27 Books We Can’t Wait to Read: May 2025
Fiction
The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei — May 6 (Doubleday)
“Jemimah Wei’s debut The Original Daughter goes for all the big stuff: ambition, time, family, forgiveness, constructing the self. Thrilling, to find a new author with an appetite for the whole spectrum of living, and the skill to get it down true. A contract of sisterhood is signed, then life, then ambition, then disappointment and heartbreak and and and. Wei’s prose is delicious, propulsively hurdling us through the lives of Gen and Arin, who will live in my marrow forever. The Original Daughter is so much the real deal.” — Kaveh Akbar, bestselling author of the National Book Award nominee Martyr!
milktooth by Jaime Burnet — May 6 (Vagrent Press)
Sorcha is over the hook-ups and gay haunts of her twenties. At thirty-one what she wants, more than anything, is to have a baby. Then she meets Chris—with her buttoned-up plaid, ’90s heartthrob hair, and grand romantic gestures—and things get serious. Fast. Though Sorcha’s friends find her new partner problematic, Sorcha has an explanation for everything. But when Sorcha becomes pregnant and Chris’s abuse escalates, Sorcha realizes she must escape the life they’ve built together, just as she escaped her own stifling family years before. When Sorcha’s estranged Aunt Agnes, a retired midwife, messages Sorcha out of the blue, her bothy in the Scottish Highlands seems the perfect place to hide. Exploring the clandestinity of queer abuse, the fierceness of friendship, and the magic of found family, milktooth is a bold, inventive, lyrical and darkly funny story about finding the strength to cut away what’s harmed you and create something entirely new.
Gulf by Mo Ogrodnik — May 6 (S&S/Summit Books)
“Gulf is instantly gripping: a hurtling, sensory plunge into the lives of women in crisis whose worlds come to overlap in unexpected ways. Mo Ogrodnik is a gifted, arresting newcomer to the literary landscape.” — Jennifer Egan, author of The Candy House
Select Screen by Abigail Stewart — May 6 (Whiskey Tit)
Streamers, TikTokkers, eSports stars, and their legions of parasocially engaged fans star in Select Screen, the new novel from Abigail Stewart spilling the unspoken secrets of today’s internet culture.
Are You Happy? by Lori Ostlund — May 6 (Astra House)
“Are You Happy? is bright, swift, and heartbreakingly direct in its portrayal of how home can sometimes leave a lingering bruise. Seriously, how does she do it?! Lori Ostlund is funny and wry; her work cuts to the quick. Every story I read made me feel deeply known. I’ve long been a fan of hers and this book does not disappoint. A short story collection that is truly all hits, no misses.” — Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth and Mostly Dead Things
The Words of Dr. L & Other Stories by Karen E. Bender — May 6 (Counterpoint)
“Karen Bender’s stories deftly explore our current American moment, a troubling one that verges on insanity. Bender is concerned with love, family, and motherhood, and in these beautifully written stories she uses words to describe thoughts and feelings that I’ve never seen described before. A great writer helps us understand who we are, and what it means to be human.” — Matthew Klam, author of Who is Rich?
Sympathy for Wild Girls by Demree McGhee — May 6 (Feminist Press)
“I loved this book! Demree McGhee writes with dazzling intelligence, tipping gracefully between the surreal and the real in a way that’s constantly upping its own ante. These stories build to a powerful crescendo, and they left me in a state of awe.” — Jenny Fran Davis, author of Dykette
A Sharp Endless Need by Marisa Crane — May 13 (The Dial Press)
“A Sharp Endless Need is the rare sports novel that both the most rabid fan and someone who’s never seen a game will love. Crane has crafted a novel filled with sweat and longing, striking a balance between tenderness, ecstasy, and wry humor that leaves no corner of the heart unexplored.” — Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl
Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan — May 13 (Pantheon)
“What book is like this? What post-apocalyptic vision dares be so gorgeous, lush, struck with humor and light, so warm and caring and care-taking? Luminous, wise, Susanna Kwan’s story of a flooded future San Francisco expands the known world, making room within its unbearable devastation for beauty, compassion, and love. This book is a labor undertaken by an imagination able to mourn and celebrate in the same breath. An argument runs through it, like a bright live wire, that to attend to loss—to hold the dying world's hand and say, ‘I’m here’—is a way to be fully alive. And so it is an argument for life.” — Meng Jin, author of Little Gods
We, the Casertas by Aurora Venturini (translated by Kit Maude) — May 13 (Catapult)
In deliciously ironic, and at times breathtakingly poetic prose, We, the Casertas is the story of Chela, the first-born child to a wealthy family in Buenos Aires. Threatened by her extraordinary intellect, her parents immediately take against her, instead lavishing attention on her beautiful sister. Chela is soon exiled to the attic and allowed to run wild, her only friend a lame owl with whom she explores the countryside. We, the Casertas is a wild, unpredictable novel about the horrors of family life and the desperate loneliness of womanhood in the mid-century.
