One of the greatest pleasures in life is reading outdoors, something that becomes eminently more possible—at least for those of us living in the American Northeast—after Memorial Day. Well, here we are—but now that you’ve scoped out your cozy spot underneath a tree, what to read first? The Lit Hub staff is, as ever, here to help, with a few of our favorite new novels being published this season. So go forth and touch grass, but as always, take a book.

* Patrick Nathan’s is secretly two projects in one. The novel begins as a very pleasurable period piece–we follow George, a queer screenwriter of sci-fi B movies, as he falls in and out of love and tries to stay off the Blacklist in a lushly rendered 50s Hollywood. And this central plot, with its noir and thriller flourishes, is propulsive enough–but then we start to slip genre’s bounds.

We move back and forth in George’s memories until the novel expands like lungs, becoming this poignant meditation on the conundrum of art-making in apocalyptic times. Nathan also captures (multiple) earth-shaking romances without glossing their edges or wallowing in their endings, which struck me as masterful. Especially since the book never feels weighty or smug.

It’s rather, as others have noted, very sexy and insistently alive. This one’s an ode to the people and projects that light us up, in spite of all the darkness. The creeps-up-on-you-scope of this project put me in mind of Sarah Thankam Mathews’ But the whimsical.