Historical Fiction
The Calamity Club
by Kathryn Stockett
Seventeen years after “The Help,” Stockett is back with another historical saga set in her home state of Mississippi, this time during the Great Depression and focused on two white women: Birdie Calhoun, a 20-something bookkeeper who comes to Oxford to beg her newly married sister for a loan, and Meg Lefleur, an 11-year-old resident at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum. Stockett weaves their plights into a heart-wrenching, often hilarious story of economic hardship, moral posturing and the particular yearnings of childless women and motherless girls.
Spiegel and Grau, May 5
Literary Fiction
John of John
by Douglas Stuart
Stuart, the author of “Shuggie Bain” and “Young Mungo,” returns with a powerful story of two lost men trying to find their way. Cal is a young gay artist who must figure out how to live his life after being summoned to his isolated, conservative Scottish hometown to take care of his sick grandmother. In the meantime, Cal’s father, John, is contending with devastating secrets of his own.
Grove, May 5
Contemporary Romance
Our Perfect Storm
by Carley Fortune
In this “Little Women”-coded slow burn romance, Frankie, a chef who was recently left at the altar, is strong-armed into going on her prepaid honeymoon by George, her childhood neighbor and semi-estranged best friend. A reporter, George has a well-researched plan to help Frankie process her heartbreak. But once the two are alone in the lushly romantic setting of Tofino, Canada, they must face the feelings they’ve long tried to avoid.
Berkley, May 5
Literary Fiction
The Hill
by Harriet Clark
Eight-year-old Suzanna shuttles between two worlds: the hilltop prison where her mother, a former radical, is serving a life sentence for her role in a bank robbery gone awry, and the New York City apartment where her imperious grandmother, herself a former Communist activist, is raising her. This debut novel, inspired in part by Clark’s own experiences as the daughter of a member of the Weather Underground, offers an acutely wrought portrait of a child caught between divided loyalties and loves.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May 5
Literary Fiction
The Things We Never Say
by Elizabeth Strout
Strout leaves behind Olive Kitteridge and the Crosby, Me., gang for a brand-new fictional world. Artie Dam is a high school history teacher in coastal Massachusetts — long married, approaching his 60s and depressed. His suicidal ideation is interrupted first by a freak accident and then by a family revelation that upends his understanding of the world, and of himself.
Random House, May 5
Folk Horror
One Leg on Earth
by ’Pemi Aguda
Aguda’s debut, the 2024 story collection “Ghostroots,” was a National Book Award finalist. Now she’s back with her first novel. The book follows Yosoye, a recent college graduate who moves to Lagos, Nigeria, to work on what is supposed to be a utopian housing development. Shortly after she arrives, however, she learns of what seems to be a curse: Pregnant women have been drowning themselves across the city. When Yosoye becomes pregnant herself, her idealistic move starts to seem more like a nightmare.
Norton, May 5
Thriller
Five
by Ilona Bannister
It is 7:01 a.m., and five people are on the platform of a suburban train station, waiting for the 7:06 a.m. train to London. By the time it arrives, as Bannister reveals in the opening line of her provocative new thriller, one of them will be dead. Who will it be?
Crown, May 5
Memoir
True Crime
by Patricia Cornwell
“I can’t imagine writing my memoirs anytime soon,” the best-selling author of the Scarpetta novels told The New York Times in 2013. “I will want my story told with glaring, unflinching honesty.” Readers can decide for themselves how well she eventually did in this account, which recalls Cornwell’s troubled childhood, early career as a forensics expert and entanglement in a murder-for-hire plot involving a former F.B.I. agent.
Grand Central, May 5
True Crime
The Family Man
by James Lasdun
At this point, many Americans know the sordid saga of Alex Murdaugh, the high-flying South Carolina lawyer convicted of the murders of his wife, Maggie, and son Paul, along with a host of financial crimes. But Lasdun, a poet and novelist who covered the case for The New Yorker, finds fresh ground. Emphasizing the mystifying nature of Murdaugh’s acts — “even the most bitter witnesses against him testified that he was a loving husband and doting father” — he brings literary polish to a quest to understand the inexplicable.
Norton, May 5
Memoir
Backtalker
by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
In this candid memoir, one of the chief architects of critical race theory charts her path from 1960s Canton, Ohio, to the halls of Columbia law school. She shows how childhood trauma, an abusive college boyfriend and some fickle comrades who abandoned her when she needed them most helped her hone some of the biggest ideas about race and gender in American life.
Simon & Schuster, May 5
Pop Culture
Dekonstructing the Kardashians
by MJ Corey
In this examination of arguably the first family of our all-media age, Corey, the social media creator behind the popular Kardashian Kolloquium, brings a combination of social chronicle and cultural critique. From old Hollywood to MAGA, Corey looks at the world that gave us the Kardashians — and how they have, for good or ill, shaped us in turn.
Pantheon, May 5
Dystopian Romance
Seek the Traitor’s Son
by Veronica Roth
Elegy has a good thing going: a job on a military search and rescue team, a husband she loves, minimal contact with her powerful mother. But her life is turned upside down when a consortium of prophets tell her she is destined to lead her nation into battle against the Talusar empire and their infamous general, Rava. And though she’s not told who will win the matchup, she is tipped off that an impending romance could determine her fate.
Tor, May 12
Arthurian Fantasy
The Lost Book of Lancelot
by John Glynn
This queer Arthurian epic follows Lancelot from his childhood, raised as an orphan on the Isle of Women, to his place at the Round Table. Along the way he is dogged by prophecy and struggles to balance his allegiances to his king and to Galehaut, his childhood training mate and the love of his life.
