Summer blockbuster season has begun — not just on the big screen but bookshelves, as well. Traditionally, May is a banner month in the publishing industry, and this year's no different: The calendar positively brims with books worth consuming, enough to last you the rest of the year if you really put your mind to reading all of them.
Which, of course, puts this humble preview series in a tight spot. There's simply no way to include every notable book coming our way, at least, not without turning this thing into a tome of Tolstoyan proportions. All this to say, below, you will not find the new books expected from Elizabeth Strout, Ayelet Waldman, Walter Mosley, Jodie Graham and plenty of other worthy wish list additions it was painful to leave off.
The deserving dozen that did make the cut, listed below, boast a slew of fresh talents, long-awaited returns and at least a few books you'll surely see again on lots of year-end favorite lists come December.
John of John, by Douglas Stuart (May 5)
When Stuart won the Booker Prize for Shuggie Bain, the jury chair called his debut novel "a moving, immersive and nuanced portrait of a tight-knit social world, its people and its values." That's an apt description of his third novel too — only, here that world is found on Scotland's Western Isles. That's where weaver John Macleod tends his croft, guards his secrets and maintains an uneasy relationship with his young adult son, John-Callum (better known as Cal), newly returned from the mainland. Stuart renders father and son — their whole community on the far side of nowhere — with the acuity of an anthropologist and the bittersweet sympathy we reserve for our dearest, most confounding loved ones.
One Leg on Earth, by 'Pemi Aguda (May 5)
Dread rises like a tide in Aguda's Lagos. A National Book Award finalist for her 2024 collection, Ghostroots, the Nigerian-born author returns to the big city for her first go at full-length fiction. Lagos thrums with the menace of a sharp-toothed grin, gaping as wide as the city's appalling income gap. Newly arrived is wide-eyed Yosoye, eager to molt her provincial youth and embrace her plum assignment helping plan a luxe development on dredged land just off shore. But beneath this dream gig lurks a nightmare: Pregnant women are drowning themselves in epidemic numbers, and Yosoye sways uneasily on the cusp of understanding why. Slosh.
Backtalker: An American Memoir, by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (May 5)
Even if you don't recognize her name, it's likely you've already encountered Crenshaw's ideas. The law professor and public intellectual coined the concepts of intersectionality and critical race theory, both of which lately have become outsize bywords on classroom syllabi, newspaper opinion pages and statehouses across the country. In this memoir, though, Crenshaw eschews the scholarly register for a more intimate approach, viewing the country and the convoluted discourse that defines it through the arc of her own personal story.
Offseason, by Avigayl Sharp (May 5)
Sharp's premise could really go any number of ways: A young woman, life is in disarray, takes a job at an all-girls school in an empty seasonal tourist town. That setup could start the logline to a horror-comedy, a mumblecore portrait of the Millennial in Winter, or a riff on the trope of the unlikely teacher doing anything it takes to get through to these kids, darn it! In truth, it's none of these things. Or all of them, actually, but only if you can picture it interpreted by a conscientious extraterrestrial — at once intensely observant and ineffably askew. It's a funny, sad, discomfiting, unabashedly weird book that I inhaled and haven't managed to stop thinking about yet.
The Calamity Club, by Kathryn Stockett (May 5)
Back in 2009, Stockett told NPR's All Things Considered one big difference between first and second novels: "When you're writing your second book, you can't help but think how it's going to make the readers feel." At the time, she was 10 months removed from the publication of her first novel, The Help, ultimately sold millions of copies, got a Hollywood adaptation, prompted a lawsuit (later dismissed) and continues to elicit plenty of contentious discourse. No wonder Stockett couldn't help but think how her next book was going to make readers feel. Seventeen years later, that novel arrives at last, with a new story of unlikely friends and social rebels in segregated Mississippi, this time during the Great Depression.
Radiant Star, by Ann Leckie (May 12)
Welcome back to the intergalactic Radch Empire, best recognized by its warships that ventriloquize their artificial intelligence through the zombified bodies of its slaves/crew members. An alarming concept, perhaps, for readers unfamiliar with Leckie's Ancillary Justice trilogy, which won just about every major award in science-fiction. But don't fret if you don't know the difference between the word "Radchaai" and an especially lusty sneeze: While set in that universe, the book is intended as a self-contained one-off. So even newbies can enjoy this lightfooted tale of religious intrigue and Terry Pratchett-esque misadventure, beneath the surface of a sunless planet way out in the empire's boonies.
Glyph, by Ali Smith (May 19)
Last year, when Smith told NPR's Scott Simon that "as human beings, we need dimension," the Scottish author meant it as a metaphor: She was illustrating the dehumanizing effects of authoritarianism in her previous novel, Gliff (not a typo). It's grimly fitting that her homophonically titled followup takes that idea rather literally. The novel opens with a pair of stories passed down by elderly World War II survivors, one of whom describes the corpse of a soldier flattened — deprived of dimension — by his own armored convoy. The ghastly story comes to haunt the pair of sisters who heard it, in this obliquely linked meditation on family, imagination and the unshakable taint of war.
Canon, by Paige Lewis (May 19)
Strap in, folks. Spelled as it is, the title refers to the ways we delineate religious truth and artistic worth — but boy, there are times when reading this book feels like being shot out of a cannon, too. Lewis' debut novel thrusts its pair of leads into heroic, perhaps even divinely ordained heroic arcs that seem rather ill-suited to them. Not that that will stop them, in this clash of good and evil as epic as it is silly.
Palaces of the Crow, by Ray Nayler (May 19)
It shouldn't surprise anyone that the crows come out looking better than their human counterparts in Nayler's latest work of speculative fiction. Consider its setting: the woods of what today is Lithuania but was, during World War II, a no-man's-land over which Nazi and Soviet soldiers washed back and forth like a brutalizing tide. That's where four young teens struggle to survive scenes of our species at its absolute worst — rapacious, unscrupulous, murderous. Make no mistake, things get bleak. But there's hope here too, in a different kind of murder: the vast flock of hyperintelligent corvids on whom the motley group comes to depend.
All Them Dogs, by Djamel White (May 19)
It wasn't exactly prudent for Tony Ward to come home. The narrator of White's debut novel had been lying low in England after a spasm of gangland violence claimed several lives, including his beloved mentor. But then, ol' Wardy isn't exactly what you'd call prudent. Insecure is more like it – and lonely, reckless and riven by contradicting desires. The young enforcer makes for a volatile but compelling vessel for this taut Dublin-based crime drama, in which his return sets in motion a fast-paced tale of underworld revenge and star-crossed love that never waits for readers to catch their breath.
The Land and Its People: Essays, by David Sedaris (May 26)
Do NPR listeners really need an introduction to Sedaris? The prolific essayist is practically a public radio institution at this point, with his frequent appearances on Fresh Air and his "Santaland Diaries" becoming an annual holiday tradition on Morning Edition. At this point, you either love the humorist or can't stand his style — and let's be frank, the correct choice here is love. His latest collection is replete with the wry wit, cringey awkwardness and earnest — but flawed — stabs at self-improvement.
The Midnight Train, by Matt Haig (May 26)
The engine of Haig's fiction is possibility – the promise held out by other places, other times, other lives, if only there were a way to access them. Often, his characters do find a way, whether through a surprise bequest or a condition that grants near-immortality or, as in his most famous novel, a vast otherworldly library. In his follow-up to The Midnight Library, the means of accessing those possibilities is literally an engine: a train that takes its lead, Wilbur, on a journey across time and space to relive some of the defining moments of his life and wonder where they could have led if only he had lived them differently.
Copyright 2026 NPR
