Plenty of big books were published this month, including fresh offerings by Dorothea Benton Frank, Sonali Dev, Thomas Harris, and Karen Russell. Kick off summer with these new releases, some notable debuts, and a hotly awaited sophomore return. 

• The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna by Juliet Grames (Ecco: HarperCollins).
  Family secrets, family stories, the bonds and bindings of sisters, and the immigrant experience power Grames's involving debut.
   
• The Bride Test by Helen Hoang (Berkley).
  Hoang's sophomore novel has been widely anticipated by readers who fell for her charming and groundbreaking first book, The Kiss Quotient. As original and important as her debut, this story tells of an autistic man and the woman who just might teach him how to love.
   
• Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips (Knopf).
  Building a novel out of the deep roots of where it is set, Phillips uses the landscape and ethos of the far edge of Russia, the Kamchatka Peninsula, as the locale for her gripping and carefully crafted story of community, women, two missing girls, and all that happens in the wake of their disappearing.
   
• Rough Magic: Riding the World's Loneliest Horse Race by Lara Prior-Palmer (Catapult).
  In a debut memoir getting linked to favorites such as Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk, Prior-Palmer recounts her experiences as the first woman to win the grueling Mongol Derby.
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• In West Mills by De'Shawn Charles Winslow (Bloomsbury, Jun.).
  Praised for its rich characterization and finely tuned writing, Winslow's debut takes place in small-town North Carolina and ranges across decades, starting in the 1940s. The story follows several characters, key among them a woman known as Knot who strives to forge her own path.