Upcoming July releases

Book releases for July 2025: art that come to life and love, a Hamilton memoir, the fallout of being flattened into a muse, and more

July has snuck up on me, as has summer: so far away, and then, when it arrives, suddenly and all at once. This weekend was a heatwave in London, and we’re gearing up for a hot week ahead.

The July 2025 book releases are fantastic, and we start the month with three standout non-fiction works, including one that feeds my obsession with all things Hamilton and highlights a significant woman in American history. There are beautiful works of fiction involving art and love, with, somehow, two books about art that literally come to life. Also on my radar: a book that’s definitely not a ghost story, a woman who writes a guide for her husband’s lover, and a nuanced exploration of what happens when a person is flattened into someone else’s muse.

Do also check out my friends’ summer reading list of 41 book recommendations for my seasonal Reads With Friends series.

What my friends are reading this summer | Reads With Friends

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Angelica: For Love and Country in a Time of Revolution by Molly Beer (1 July)

Few women of the American Revolution have come through 250 years of US history with such clarity and color as Angelica Schuyler Church. She was Alexander Hamilton's "saucy" sister-in-law, and the heart of Thomas Jefferson's "charming coterie" of artists and salonnières in Paris. Her transatlantic network of important friends spanned the political spectrum of her time and place, and her astute eye and brilliant letters kept them well informed.

A woman of great influence in a time of influential women (Catherine the Great and Marie-Antoinette were contemporaries), Angelica was at the red-hot center of American history at its birth: in Boston, when General Burgoyne surrendered to the revolutionaries; in Newport, receiving French troops under the command of her soon-to-be dear friend Marquis de Lafayette; in Yorktown, just after the decisive battle; in Paris and London, helping to determine the standing of the new nation on the world stage.

She was born as Engeltje, a Dutch-speaking, slave-owning colonial girl who witnessed the Stamp Act riots in the Royal British Province of New York. She came of age under English rule as Angelica, the eldest daughter of the most important family on the northern part of Hudson's River, raised to be a domestic diplomat responsible for hosting indigenous chiefs and enemy British generals at dinner. She was Madame Church, wife of a privateer turned merchant banker, whose London house was a refuge for veterans of the American war fleeing the guillotine in France. Across nationalities, languages, and cultures, across the divides of war, grievance, and geography, Angelica wove a web of soft-power connections that spanned the War for Independence, the post-war years of tenuous peace, and the turbulent politics and rival ideologies that threatened to tear apart the nascent United States.

(W. W. Norton & Company)

I’m obsessed with Hamilton. I’ve watched it live twice at pivotal moments in my life, and even strong-armed my parents into going (without me, sadly). I also signed up for Disney+ for exactly one month during lockdown so I could watch it seven (7!!) times. We see plenty of Eliza in Hamilton, but I’ve always been curious about Angelica. I read biographies sparingly, but this one makes it on my list.

The Art of Vanishing by Morgan Pager (1 July)

Jean's life is the same day in and day out. Frozen in time by his painter father, the legendary Henri Matisse, Jean observes the ebb and flow of museum guests as they take in the works of his father and other masters like Renoir, Picasso, and Modigliani. But his world takes a mesmerizing turn when Claire, a new museum employee, enters his life.

Night after night, Claire moves through the gallery where Jean's painting hangs, mopping the floors, talking softly to herself to stem her loneliness, and gazing admiringly at the masterpieces above. The alluring man in the corner of the Matisse—is he watching her? Why does she feel a deepening pull to him, like he can see her truest self, her most profound secrets? Did he just move?

In an extraordinary twist of fate, Claire discovers she can step through the frame of Jean's painting and into a bygone era, a lush, verdant snapshot of family life in France in the throes of the First World War. She and Jean begin a seemingly impossible affair, falling in love against the backdrop of the gallery's other paintings come to life—glittering parties, exhilarating horse races, and windswept beach bluffs—which they can move through together and where Claire is seemingly the only outside visitor, alone in possession of this gift.

But as their happiness is threatened by challenges both inside and outside the museum, Claire and Jean find themselves in a fight to preserve the love they've hardly dared to dream of. Will their extraordinary connection defy the confines of reality, or will the forces conspiring against them shatter their carefully curated happiness?

(Ballantine Books)

I am fascinated by this concept and can’t wait to read this book. Interestingly, there’s another book being published on 10 July about artwork that comes to life in the museum. Is something in the air?