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The dog days of summer are upon us, so naturally, we’re reading two novels featuring man’s best friend, set in an 18th-century English village and modern-day Tbilisi.

And if you’re looking for more reads, check out our previous reviews of Maria Reva’s Endling and David Szalay’s Flesh, which were named to the Booker Prize longlist this week.

The Hounding: A Novel

Xenobe Purvis (Henry Holt and Co., 240 pp., $26.99, August 2025)

In 1701, a physician wrote a letter to the editor in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society recounting a rumor that young girls in Oxfordshire had been “seized with frequent barking in the manner of dogs.”

The tale that British author Xenobe Purvis weaves in her debut novel from this single line is just as elusive as the anecdote itself. Told through a rotating cast of locals, The Hounding recounts a summer in the village of Little Nettlebed, whose inhabitants—increasingly agitated by a harsh drought—become convinced that the five unruly daughters in the Mansfield family are turning into dogs.

The Hounding is a paean to girlhood and a consummate summer tale, full of halcyon days in the Mansfield family’s orchard. (Summer, after all, is “the season of strangeness,” one narrator remarks. “It was the heat that did it. It addled people’s minds.”) It follows a storied literary tradition of sisters as an endless source of fascination for the young men next door, from Laurie in Little Women to the anonymous neighbor boys of The Virgin Suicides. One young man, enraptured by the Mansfield girls’ “rich tapestry” of sisterhood, attempts to decode their language: “Early on, he’d tried to make a glossary in his mind; he noted each hair toss, each playful pinch, each sigh. But the list was too long, the meanings too subtle.”

Purvis is attuned above all to the slipperiness of truth and the potential for hearsay to rend apart a community, especially one primed to believe the worst of its outcasts. When the baker’s wife recounts the rumor about the girls, there was “something irresistible in it, like sweet cakes or marchpane.” Even the more sensible villagers, “the ones who urged caution as the story spread, looked within their hearts and found there a dark mistrust of the Mansfields.”

It’s a beguiling tale, if one that occasionally slips into platitude. (The publican’s wife, for instance, bemoans “the great, gruelling trial of being a woman in a world governed by men. How painful it was, and how humiliating.”) And Purvis makes clear from the onset that the locals’ growing ire at the Mansfield girls cannot be divorced from the relentless dry spell in the village and the burdens it places on their livelihoods. In our age of climate catastrophe, The Hounding serves as an unsettling reminder of who is made to pay when “all sorts of ordinary things” go wrong.—Chloe Hadavas

A Dog in Georgia: A Novel

Lauren Grodstein (Algonquin Books, 304 pp., $29, August 2025) 

Tbilisi, Georgia, is not the most obvious getaway destination for an American woman in the throes of a midlife crisis. But it is where the protagonist of Lauren Grodstein’s latest novel, A Dog in Georgia, chooses to escape her uneasy existence in New York.

One morning, 46-year-old Amy Webb wakes to discover texts on her husband’s phone that all but suggest he is cheating on her (again). The revelation comes just as Amy feels especially aimless in her career and family life. Trained as a cook, she married into wealth and hasn’t worked a line job in years. And although she is a dutiful stepmom to her husband’s son, he is now off studying at Cornell University and thriving on his own.

Whenever Amy enters an anxious spiral, she watches animal videos on YouTube. Her “truest companions had been animals,” Grodstein writes—Amy previously worked at shelters—and her Manhattan apartment brims with a “menagerie” of cats and dogs. Amy is obsessed with one particular video of a stray dog in Tbilisi named Angel who “was famous for walking kids across the street to school.” After Angel disappears, Amy decides to fly to Tbilisi and try to find the dog herself.

That is how a well-intentioned American woman with scant international experience is plopped into a geopolitical firestorm that she is entirely unprepared for. Although Tbilisi is home to “forty-six thousand stray dogs,” per Grodstein’s count, Amy discovers that Georgia is facing much more serious problems than a missing pooch. “Georgians hate the Russians … because they’ve been staging this low-key invasion since 2008, not like what they’re doing in Ukraine but still bad,” Amy tells her stepson over the phone. The main suspects in Angel’s disappearance, Amy learns, are “hoodlums, vandals, Russians, Russians.”

Amy’s hunt for Angel occurs in the spring of 2024, as Georgia was embroiled in at times violent protests against a Russian-inspired “foreign agents” law. A Dog in Georgia is part lighthearted animal novel and part post-Soviet politics 101. The narrative is smile-inducing even as it toggles from terriers to tear gas. In addition to dogs—so many dogs—Amy meets a diverse cast of human characters, including “three post-Soviet grandmothers,” a punk teenager, and a Russian draft dodger. The result is a novel that remains deeply funny even as it explores some of the darkest days in recent Caucasus history.

Grodstein rejects the simple binaries that so often define Western writing about the former Soviet Union. Amy has profound reflections on how she, as an American, is perceived abroad. (She is immediately recognized as such because she has “clear skin and beautiful teeth,” a Georgian tells her.)

Amid the protests in Tbilisi, Amy praises U.S. democracy but is ill-prepared to deal with a skeptical Georgian’s line of questioning about the “thing where the person who gets the most votes in the United States doesn’t always win.” When Amy asks a British expat why Russia is hungry for influence in Georgia, he responds forcefully: “Surely you know that no other country in the history of the world has dominated every facet of the global order the way that the United States does today. You are a citizen of the most empire-minded civilization since civilization began.”

Amy also tends to throw money at her problems—and feels a pit in her stomach when a Georgian woman remarks to her that “your child goes to a university that, if I am to believe my eyes, costs more money for one year than I will make in my entire life.” Amy reflects critically on the hegemony of the English language and develops an affection for “beautiful flowery Georgian,” which she finds “lovely, gentle and lilting.” Grodstein includes some (anglicized) Georgian words and phrases throughout the book.

Still, Amy remains a likable—if occasionally naive—character. A Dog in Georgia is proof that a hero’s journey need not be haughty and that a political novel can be whimsical and bubbly. In a book ostensibly about animals, Grodstein instead probes the limits of human compassion. As a young Georgian tells Amy, “It is easier for us to care for dogs than it is to care for one another.”—Allison Meakem

August Releases, in Brief

A multimillion-dollar heist goes awry in former CIA officer Elliot Ackerman’s latest geopolitical thriller, Sheepdogs. The late Fumio Yamamoto’s 2000 feminist classic, The Dilemmas of Working Women, is translated into English by Brian Bergstrom. Sefi Atta’s Indigene captures key moments in the lives of four professional Nigerian women. In Fonseca, Jessica Francis Kane fictionalizes English author Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1952 voyage to Mexico to vie for a distant inheritance. Zhang Yueran’s Women, Seated, translated by Jeremy Tiang, chronicles the crumbling fortunes of an elite Chinese family.

In Nigerian British writer Helen Oyeyemi’s A New New Me, a woman in Prague is split into seven selves. Yiming Ma’s debut novel, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us, envisions a far-off future dominated by China as the world’s sole superpower. A shipwreck unravels into an outlandish mystery on the eve of World War II in Peter Mann’s World Pacific. French art historian Thomas Schlesser’s runaway bestseller, Mona’s Eyes, is translated into English by Hildegarde Serle. And Taiwanese American author Elaine Hsieh Chou’s genre-bending story collection, Where Are You Really From, blends the taboo and the surreal.—CH