MAY

John Wray, Gone to the Wolves
FSG, May 2

If you’ve ever read up on the early 90s Norwegian black metal scene, you’ll know that shit got extremely real extremely quickly up there. What began as a bit of casual Satanism on the weekends soon became something far darker and more violent than most of the movement’s young participants could ever have imagined. Godsend and The Lost Time Accidents author John Wray’s epic new novel, which explores the heavy metal scenes in LA and Northern Europe in the 80s and 90s from the perspective of three Florida runaways, sounds like the first major literary exploration of this anarchic underground community. I’m excited to take the plunge.  –DS

Hannah Pittard, We Are Too Many: A Memoir [Kind of]
Henry Holt, May 2

The inciting incident of Hannah Pittard’s genre-bending memoir is a doozy: she discovers her husband has been having an affair with her best friend. In We Are Too Many, Pittard blends fact and fiction to approach this betrayal, in a book that’s described as “radically honest to an unthinkable degree.” Here for it!  –ES

Mary Beth Keane, The Half Moon
Scribner, May 2

Malcolm and Jess are married, in love, but are facing a moment of transition: Jess is realizing she can’t have a baby, and wondering how to reconceive her vision of her life, and Malcolm is finally ready to buy the bar he’s worked at for years and begin a new chapter. Both feel suddenly aware of time passing, youth being foregone, and change being inevitable and complicated, but whether they know how to do it together, or need to go it alone, is the point on which The Half Moon turns.  –JH

Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water
Grove Press, May 2

Fourteen years after his hugely popular Cutting for Stone, Verghese’s new novel is an epic story beginning in 1900 and spanning through to the 1970s—it follows three generations of a family that suffers from a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning, and in Kerala, water is everywhere. A story of love, faith, and medicine, set against the historical progress of India.  –EF

Max Porter, Shy
Graywolf Press, May 2

Max Porter’s books are always as much poetry as they are prose; they are tiny works of art that never fail to move and engage. Shy drops us into the mind of a teenage boy who is walking into the night, away from Last Chance, a home for “very disturbed young men,” and toward—what? (Isn’t that always the question.)  –ET

Hopeton Hay, Scott Montgomery, Molly Odintz (eds.), Austin Noir
Akashic Books, May 2

The long-running Akashic noir series gets a standout installment this year, with a new collection focused on stories from one of America’s most fascinating cities, still clinging to its traditional “weirdness” but also reckoning with a massive influx of money and an extreme clash of cultures that in many ways stands in for the broader forces at play in America today. The new collection has stories from Gabino Iglesias, Ace Atkins, and more, and with Molly Odintz [who happens to be an editor at CrimeReads and a contributor to this list], Scott Montgomery, and Hopeton Hays handling editorial duties, the volume takes on a rare sophistication worthy of its subject. This is the collection the city—and noir readers everywhere—deserve.  –DM

Ore Agbaje-Williams, The Three of Us
Putnam, May 16

I love novels that take place in a single day, in a single location; they make me feel like I’m at the theater—an experience I miss deeply. Ore Agbaje-Williams’ debut novel is a biting comedy of manners with a delightfully simple, but incredibly fertile, premise: What if the two most important people in your life hated each other with a passion? The long-simmering tensions between a husband, his wife, and her best friend finally come to a head when the husband returns home early from work and interrupts what was supposed to be a lazy afternoon between BFFs. Over three acts, as the thin walls of tact and civility begin to erode, all manner of scabrously hilarious confessions and accusations burst through. Hook it to my veins.  –DS

R.F. Kuang, Yellowface
William Morrow, May 16

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I’ve been enjoying the recent crop of novels exploring the anxieties of authorship—Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot, Andrew Lipstein’s Last Resort, and Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose being a few examples—so I’m excited to check out R.F. Kuang’s debut, which goes a step further to explore cultural appropriation. Here’s the gist: June Hayward and Athena Liu are both on the author track, but only Liu is seeing success. When she dies in a freak accident, June steals her just-finished manuscript, about the efforts of Chinese laborers during WWI, and passes it off as her own—under the guise of “Juniper Song” and an ethnically ambiguous author photo. Yikes! (I wonder if these white guys will take notice?)  –ES