Transplants by Daniel Tam-Claiborne — May 13 (Regalo Press)
“A delicately braided story of two women and their searches for belonging within and across cultures, borders, and languages. Transplants is that rare debut: intricate, ambitious, and beautifully realized.” — Dominic Smith, author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos and Return to Valetto
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong — May 13 (Penguin Press)
“The Emperor of Gladness is a poetic, dramatic and vivid story. Epic in its sweep, the novel also handles intimacy and love with delicacy and deep originality. Hai and Grazina are taken from the margins of American life by Ocean Vuong and, by dint of great sympathy and imaginative genius, placed at the very center of our world.” — Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island and Brooklyn
State Champ by Hilary Plum — May 13 (Bloomsbury Publishing)
“Where’s the red line, sheeple? State Champ knows. A defiant punk voice, fucked up and bristling from defeats, growls her barbed protest song, so vivid and direct you can’t tell when its ragged refusals transform into the limpid melodic rill of exit music and fight song. Hilary Plum has composed an athletic, poised, and complex fury, knowing of the body and leavened with foils, to remind us how to take a stand.” — Eugene Lim, author of Search History
Gingko Season by Naomi Xu Elegant — May 20 (W. W. Norton & Company)
After suffering her first big heartbreak two years earlier, Penelope Lin has built a quiet life with no romantic entanglements. She spends her days cataloging a museum’s vast collection of Qing Dynasty bound-foot shoes and in the comfortable company of close friends. One day, she happens to meet Hoang, who confesses to releasing mice from the cancer research lab where he works. Hoang’s openness catches Penelope off guard; from then on, she finds her carefully constructed life slowly start to unravel. Told in Penelope’s witty, vulnerable, and thoroughly endearing voice, Gingko Season captures three seasons of reawakening, challenges, and transformation.
The Stalker by Paula Bomer — May 27 (Soho Press)
“Rarely does a book come along that rearranges perception and sings with psychological acuity. The Stalker is an impeccable character study of the least self-aware man on earth. How often do we get to see a monster from his own vantage? With Paula Bomer in charge, a stylist of the highest order, I wanted to follow him anywhere. This novel is heart-pounding, endlessly entertaining, and in complete touch with humanity. Risky and brilliant, dark as hell and bitingly comic as only the masters can pull off. Wholly satisfying to the final glorious moment.” — Chelsea Bieker, author of Madwoman and Godshot
Summerhouse by Yigit Karaahmet (translated by Nicholas Glastonbury) — May 27 (Soho Crime)
“A gorgeous, thrilling tale of gay lovers celebrating their fortieth anniversary on an idyllic island when a handsome teenager moves next door. Beauty abounds in the world and prose, arresting the characters, and this reader too, as the forces of homophobia, desire, and jealousy conspire to alter our lives forever. Summerhouse is an unforgettable novel about the explosive nature of lust in a violent society.” — Kyle Dillon Hertz, author of The Lookback Window
Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan — May 27 (The Dial Press)
“A charming, big-hearted love story unlike any I’ve read before . . . Dinan forces us to ask ourselves: Are we more than the worst thing we’ve ever done? An absolute knockout.” ― Marisa Crane, author of A Sharp Endless Need
Non-Fiction & Poetry
Second Life, Having a Child in the Digital Age by Amanda Hess — May 6 (Doubleday)
“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, author of Pure Flame
What My Father and I Don’t Talk About, Sixteen Writers Break the Silence Edited By Michele Filgate — May 6 (Simon & Schuster)
“This stunning collection gathers so many kinds of fathers; fathers selling cars, cutting hair, peeling apples, salting slugs, wearing dresses, arriving too late, fathers who were violent in their primes, cowed by end of life. I noted a few showing up to games under complicated circumstances, two who’d given up painting, and one surprising daddy. These essays are hilarious, comforting, confounding and devastating. If fathers point out the world to their kids, this book of kids points back in remarkable, beautiful ways.” — Marie-Helene Bertino, author of Beautyland
