As we approach the start of a new month, it’s time to look forward to some exciting new releases. Here is a selection of new books for your reading pleasure coming next month.
Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang
COMING ON MAY 9TH
Athena Liu is a literary darling and June Hayward is literally nobody.
White lies
When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the ambiguous name Juniper Song.
Dark humour
But as evidence threatens June’s stolen success, she will discover exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.
Deadly consequences…
What happens next is entirely everyone else’s fault.
The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman
COMING MAY 9TH
You’d think you would be allowed to relax over Christmas, but not in the world of the Thursday Murder Club.
On Boxing Day, a dangerous package is smuggled across the English coast.
When it goes missing, chaos is unleashed. The body count starts to rise – including someone close to the Thursday Murder Club – as our gang face an impossible search and their most deadly opponents yet.
With the clock ticking down and a killer heading to Cooper’s Chase, has their luck finally run out? And who will be ‘The Last Devil To Die’?
COMING MAY 23RD
Only 656 people in human history have left Earth. In Space: The Human Story, astronaut Tim Peake traces the lives of these remarkable men and women who have forged the way, from Yuri Gagarin to Neil Armstrong, from Valentina Tereshkova to Peggy Whitson.
Full of exclusive new stories, and astonishing detail only an astronaut would know, the book conveys what space exploration is really like: the wondrous view of Earth, the surreal weightlessness, the extraordinary danger, the surprising humdrum, the unexpected humour, the newfound perspective, the years of training, the psychological pressures, the gruelling physical toll, the thrill of launch and the trepidation of re-entry. The book also examines the surprising, shocking and often poignant stories of astronauts back on Earth, whose lives are forever changed as they readjust to terra firma.
Publication of the book comes on the eve of NASA’s plans to return to the moon, fifty years after an astronaut last walked on the lunar surface. In 2024 the Artemis II mission will send four astronauts to orbit the moon. In 2025 Artemis III will send the first woman and the first person of colour to step on the lunar surface. What will separate these upcoming moonwalkers from the legendary Apollo crews? Does it still take a daring-do attitude, super-human fitness, intelligence, plus the ‘Right-stuff’ – a fabled grace under pressure? And how will astronauts travel even further – to Mars and beyond? Space: The Human Story reveals all.
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
COMING ON MAY 16TH
A BOY MEETS A GIRL. THE PAST MEETS THE FUTURE. A FINGER MEETS A TRIGGER. THE BEGINNING MEETS THE END. ENGLAND IS FOREVER. ENGLAND MUST FALL.
In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering ‘expats’ from across history to test the limits of time-travel.
Her role is to work as a ‘bridge’: living with, assisting and monitoring the expat known as ‘1847’ – Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to find himself alive and surrounded by outlandish concepts such as ‘washing machine’, ‘Spotify’ and ‘the collapse of the British Empire’. With an appetite for discovery and a seven-a-day cigarette habit, he soon adjusts; and during a long, sultry summer he and his bridge move from awkwardness to genuine friendship, to something more.
But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures. Can love triumph over the structures and histories that have shaped them? And how do you defy history when history is living in your house?
Table for Two by Amor Towles
COMING ON MAY 16TH
Millions of Amor Towles fans are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter fiction: six stories based in New York City and a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood.
The New York stories, most of which take place around the year 2000, consider the fateful consequences that can spring from brief encounters and the delicate mechanics of compromise that operate at the heart of modern marriages.
In Towles’s novel Rules of Civility, the indomitable Evelyn Ross leaves New York City in September 1938 with the intention of returning home to Indiana. But as her train pulls into Chicago, where her parents are waiting, she instead extends her ticket to Los Angeles. Told from seven points of view, “Eve in Hollywood” describes how Eve crafts a new future for herself—and others—in a noirish tale that takes us through the movie sets, bungalows, and dive bars of Los Angeles.
Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, Table for Two is another glittering addition to Towles’s canon of stylish and transporting fiction.
COMING ON MAY 30TH
Neef and Danny. Danny and Neef. They were inseparable for all those years. Outsiders in their rural Yorkshire town, they clung to an imagined future achieved through Neef’s talent for storytelling and Danny’s for gardening. But as they grew older, their dreams strained against the same forces that held their families hostage: substance abuse, poverty, racism. They began to lose sight of their future and each other.
Now, Neef works in a café in London and calls herself Jennifer. Jennifer is sober and determined to stay anonymous, until Danny’s father shows up looking for his missing son. As the memories she once fled resurface, Neef is forced to face the decisions she’s made and the person she’s become. Heartbreaking and hopeful, Wild Ground is an achingly tender novel of first love and second chances.
COMING ON MAY 23RD
A man with an Irish accent knocks on Eilis Fiorello’s door on Long Island and in that moment everything changes. Eilis and Tony have built a secure, happy life here since leaving Brooklyn – perhaps a little stifled by the in-laws so close, but twenty years married and with two children looking towards a good future.
And yet this stranger will reveal something that will make Eilis question the life she has created. For the first time in years she suddenly feels very far from home and the revelation will see her turn towards Ireland once again. Back to her mother. Back to the town and the people she had chosen to leave behind. Did she make the wrong choice marrying Tony all those years ago? Is it too late now to take a different path?
The sequel to Colm Tóibín’s prize-winning, bestselling novel Brooklyn.