June 2025 Book of the Month Hints

This month Book of the Month took to the streets to ask “strangers” to guess what a book is about based only on the cover and title.


Book #1

Video transcript:
Stranger: Couple that went away and never came back. And the rest is history.

The Summer We Ran

Audrey Ingram

Does your past define your destiny? Told through multiple perspectives, rich with emotion and immersive dual timelines, The Summer We Ran weaves together a story of lost love, devastating secrets, shocking sabotage, and the painstaking decision two people must make in order to fulfill the futures they each desire.

In the summer of 1996, Tess Murphy’s mom gave her two rules to abide by: keep quiet and stay out of trouble. Her mother landed a new job as a cook at an affluent Virginia estate and didn’t want anything to risk the opportunity, least of all her outspoken teenage daughter. What no one saw coming was Tess falling deeply in love with the boy next door, high-society Grant Alexander.

Over a few wondrous and heat-filled months, Tess and Grant’s love blooms so ferociously it feels utterly impossible that anything can keep them apart, until tragedy strikes.

Now, more than two decades after their epic teenage romance, Tess and Grant are both running for governor of Virginia, and secrets from that summer threaten to shatter their families, their political futures, and the memory of the first love that shaped their lives.

Publication Date: June 3, 2025
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Publisher: Zibby Publishing

Book #2

Video transcript:
Stranger (on right): It’s giving castle vibes. It’s like a family affair. Real sexual. A fight for power but it’s going to have to do a lot with romance.

I think this could be one of three books: A Dance of Lies by Brittney Arena, The Art of Vanishing by Morgan Pager, or Next to Heaven by James Frey. Based upon the book’s colors, it looks like it is the later.

Next to Heaven

James Fry

A darkly funny, razor sharp plunge into America’s most perfect town, where privilege, sex, scandal, and murder lurk beneath a flawless veneer, from #1 New York Times bestselling author James Frey.

Behind every great fortune, lies a great crime.
– Honoré de Balzac

New Bethlehem, Connecticut. Picture-perfect lawns, manicured hedges, multi-million dollar homes. But beneath the designer yoga gear and country club memberships lies a darker reality.

In this world of excess, Devon and Belle have it all—beauty, money, status. But they want something more. Something dangerous. Something that makes them feel alive. Their solution? A party—a meticulously curated gathering of New Bethlehem’s elite, from a desperate ex-NFL quarterback to a hockey coach with a penchant for married women, and a ruthless Wall Street “closer” who wields his wealth like a weapon.

One night. Multiple betrayals. And a murder that will shatter New Bethlehem’s carefully constructed facade.

Fans of “The White Lotus” and “Big Little Lies” will be drawn into the dark underbelly of the American Dream – a world where money can buy anything, until it ruins everything.

Publication Date: June 17, 2025
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Authors Equity

Book #3

Video transcript:
Stranger (on right): So — *bleep*.
Kat (on left): You can’t say the title!
Stranger: Oh, shit! Romeo and Juliet, forbidden love, but with a murder mystery involved. Graveyards.
Kat: I just realized this is the author. We have had this person before.

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

V.E. Schwab

From V. E. Schwab, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue: a new genre-defying novel about immortality and hunger.

This is a story about hunger.
1532. Santo Domingo de la Calzada.
A young girl grows up wild and wily―her beauty is only outmatched by her dreams of escape. But María knows she can only ever be a prize, or a pawn, in the games played by men. When an alluring stranger offers an alternate path, María makes a desperate choice. She vows to have no regrets.

This is a story about love.
1827. London.
A young woman lives an idyllic but cloistered life on her family’s estate, until a moment of forbidden intimacy sees her shipped off to London. Charlotte’s tender heart and seemingly impossible wishes are swept away by an invitation from a beautiful widow―but the price of freedom is higher than she could have imagined.

This is a story about rage.
2019. Boston.
College was supposed to be her chance to be someone new. That’s why Alice moved halfway across the world, leaving her old life behind. But after an out-of-character one-night stand leaves her questioning her past, her present, and her future, Alice throws herself into the hunt for answers . . . and revenge.

This is a story about life―
how it ends, and how it starts.

Publication Date: June 10, 2025
Genre: Historical Fantasy
Publisher: Tor Books

Book #4

Video transcript:
Stranger (on right): Witches and, like, burning at the stake. I want to show the cover to them now.
Kat (on left): Oh my god, this is actually — this is secret access.
Stranger: Oh!
Kat: You know one of the…
Stranger: I feel so honored.

There is a small possibility that this book could alternatively be Glass Girls by Danie Shokoohi.

