and politics, who reunite decades later at a Los Angeles market, both married to other people. It’s a multigenerational epic about longing, displacement and the way memory shapes (and distorts) who we become. Chen writes historical fiction the way it should be written: not as a period piece but as a lens on everything that still hurts in the present. One of the most ambitious debut novels in recent memory.
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
The buzziest debut of 2026 — a GMA Book Club pick already optioned for film with Anne Hathaway attached — Yesteryear follows Natalie, a tradwife influencer with 8 million followers and a picture-perfect farmhouse in Idaho, who wakes up one morning to find herself transported back to 1855. What was a performance is suddenly real life, and the gap between the life she sold and the life she actually has to live turns out to be the whole story. Burke’s novel is a sharp, propulsive satire about authenticity, social media, gender expectations and the distance between who we present ourselves to be and who we actually are.
Hum by Helen Phillips
This one is for the sci-fi nerds. Set in a near-future world where AI assistants have replaced most human interaction and even access to nature requires a paid subscription, Hum somehow manages to feel both wildly speculative and uncomfortably current. Phillips follows a mother trying to navigate economic instability, digital surveillance and the quiet unraveling of what it means to be a person in a world optimized for efficiency. The novel is at times tense, admittedly strange but always deeply human — asking questions about technology and connection that feel increasingly impossible to avoid. It also happens to be one of the smartest pieces of climate fiction in recent years — the kind of book that leaves you staring at your phone a little differently afterward.
For Your Mental Health
Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience by Brené Brown
Most of us are emotionally under-literate. There’s no point in denying it: we know we’re stressed, overwhelmed, frustrated. Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart is essentially a field guide to what humans actually feel, breaking down more than 80 emotions and experiences with the kind of clarity that makes you realize how much language shapes self-awareness. Brown combines research, storytelling and practical insight without drifting into therapy-speak or self-help clichés. The result is a book that genuinely helps readers understand themselves and the people around them better — which, in a culture where everyone is reacting and very few people seem to know why, feels unusually valuable right now.
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt
This is the book everyone is citing and not enough people have actually read. Haidt, the social psychologist behind The Righteous Mind, makes a meticulous, research-backed case for what’s been happening to young people over the last decade — and it’s both more specific and more solvable than most of the discourse around it suggests. His argument hinges on two parallel failures: the overprotection of kids in the physical world and a catastrophic underprotection in the digital one, with smartphones and social media handed to children with no guardrails and no real understanding of the damage being done.
For many readers, the book is simultaneously a diagnosis and a challenge. If the Church is going to be a meaningful presence in the lives of Gen Z and young millennials, it needs to understand the world that shaped them — and Haidt’s account is the most honest, most data-grounded version of that world in print. It’s not a faith book. But it might be one of the most important books for people of faith to read right now. The questions he’s asking — about community, about embodied life, about the difference between safety and formation — are exactly the questions the Church should already be trying to answer.
Strong Like Water: Finding the Freedom, Safety, and Compassion to Move Through Hard Things by Aundi Kolber
Kolber is a licensed trauma therapist who writes with the kind of warmth and precision that makes you feel simultaneously seen and challenged. Strong Like Water pushes back against the “no pain, no gain” theology of strength that a lot of us absorbed growing up — in church and out of it — and offers a different framework rooted in nervous system science and genuine compassion. The book argues that real strength is less like a wall and more like water: flexible, persistent, and capable of moving through things rather than just bearing them. Practical, accessible and grounded in faith throughout.
The Best of You: Break Free from Painful Patterns, Mend Your Past, and Discover Your True Self in God by Alison Cook
Cook is a licensed psychologist and host of one of the most trusted voices at the intersection of Christian faith and modern mental health. The Best of You is for anyone who has spent years in patterns they can’t explain — people-pleasing, shutting down, staying too long in the wrong places — and wants to understand why. Drawing on attachment theory, Scripture and her clinical expertise, Cook walks readers toward a version of themselves that isn’t just coping but actually free. One of the most practically useful books in this space in years.