Grand Central, May 12
Historical Fantasy
The Tapestry of Fate
by Shannon Chakraborty
The sequel to “The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi” finds the swashbuckling pirate queen balancing single motherhood with treasure hunting, tracking down esoteric artifacts for a council of immortals. But when Raksh, the devilish spirit who happens to be her new husband, angers the council, they retaliate by sending Amina to an enchanted island for her most dangerous mission yet.
Harper Voyager, May 12
History
Athens and Sparta
by Adrian Goldsworthy
Alternately allies and rivals, Athens and Sparta were the two most powerful city-states in classical Greece. They were also, Goldsworthy writes, “polar opposites in culture and ideology”: the first a radical, maritime democracy; the second a rigid, militaristic society. Packed with intrigue and the politics of empire, revolution and war, this accessible history of a tangled relationship between nations might strike some readers, the author warns, as “uncomfortably relevant.”
Basic Books, May 12
Epic Fantasy
Canon
by Paige Lewis
Lewis’s madcap epic follows two hapless people on a divine mission. Yara is a nonbinary artist with O.C.D. who one day receives a message from God: Embark on a quest and defeat an entity named Dominic. That happens to be the same task that Adrena, a prophet eager to win God’s favor, has taken upon herself to complete. The result is a fun, increasingly antic adventure story.
Viking, May 19
Investigative Reporting
How to Rule the World
by Theo Baker
Baker arrived at Stanford in 2022 as a bright-eyed freshman wanting to climb the Silicon Valley ladder. He finished that year having taken down the university president, and become jaded by a system where faux idealism often obscures corruption and greed. His book is a scorching portrait of a university infiltrated by venture capital and tech firms and a dweebocracy that “sets the agenda for the planet.”
Penguin Press, May 19
Family History
Keeper of My Kin
by Ada Ferrer
The Cuban Revolution severed Ferrer’s family, sending her, then an infant, fleeing to New York with her mother, and leaving her 9-year-old half brother behind. The anguish and aftershocks of separation reverberate through this memoir as Ferrer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, sifts through personal letters and Cuban archives to tell the inextricably entwined stories of family and country.
Scribner, May 19
Tech Biography
Steve Jobs in Exile
by Geoffrey Cain
In September 1985, Apple fired Steve Jobs as chief executive. In September 1997, he got the job back, on an interim basis and then permanently, going on to lead the company to a remarkable comeback. Many accounts refer to his “wilderness years” in between, but this book, by a veteran technology writer, argues that they helped Jobs morph from a cocky visionary into a mature, empathetic and strategic leader.
Portfolio, May 19
Family Memoir
Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young
by Zayd Ayers Dohrn
At 3, Dohrn knew how to spot an undercover cop and how to lose a tail, crucial skills for a kid living on the run — the son of two leaders of the militant leftist group the Weather Underground. In this intimate memoir, he uses interviews, letters, diaries and F.B.I. records to reconstruct his parents’ lives in the 1960s and ’70s, probing the beliefs that drove them to embrace violence and the emotional fallout for their family.
Norton, May 19
Cultural Criticism
The Danger to Be Sane
by Rosa Montero; translated by Lindsey Ford
In this moving and idiosyncratic book, the Spanish writer Montero explores the links between art and mental stability. Combining literary theory, history and first-person essay, Montero asks why so many artists aren’t “normal” — and whether that’s a bad thing.
Europa, May 19
Ancient History
Talking Classics
by Mary Beard
Few scholars make ancient Greece and Rome come alive as vividly — or seem as relatable — as Beard, the popular British classicist. Her latest book is a kaleidoscopic survey of some of the ancient people and objects, both awe-inducing and ordinary, that have delighted and intrigued her over her life and career — starting with a formative encounter at age 5 with a 4,000-year-old bread roll at the British Museum.
University of Chicago Press, May 21
Science Fiction
Babylon, South Dakota
by Tom Lin
In Lin’s new novel, Saul and Mei Lee arrive in South Dakota from China sometime during the Cold War, with a bit of gold and a dream to homestead their new land. But after the government builds a missile silo on their property, inexplicable and even otherworldly events start to occur. Is the silo just an unrelated oddity on the farm? Or are there secret forces hidden within?
Little, Brown, May 26
Magical Realism
The Midnight Train
by Matt Haig
The second installment in Haig’s Midnight World series centers on Wilbur, who boards a mystical train that allows him to time travel back to his honeymoon in Venice in an attempt to correct the mistake that lost him the love of his life.
Viking, May 26
Contemporary Romance
Dolly All the Time
by Annabel Monaghan
Between four jobs, a teenage son, a brother with special needs and a dad struggling with debt, Dolly Brick has a lot on her plate — and that was before a fire in her childhood home forced her and her kid to move back to coastal Rhode Island for the summer. When the very handsome, seemingly sane scion of the local founding family offers her a paid gig posing as his girlfriend, it seems too good to be true. But maybe it’s time somebody else took care of Dolly for a change?
Putnam, May 26
Essays
The Land and Its People
by David Sedaris
In his newest collection, Sedaris takes on the indignities and freedoms of aging — from competitive infirmity to care taking to underpants — with his characteristic élan. You’ll find familiar faces and Sedaris’s trademark off-kilter humor, as well as a poignant tenderness.
Little, Brown, May 26
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