Cover of The Ghostwriter by Julie Clark

The Ghostwriter

Julie Clark

From the instant New York Times bestselling author of The Last Flight and The Lies I Tell comes a dazzling new thriller.

June, 1975.

The Taylor family shatters in a single night when two teenage siblings are found dead in their own home. The only surviving sibling, Vincent, never shakes the whispers and accusations that he was the one who killed them. Decades later, the legend only grows as his career as a horror writer skyrockets.

Ghostwriter Olivia Dumont has spent her entire professional life hiding the fact that she is the only child of Vincent Taylor. Now on the brink of financial ruin, she’s offered a job to ghostwrite her father’s last book. What she doesn’t know, though, is that this project is another one of his lies. Because it’s not another horror novel he wants her to write.

After fifty years of silence, Vincent Taylor is finally ready to talk about what really happened that night in 1975.

Publication Date: June 3, 2025
Genre: Thriller
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark

Book #5

Video transcript:
Stranger (on right): I think it’s about the revenge of the book Fahrenheit 451. Yes, and it’s burning down.
Kat (on left): Ohhh!
Stranger: And it’s like *bleep*, like the revenge of him
Kat: I love that!

King of Ashes

S.A. Cosby

Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author S. A. Cosby returns with King of Ashes, a Godfather-inspired Southern crime epic and dazzling family drama.

When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father’s car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family―and the family business―together. Neveah and their father, who run the Carruthers Crematorium in the run-down central Virginia town of Jefferson Run, see death up close every day. But mortality draws even closer when it becomes clear that the crash that landed their father in a coma was no accident and Dante’s recklessness has placed them all in real danger.

Roman, a financial whiz with a head for numbers and a talent for making his clients rich, has some money to help buy his brother out of trouble. But in his work with wannabe tough guys, he’s forgotten that there are real gangsters out there. As his bargaining chips go up in smoke, Roman realizes that he has only one thing left to offer to save his brother: himself, and his own particular set of skills.

Roman begins his work for the criminals while Neveah tries to uncover the long-ago mystery of what happened to their mother, who disappeared when they were teenagers. But Roman is far less of a pushover than the gangsters realize. He is willing to do anything to save his family. Anything.

Because everything burns.

Publication Date: June 10, 2025
Genre: Thriller
Publisher: Flatiron Books/Pine & Cedar

Book #6

Video transcript:
Stranger (on right): Ooo! Dream a murder in your mind… on vacation.
Kat (on left): Period!

There are two options for this one: The Other Side of Now by Paige Harbison or What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown. I have shown both below.

Cover of

What Kind of Paradise

Janelle Brown

A teenage girl breaks free from her father’s world of isolation to discover that her whole life is a lie in this propulsive new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Pretty Things and Watch Me Disappear.

The first thing you have to understand is that my father was my entire world.

Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Waldenesque utopia.

As Jane becomes a teenager she starts pushing against the boundaries of her restricted world. She begs to accompany her father on his occasional trips away from the cabin. But when Jane realizes that her devotion to her father has made her an accomplice to a horrific crime, she flees Montana to the only place she knows to look for answers about her mysterious past, and her mother’s death: San Francisco. It is a city in the midst of a seismic change, where her quest to understand herself will force her to reckon with both the possibilities and the perils of the fledgling internet, and where she will come to question everything she values.

In this sweeping, suspenseful novel from bestselling author Janelle Brown, we see a young woman on a quest to understand how we come to know ourselves. It is a bold and unforgettable story about parents and children; nature and technology; innocence and knowledge; the losses of our past and our dreams for the future.

Publication Date: June 3, 2025
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Random House

Cover of

The Other Side of Now

Paige Harbison

A hilarious and heartfelt novel about how loves and lives are never truly lost, for fans of Rebecca Serle and Taylor Jenkins Reid.

With a leading role on a hit TV show and a relationship with Hollywood’s latest heartthrob, Meg Bryan appears to have everything she ever wanted. But underneath, her happiness is as fake as her stage name, Lana Lord. Following a tiny nervous breakdown at her thirtieth birthday party, she books an impromptu trip to Ireland. Specifically, to the village where she and her best friend Aimee always dreamt of moving.

When Meg arrives, the people in town don’t just recognize her, they seem to know her. She quickly―reluctantly―realizes she has somehow slipped into an alternate reality. One where she did move to Ireland as a teenager, one where she never got famous, and―most shocking of all―one where Aimee is alive and well. 

She just wants nothing to do with Meg.

Despite her bewilderment, Meg is clear-eyed about one thing: this is a once-in-two-lifetimes chance to reconnect with her friend and repair what she broke . . . or else risk losing Aimee all over again.

Publication Date: June 3, 2025
Genre: Contemporary Ficiton
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press