Stephen King, Yiyun Li, Scandalous academics... 27 new paperbacks out this month.

May is here, and with it comes the promise of warmer and brighter weather, the promise of summer’s suns. And we could certainly use that promise right now in an America and world at large increasingly defined by senseless violence and erasure, a world in which we need things to relight our lanterns—and one of those, of course, is art. With that in mind, I have new books to recommend you check out this May, some comforting, some cathartic, some charting new courses for us to consider voyaging through.

Below, you’ll find twenty-seven new paperbacks in fiction and nonfiction to check out, each out this May. You’ll find work by beloved authors, from Stephen King, Yiyun Li, and Susan Choi to Molly-Jong Fast and Sam Kean, as well as delightful debuts and new work from promising up-and-comers. You’ll find explorations of mother- and fatherhood and parenting in general; scientific musings on what it might have been like to have dined with King Tut; fiction that takes on academic scandals, trans bonding, AI relationships, and the American prison system; and much, much more. If you missed any of these in hardcover, or just have been waiting for that unique pleasure of thumbing through a fresh paperback, you’ll definitely want to look out for these exciting new editions.

Stay safe, as always, and despite the horrors of the present, I hope these bring some moments of comfort, reflection, and calling-to-action.

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Susan Choi, Flashlight
(Picador)

“Choi masterfully delivers a story that feels both deeply personal and profoundly moving. Taking the time to sink into Flashlight’s bold exploration of grief, identity, and survival will absolutely be worth the investment.”
–Allison Fabian Derfner

Emily St. James, Woodworking
(Crooked Media Reads)

“Woodworking is a moving and big-hearted novel about people finding community as they find themselves—a reminder that coming of age can happen at any age. I loved these characters and the connections they formed. This is a tender, funny, page-turning story about trans women finding their way, in a world that needs all the softness and humor it can get.”
–Lydia Kiesling

Stephen King, Never Flinch
(Scribner)

“Breathtaking….King shines when it comes to depicting evil, so it’s no surprise that he’s created two chilling killers… haunting.”
–BookPage

Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow
(Picador)

“Things in Nature Merely Grow is a story of loss that is unlike any other book I’ve read. It’s a work of harsh beauty that exists in a different realm to most grief memoirs. That’s partly because of its startling poise and emotional restraint, and partly because it describes a realm of experience that is exceptionally strange and terrible….It is an unforgettable monument to endurance, one that offers a kind of fierce comfort.”
–Johanna Thomas-Corr

Erika J. Simpson, This Is Your Mother: A Memoir
(Scribner)

“Mother as archive, mother as lesson, mother as love, mother as a set of rules spoken and unspoken—Erika J. Simpson’s singular debut memoir, This Is Your Mother, is a powerful story of how to survive America, and how to survive what our parents teach us about themselves and ourselves, too.”
–Alexander Chee

Amanda Hess, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age
(Vintage)

“The story of a crisis-born odyssey, Second Life charts a new mother’s descent into and re-emergence from the internet’s ‘pregnant underworld’ with clarity, rigor, and tremendous wit. That such a deft a vivisector of our digital age should find herself lost in its churn of data-brokerage, commerce, and myth is a reminder of what we’re all up against, and an engine of Amanda Hess’s bracing and eloquent memoir.”
–Michelle Orange

Darrow Farr, The Bombshell
(Penguin)

“If a book could possess ‘French-Girl Style’—that aspirational Parisian chic the internet tries to trick me into believing can be achieved with bangs or Repetto ballet flats—The Bombshell would have it. Darrow Farr’s debut novel is effortlessly cool: a smart, sophisticated tale of sexual and political awakening over the course of a fateful summer that reads like falling into an Éric Rohmer film.”
–The New York Times Book Review

Tash Aw, The South
(Picador)