Late to the Search Party by Steven Espada Dawson — May 6 (Scribner)
“How do you carry your family with you when you’re the only one who has survived the furies of life? That impossible question drives this debut poetry collection. In these exquisitely crafted elegies, Steven Espada Dawson writes of how addiction and absence and illness and grief can become a new center of gravity. The poems in Late to the Search Party stitch together the memories of a family torn apart by circumstance, with threads of beauty, joy, rage and undying love.” — Roxane Gay, New York Times best-selling author of Bad Feminist
This Is Your Mother, A Memoir by Erika J. Simpson — May 6 (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, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
The Wanderer’s Curse, A Memoir by Jennifer Hope Choi — May 6 (W. W. Norton & Company)
“The Wanderer’s Curse is a spirited and searching memoir that not only transported me through time and space, but delighted me with unexpected tangents along the way. Jennifer Hope Choi has a voice all her own, and writes with a singular blend of wholeheartedness and perfect comedic timing about family, home, Korean Americanness, and so much more. Her ‘curse’ is the reader’s blessing.” — Rachel Khong, New York Times best-selling author of Real Americans
World Without End, Essays on Apocalypse and After by Martha Park — May 6 (Hub City Press)
“In these penetrating and beautifully wrought essays, Martha Park employs her many identities—artist, naturalist, southerner, mother, preacher’s daughter astray—to investigate profound questions about faith and the fate of our planet. It is rare to find a voice like this: at once vulnerable and rigorous, skeptical and compassionate, commanding and humble in the presence of mystery. It is rarer still when that voice—its questions and ideas—are so vividly embodied, so intimately involved with the sensory world. I have been raving about this book since I finished reading its exquisite and devastating final lines. As the title suggests, I suspect World Without End will endure long past the season of its birth, moving and engaging readers for years to come.” — Lisa Wells, author of Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World
So Many Stars, An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color by Caro De Robertis — May 13 (Algonquin Books)
“So Many Stars is a beautiful constellation of stories, woven together to show the breadth of experiences that make up the lives of Trans, Genderqueer, Nonbinary, and Two-Spirit people of color. This book is a gift – a powerful and necessary addition to the Queer canon. An intimate and multilayered accounting of personal and collective grief, family, love, art, and the complexities, joys, and heartbreaks of the past and present, these stories also consider the future of Queer liberation.” — Jaquira Díaz, author of Ordinary Girls
Aggregated Discontent, Confessions of the Last Normal Woman by Harron Walker — May 20 (Random House)
“Aggregated Discontent is a brilliant blend of memoir, reporting, and cultural criticism: a book for anyone interested in womanhood, gender, and millennial angst, as well as the personal and systemic ways that the health-care system fucks over trans people.” — Lamya H, author of Hijab Butch Blues
Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li — May 20 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.” There is no good way to say this—because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a timeline.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: “doing the things that work,” including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death. This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving or mourning. Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit.
Maybe This Will Save Me, A Memoir of Art, Addiction and Transformation by Tommy Dorfman — May 27 (Hanover Square Press)
“In Tommy Dorfman’s hands, evolution is nonlinear and kaleidoscopic: in some ways fated from the beginning, in others not guaranteed but slowly earned. Her memoir resists simplicity at every turn. It might have been easier to write as a past tense proclamation, but Dorfman creates from the present, the messy middle, which is all we have. Maybe This Will Save Me is at once a love letter to the person she’s been all along and to the mysterious, unending process of becoming.” — Chloe Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists
