These five must-read books will hit shelves in August

An old literary friend — Sherlock Holmes — is back in August. Perhaps you’d like him to join you in an air-conditioned setting?

Holmes returns to solving cases in Nicholas Meyer’s “Sherlock Holmes and the Real Thing,” the latest in his series of supposedly newly discovered adventures of the great detective. But if you’re looking for something a little less sunny, to balance the blazing days, how about a local author’s novel about a possible cannibal? Or a social media-famous psychotherapist’s guide to taking control of your own life?

They’re all in the list of five August books we at the Minnesota Star Tribune can’t wait to read:

Are You Mad at Me?, Meg Josephson

Josephson is the internet’s psychotherapist, with more than 300,000 Instagram followers clinging to her every “Tell me more about your relationship with your father.” Her book focuses on people who overextend themselves, who are anxious and who avoid conflict to their detriment. They’re all behaviors she identifies as part of “fawning,” and she wants us to knock it off in this self-help book with a sense of humor, subtitled “How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You.” Out Aug. 5.

People Like Us, Jason Mott

The latest from the author of “Hell of a Book” sounds like it will appeal to fans of Percival Everett’s “Erasure.” It’s also a satire that turns on the relationships between Black writers and the publishing world. Mott’s novel finds two writers’ paths converging. One is embarking on a publicity tour for his wildly successful new book and the other is trying to figure out what to say in a speech at a school that is struggling to recover from a shooting. Out Aug. 5.

He went on to direct “Star Trek” movies and campaign against nuclear arms but Meyer made his first splash back in the ‘70s as the author of “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution,” a witty mystery that resurrected Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, and dove him into a kidnapping case that involved his own cocaine addiction and a meeting with Sigmund Freud. “The Real Thing” refers to art masterworks that may not be authentic, but don’t worry. There are a bunch of murders, too. Out Aug. 26.

A Truce That Is Not Peace, Miriam Toews

All of Toews’ eight novels contain autobiographical elements. She is best known for “Women Talking,” which became an Academy Award-winning movie and which draws on her youth in a restrictive religious community, but Toews also has written about her sister’s death by suicide and her troubled father. Many of those elements come together in “Truce,” a memoir in which the Canadian grapples with why she keeps returning to her sister’s story, how reliable her memory is and whether she should be writing about this stuff in the first place. All of Toews’ books are outstanding but if you have not read her, this could be a great place to start. Out Aug. 26.

What Hunger, Catherine Dang