August reading: new paperbacks from Adichie, Rushdie and more

The Guardian has published its selection of standout paperbacks released in August, featuring both established authors and newer voices in fiction.

Women at the centre

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "Dream Count" weaves together the lives of four women — three Nigerians and one Guinean — living in the United States, touching on pregnancy, motherhood, sexual assault and female genital mutilation, all set against the backdrop of the Covid pandemic.

The supernatural and the experience of illness

Karl Ove Knausgård continues his sprawling saga with "The School of Night", tracing the mysterious Kristian Hadeland from his youth in London to a planned suicide on a remote Norwegian island. Meanwhile, Patricia Lockwood's "Will There Ever Be Another You" recounts her own experience of severe long Covid — aphasia, hallucinations and memory loss — in a fragmented, deeply personal narrative.

Marital crisis and dystopian futures

In Erin Somers's "The Ten Year Affair", a millennial mother spends a decade contemplating a possible affair without ever acting on it. Gary Shteyngart's "Vera, or Faith" views a near-future, "post-democracy" United States through the eyes of a ten-year-old girl, in a country where citizens' private lives are closely monitored.

War reporting

Phoebe Greenwood's debut novel "Vulture", drawing on her own experience as a freelance journalist in Jerusalem between 2010 and 2013, follows a reporter covering Gaza in 2012 for a British newspaper, offering a sharp look at the ethics of conflict journalism.