Jonathan Eig, King: A Life
FSG, May 16

Bestselling author and former Wall Street Journal senior writer Jonathan Eig’s new biography of Martin Luther King Jr. is the first to appear in decades, and also the first to incorporate recently declassified FBI files on the civil rights icon. The publisher describes it as a “landmark biography” that “gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, a perplexing husband and father, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.”  –ET

Jenny Fran Davis, Dykette
Henry Holt, May 16

Honestly . . . this cover alone. But as a bonus, this is a book about three queer couples who spend ten days together in an upstate country house, where things get messy, embarrassing, hilarious, and yes, sexy. Melissa Febos called it “a portrait of a certain corner of queer culture that is part satire, part ode, and full of delightful cringe,” which seems like something we could all use in 2023.  –ET

Samantha Irby, Quietly Hostile
Vintage Anchor, May 16

Samantha Irby is the most reliably hilarious essayists working now, so any time she publishes a new collection, it’s cause for celebration. Quietly Hostile details her new “bourgeois life of a Hallmark Channel dream” living in a Blue town in the middle of a Red state with her wife, complete with bad friend dates, nightmarishly slapstick Hollywood meetings, and the inevitable bodily breakdowns that accompany middle age. I look forward to laughing—helplessly, breathlessly—at all of it.  –JG

Emma Cline, The Guest
Random House, May 16

Emma Cline’s second novel is tense and restrained, as careful and controlled as the woman at its center—before she begins to unravel at the seams. This is a slow-motion car crash of a book, just one person trying as hard as they can to avert an almost inevitable disaster, and no matter how bad things get, it’s extremely hard to look away.  –ET

Javier Marías, tr. Margaret Jull Costa, Tomás Nevinson
Knopf, May 23

The last novel from Spain’s most thrillingly poetic mystery writer, who died this year, follows a man recruited into the British Secret Service, tasked with identifying and neutralizing the woman responsible for a series of terrorist attacks. But as always with Marías, the plot is really beside the point—it’s the way things are told, and the way the author’s brain works, that will keep your nose in the pages.  –ET

Ivy Pochoda, Sing Her Down
MCD, May 23

Ivy Pochoda is one of the great writers of today, crime or otherwise, although luckily for me, she writes pure noir. Her latest plays with tropes of the western as two former cellmates from an Arizona prison engage in a cat-and-mouse game after both achieve release. I will be spending my holidays reading this amazing new novel so that I can recommend it to you all in far more detail come the new year. You’re welcome, my darlings (although reading this book is truly the opposite of sacrifice).  –MO

Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans
Riverhead, May 23

The latest novel by the author of Real Life and Filthy Animals will hit a lot of writers where they live: finishing out the MFA in Iowa City. It is populated by characters whom Taylor has described as “all on the brink in some crucial way, whether spiritually, psychically, career-wise, or economically,” which . . . will also hit a lot of writers (and readers) where they live.  –ET

Amelia Possanza, Lesbian Love Story
Catapult, May 30

When Possanza moved to Brooklyn and joined the world’s largest LGBTQ swim team, she found herself surrounded by queer stories. Her debut memoir centers around seven lesbian love stories of the twentieth century in an effort to find women who would inspire her both in love and life. A compelling history in praise of the research archive, Possanza asks and attempts to answer, what is lesbian love?   –EF

Megan Abbott, Beware the Woman
Putnam, May 30

Megan Abbott goes Rosemary’s Baby! A pregnant woman and her doting husband head to a family retreat in the woods, ready to relax with the knowledge that her father-in-law is a doctor. But a sudden health scare, and the family’s strict supervision of her activities, make the cottage start to feel more like a prison, and Abbott’s narrator starts to get a bad feeling about her mother-in-law’s early demise. Abbott has already proven that teenage girlhood is Noir AF, so I’m psyched to read her do the same thing for pregnancy.  –MO

Luis Alberto Urrea, Good Night, Irene
Little, Brown, May 30 

The main character in Urrea’s latest novel is based on his own mother, who was one of the “Donut Dollies”—American women sent to Europe during WWII by the American Red Cross to serve coffee and donuts to the homesick troops. A different kind of war story from a celebrated author of both fiction and nonfiction.  –ET