“Like Chekhov’s Russia, Aw’s Malaysia is both a universally resonant vision of a timeless and placeless lost world, and a historically precise portrait of a country undergoing rapid modernization….[Aw] emerg[es] as a Proustian chronicler of momentary bodily and mental experience writing on a compressed, exquisite scale…blending the timeless and the historical to reinvent what an epic can be.”
–The Guardian

Colwill Brown, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh
(Holt)

“Following Kel, Shaz and Rach’s lives from childhood to adulthood is a bit like watching King Lear being acted out every day. The stakes are so high, the passions so deep, the triumphs so vivid, but happily, in the face of many missed buses and betrayals, they have each other and another voddy and kebab. We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is one of the most remarkable portraits I’ve ever read of friendship.”
–Margot Livesy

Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir
(Penguin Books)

“Jong-Fast has put to words the tumult of the worst year of her life, captured and harnessed the experience so the rest of us can know that we are not alone. She’s Job with a sense of humor….With propulsive humor and perspective on her annus horribilis, Jong-Fast achieves the memoir’s transformative work of alchemy, arming us all with lines so good you won’t just want to underline them, you will want to cut them out to share.”
–The Washington Post

Besha Rodell, Hunger Like a Thirst: From Food Stamps to Fine Dining, a Restaurant Critic Finds Her Place at the Table
(Celadon Books)

“A meld of autobiography and culinary memoir with meat on its bones….It is Rodell’s candor, her gift for asking so many savory, enlightening questions, that rewards the reader’s palate. Structured like a good meal, or a good review, rendering a superb memoir.”
–Kirkus Reviews

Augustine Sedgewick, Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power
(Scribner)

“[A] winsome and erudite study of patriarchy…Sedgwick teases out the contradictions between patriarchy as a doctrine of benevolent control and its reality as a form of constraint and domination that often breeds resistance. He plays on these ironies in elegant, evocative prose…[A] fresh and insightful meditation on the paternal dilemma.”
–Publishers Weekly

Maria Reva, Endling
(Vintage)

“[A] dazzling debut…Into this brilliant stew of a novel the fearless Reva stirs Ukraine’s ‘romance tour’ industry, feminist activists, a kidnapping caper, the fine science of snail conservation, the eternal mysteries of family dynamics, and Europe’s first major land war since World War II. Only a supremely talented writer could handle material like this, and Reva–who seems incapable of writing a dud sentence–shows she’s more than up to the task. Open this book, fasten your seatbelt, and brace for impact.”
–Ben Fountain

Emily Adrian, Seduction Theory
(Little Brown)

“[A] deliriously smart, funny, sexy, page-turner in which Emily Adrian upcycles the postmodern love triangle plot into a novel of ideas. Her wayward academics raise provocative questions about truth, desire, power, obsession, and what it really means to live a shared life. There are welcome resonances with novels such as Andrew Martin’s Early Work and Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind, with enough Nabokov in the mix to keep you on your toes to the last page, at which point you’ll likely do what I did: let out a shocked and gleeful scream.”
–Justin Taylor

Adelaide Faith, Happiness Forever
(Picador)

“Faith masterfully balances Sylvie’s dialogue-heavy sessions with her counselor with unflinchingly honest descriptions of her inner thoughts and surroundings. Fans of Judith Rossner’s August and Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (2017) will enjoy this slow-paced novel of one woman’s journey to find happiness without asking for permission.”
–Booklist

Kate Summerscale, The Peepshow: The Murders at Rillington Place
(Penguin)

“Kate Summerscale’s multi-layered page-turner The Peepshow, which inverts the classic true crime structure, is masterful. The mystery is not who committed a series of murders in 1950s London but whether there had been a gross miscarriage of justice, as told through one tabloid reporter’s attempt to redeem himself by revealing it. It’s also an unflinching examination of the true crime industry—a look at the boundary between making visible the unseen and the exploitation of tragedy—and no one, not even the reader, escapes complicity.”
–Becky Cooper

Sam Kean, Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Recreating the Sights, Sounds, and Smells of Lost Civilizations
(Little Brown)

