New in May

On New Year’s Eve in 1987, lightning kills Nate’s and Danny’s mother. To deal with the loss and make sense of a world seemingly governed by chance, their distant and eccentric father creates the Nicotine Gospel. “According to him, an eight by five cardboard box containing somewhere near twenty machine-made cigarettes would tell you all you needed to know about a man.” The boys throw themselves into the lessons to be close to their dad, but as Nate grows up and begins to understand how strange the family gospel (and their father) truly is, he starts to worry. While Nate excels at school and finds ways to escape their father’s neglect and the increasingly ramshackle house in Durban, Danny seems to revel in courting danger and death. Decades later, upon learning of their father’s death, Nate and Danny, long estranged, decide to drive from Durban to Cape Town to attend the funeral. On the journey, they must confront each other and their troubled past to find a way forward. The Nicotine Gospel is a darkly funny road trip novel.

Across three decades of democracy, South Africa has seen an outpouring of longform, narrative journalism and creative nonfiction – genres in which some of the country’s finest writers have tried to make sense of a complex and changing society. This brand new, one-of-a-kind anthology collects some of the best literary nonfiction published since the end of apartheid, carefully selected and introduced by editors Sean Christie and Hedley Twidle.From the underworld of zama zama goldminers to the tragicomic closure of a Cape Town zoo, from stick fighting to punk rock, game lodges to fruit farms, cricket pitches to mermaids, The South Africa’s New Nonfiction assembles a range of true stories that are as compelling as any fiction.Literary nonfiction in South Africa has often been found at the margins of our media – in zines, journals, now defunct magazines and personal blogs. It is a kind of writing that has, in general, not made much financial sense – more a medium for those obsessed with pursuing a single story over months or years. In The Interpreters, the editors have combed through 30 years of post-apartheid writing to produce a collection that combines preeminent names with lesser known but no less immersive and powerful works of creative journalism – disparate views and voices that, when read together, have created a new topography of South Africa’s recent past.Featuring J. M. Coetzee • Kimon de Greef • William Dicey • Alexandra Dodd • Madeleine Fullard • Mark Gevisser • Anna Hartford • Anton Harber • Michiel Heyns • Daniël Hugo • Anton Kannemeyer • Bongani Kona • Rustum Kozain • Antjie Krog • Alastair Laird • Adrian Leftwich • Lidudumalingani • Bongani Madondo • Rian Malan • Zanele Mji • Mogorosi Motshumi • Nosisi Mpolweni • Julie Nxadi • Njabulo S Ndebele • Lindokuhle Nkosi • Sean O’Toole • Kopano Ratele • Warren Raysdorf • Srila Roy • Lin Sampson • Kwanele Sosibo • Jonny Steinberg • Niren Tolsi • Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon • Roger Young • Percy Zvomuya

Summer 1914. A world on the brink of catastrophe.In London, twenty-six-year-old Venetia Stanley—aristocratic, clever, bored, reckless—is part of a fast group of upper-crust bohemians and socialites known as “The Coterie.” She’s also engaged in a clandestine love affair with the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, a man more than twice her age. He writes to her obsessively, sharing the most sensitive matters of state.As Asquith reluctantly leads the country into war with Germany, a young intelligence officer with Scotland Yard is assigned to investigate a leak of top-secret documents. Suddenly, what was a sexual intrigue becomes a matter of national security that could topple the British government—and will alter the course of political history.An unrivaled master of seamlessly weaving fact and fiction, Precipice is another electrifying thriller from the brilliant imagination of Robert Harris.

Amane is ten years old when she discovers she’s not like everyone else. Her school friends were all conceived the normal way, by artificial insemination, and raised in the normal way, by parents in ‘clean’, sexless marriages. But Amane’s parents committed the ultimate taboo: they fell in love, had sex and procreated. As Amane grows up and enters adulthood, she does her best to fit in and live her life like the rest of society: cultivating intense relationships with anime characters and limiting herself to extra-marital sex, as is the norm. Still, she can’t help questioning what sex and marriage are for.But when Amane and her husband hear about Eden, an experimental town where residents are selected at random to be artificially inseminated en masse (including men who are fitted with artificial wombs), the family unit does not exist and children are raised collectively and anonymously. They decide to try living there. But can this bold experiment build the brave new world Amane desires, or will it push her to breaking point?

