Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and nonfiction, to consider for your May reading list.
Whether it’s first love or obsessive love or family love, May’s new releases have a lot to say about that which makes the world go ’round. However, if you’re disinclined to pick up a love story, there’s also a U.S. history-based memoir, a great beach read set on Cape Cod and the autobiography of a self-titled “feminist punk.” Happy reading!
FICTION
Shanghailanders: A Novel
By Juli Min
Spiegel & Grau: 288 pages, $28
(May 7)
Unspooling backward from an imagined 2040 to 2014, this novel shows a Chinese family coping with 21st-century pressures and pleasures across three continents. The Yangs — father Leo, mother Eko and eldest daughters Yumi and Yoko — will interact with the “baby” of the family, Kiko; a long-suffering nanny, or ayi; and a cab driver, in chapters that spiral back to a denouement as sophisticated and affecting as Leo, “a real Shanghai man.”
Blue Ruin: A Novel
By Hari Kunzru
Knopf: 272 pages, $28
(May 16)
Kunzru’s novel ends a trilogy speaking to current problems of racism, right-wing politics and inequality. Struggling artist Jay is delivering groceries during the global pandemic. Not feeling well, he seeks shelter with an ex-girlfriend. Alice, whose husband was Jay’s art-school frenemy, hides Jay in a barn. But isolation of all kinds, including economic, ups the dramatic ante, and the three “friends” must contend with their choices.
Housemates: A Novel
By Emma Copley Eisenberg
Hogarth: 352 pages, $29
(May 28)
Eisenberg’s fiction debut feels like a swim in a heated pool after a long journey. Bernie and Leah, Philadelphia housemates, embark on a road trip west in order to claim some photography materials from Bernie’s onetime academic mentor. En route, the women meet all manner of characters and discuss all kinds of topics, eventually (some readers will say inevitably) falling in love with each other. They’ll never bore each other, or readers.
Exhibit: A Novel
By R.O. Kwon
Riverhead Books: 224 pages, $28
(May 28)
Kwon, who tackled obsessive faith in her debut, “The Incendiaries,” and obsessive intimacy in the anthology “Kink,” coedited with Garth Greenwell, here explores the landscape of obsessive desire between the married woman Jin Han and the ballet star Lidija Jung. The author elegantly uses Jin’s belief that she is cursed by an unquiet spirit as a means of expressing the torment Jin feels being divided between safety and ecstasy.
The Winner: A Novel
By Teddy Wayne
Harper: 320 pages, $30
(May 28)
The author sees this novel as a departure from his usual work. But readers will see that even if “The Winner” has a more propulsive plot, it ties in with Wayne’s novels “Kapitoil” and “The Great Man Theory” as it also centers on socioeconomics. Conor O’Toole lands a job as a tennis pro in a wealthy community near Cape Cod and thinks he’s living a dream, juggling affairs with two women — until he hits a metaphorical foul shot.
NONFICTION
First Love: Essays on Friendship
By Lilly Dancyger
Dial Press: 224 pages, $28
(May 7)
Dancyger, who has written about women and anger (“Burn It Down”) and her parents’ addiction (“Negative Space”), turns to the friendships that have sustained her. From childhood to adolescence and on to adulthood, the author’s intense bonds with other women, based on commonalities as varied as kinship, substance abuse or caregiving, place these essays integrating personal experience and cultural allusions alongside Leslie Jamison’s work.
Throne of Grace: A Mountain Man, an Epic Adventure, and the Bloody Conquest of the American West
By Bob Drury and Tom Clavin
St. Martin’s Press: 368 pages, $30
(May 7)
Jedediah Smith might be one of the most important, and one of the most overlooked, 19th century explorers in our nation’s history. Authors Clavin and Drury, who last wrote “Blood and Treasure,” about Daniel Boone, are correcting that oversight. Here they use Smith’s own journals, among other resources, to capture the adventures of a man who was the first white settler to see much of the territory between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, as well as parts of Mexico.
The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning
By A.J. Jacobs
Crown: 304 pages, $30
(May 7)
Father of the stunt memoir (“The Know-It-All”) Jacobs examines those we call our Founding Fathers in an endeavor that has the indefatigable author wearing a tricorne hat, battling Redcoat reenactors and delivering quill-written missives to strangers. He challenges assumptions about some truths we have long held to be self-evident. Oh, wait, that’s the Declaration of Independence. Time to read this book!
Love Is a Burning Thing: A Memoir
By Nina St. Pierre
Dutton: 320 pages, $28
(May 7)
Her mother set herself on fire once, then discovered transcendental meditation. As she chased enlightenment, she moved the author and her brother all over California — until setting another fire that would result in tragedy. As St. Pierre faces her parent’s mental illness, she also investigates how and why people who lose their place in society often turn to extremes of spirituality, as well as how deep compassion can help them find real peace.
Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk
By Kathleen Hanna
Ecco: 336 pages, $30
(May 14)
Hanna, the former Bikini Kill frontwoman and co-founder of the Riot Grrrl movement, starts with her difficult childhood and traces its influences into her future actions like “Girls to the Front” and lyrics about gender-based violence. She survived Lyme disease, married the Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz and became a parent. Along the way, her views have changed, but her honest, funny and raw voice has not.