“Popular science writer Kean, who most recently delved into the exploits of sinister scientists in The Icepick Surgeon (2021), turns his sharp eye to experimental archaeology in this blend of lively factual chronicles that revive the past and fictional interludes depicting how our ancestors hunted, battled, and lived….Kean makes a powerful case for how vital the experimental archaeologists’ work is in giving us a better understanding of the past.”
–Booklist

Rachel Cockerell, Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land
(FSG)

“Melting Point teleports like a literary Tardis, shifting seamlessly between late nineteenth-century Mitteleuropa, the tree-lined boulevards of Galveston a decade later, the Lower East Side of New York, [and] wartime London. An ambitious and high-risk venture…yet Cockerell pulls it off with verve.”
–Adam LeBor

Isabel Allende, My Name Is Emilia del Valle
(Ballantine)

“A deeply researched historical adventure, excavating both romantic and journalistic exploits with verve and passion….The upheaval that Emilia del Valle recounts in 1891 is our clarion call in 2025.”
–The Washington Post

Fred Lunzer, Sike
(Celadon Books)

“Part love story, Part A.I. story, Fred Lunzer’s Sike is that rare thing, a beautifully written novel that’s both ingenious and ingenuous. It’s of the moment, certainly, but for all its knowledge and knowingness—about tech and philosophy and bar culture and rap lyrics—it takes its polyglot, globetrotting characters on the most old-fashioned journey of all: a trip straight to the heart. I’ve never read anything quite like it.”
–Joshua Henkin

Wally Lamb, The River Is Waiting
(Scribner)

“Lamb sheds light on the inhumanity and cruelty of the American prison system, while also offering glimmers of hope and friendship… There are no simple resolutions in this gripping drama, and Lamb offers plenty to ponder about guilt, innocence, rehabilitation, and forgiveness.”
–Booklist

River Selby, Hotshot: A Life on Fire
(Grove Press)

“What a wonderful, compassionate, sharply observed, beautifully researched, open-hearted book. Selby has lived a big, courageous life, and that largesse is evident on every page, in the form of the rigor and curiosity of the narrative voice. Ostensibly about fire-fighting, Hotshot turns out to be a beautiful reflection on justice, the environment, the self, and much more.”
–George Saunders

Paul Elie, The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s
(Picador)

“The Last Supper is a brilliant and daring work of history, one that shows how sex, art, and faith merged to produce not just the crazy 1980s but also the crazy world we inhabit today. Paul Elie follows an unforgettable cast of characters—from Andy Warhol to Madonna to Toni Morrison—out to shake up the world, in a book that’s equally smart and entertaining.”
–Jonathan Eig

Sarah Allaback, Monique F. Parsons, Green Gold: The Avocado’s Remarkable Journey from Humble Superfood to Toast of a Nation
(Counterpoint)

“Those looking for a fact-laden ride through the avocado’s nomenclature and geographical history will be delighted by this work….Readers interested in this type of agricultural history will surely dog-ear pages of this biography of one of the most ubiquitous fruits consumed in the country today.”
–Booklist

Rita Halasz, Deep Breath
(Catapult)

“Rita Halász is the Elena Ferrante of Budapest, with a heartbreaking humor entirely her own. I loved this novel.”
–Jessi Jezewska Stevens

Sara Hamdan, What Will People Think?
(Holt)

“A beautiful reminder that life is short and to live it on your own terms; preferably laughing. Sara Hamdan takes us into the contemporary comedy scene of New York, and back through the lemon trees of 1940s Palestine in a story that is heart-warming, life-affirming and very hard to put down.”
–Eliza Moss

K.A. Merson, The Language of the Birds
(Ballantine Books)

“A mind-bending dive into the power of the puzzle….Sweeping across the American West, the story takes in ancient mythologies, classic literature, and sinister conspiracy theories to weave its own shade of magic….A mystery, crime, adventure, and coming-of-age tale all wrapped up in a treasure of a book.”
–Janice Hallett