'of salt, dust & love' is a collection of twelve short stories by Stephen Symons. The melancholy of loss—past, present or anticipated—of time passing, life lived, and the futility of war weave through these short stories. Subtly crossing genres (military fiction, science fiction, historiographic metafiction, romance) and intertwining the poetic in the prose, narrative resolutions are left open to furtherinterpretation and imagining, provoking a re-reading of the stories.- Glen Thompson

One wealth-obsessed man – who is also dead.One status-obsessed woman – who is the perfect accessory.Their four inheritance-obsessed children – each with a killer instinct.And a murder-obsessed outsider looking to expose them all…Bella Mackie is back with a brilliantly funny and twisty mystery about dysfunctional families, awful rich people, and true-crime obsessives — and a murder or two, of course.

Piper Bellinger is fashionable, influential, and her reputation as a wild child means the paparazzi are constantly on her heels. When too much champagne and an out-of-control rooftop party lands Piper in the slammer, her stepfather decides enough is enough. So he cuts her off, and sends Piper and her sister to learn some responsibility running their late father's dive bar... in Washington.Piper hasn't even been in Westport for five minutes when she meets big, bearded sea captain Brendan, who thinks she won't last a week outside of Beverly Hills. So what if Piper can't do math, and the idea of sleeping in a shabby apartment with bunk beds gives her hives. How bad could it really be? She's determined to show her stepfather—and the hot, grumpy local—that she's more than a pretty face.Except it's a small town and everywhere she turns, she bumps into Brendan. The fun-loving socialite and the gruff fisherman are polar opposites, but there's an undeniable attraction simmering between them. Piper doesn't want any distractions, especially feelings for a man who sails off into the sunset for weeks at a time. Yet as she reconnects with her past and begins to feel at home in Westport, Piper starts to wonder if the cold, glamorous life she knew is what she truly wants. LA is calling her name, but Brendan—and this town full of memories—may have already caught her heart.The first in a spicy and unforgettable rom-com duology by Tessa Bailey, in which a Hollywood "It Girl" is cut off from her wealthy family and exiled to a small Pacific Northwest beach town... where she butts heads with a surly, sexy local who thinks she doesn't belong.EndorsementsAs seen on E! Online, PopSugar, CNN, Elite Daily, Vulture, BuzzFeed, Bustle, The Nerd Daily, PARADE, LA Magazine, Country Living, USA Today.

Set in a remote village in the north of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two sixteen-year-old boys meet and transform each other’s lives.James—a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old—is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in. He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village’s leaf-ribboned boundaries, beyond his autonomy, tenderness, sex. Then, in the autumn of 2002, he meets Luke, a slightly older boy, handsome, unkempt, who comes with a reputation for danger. Abandoned by his parents—his father imprisoned, and his mother having moved to France for another man—Luke has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle at their farm just outside the village. James is immediately drawn to him, like the pull a fire makes on the air, dragging things into it and blazing them into its hot, white centre, drawn to this boy who is beautiful and impulsive, charismatic, troubled. But underneath Luke’s bravado is a deep wound—a longing for the love of his father and for the stability of family life.Open, Heaven is a novel about desire, yearning, and the terror of first love. With the striking economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Hewitt has written a mesmerizing hymn to boyhood, sensuality, and love in all its forms.A stunning debut novel from the acclaimed young Irish poet Seán Hewitt, reminiscent of Garth Greenwell and Douglas Stuart in the intensity of its evocation of sexual awakening.

Seventeen-year-old John Masterson has no idea what he wants. It’s his last summer on the small island where he has grown up and he should be enjoying the weeks until his exam results come through. Instead, he’s working mind-numbing shifts at the local hotel and trying to keep his head down after his mother’s nude sext to another man was leaked to the whole island.As John joins the local senior football team, gets caught up in fights and parties, and embarks on a tentative relationship with his slightly older co-worker Amber that he feels both proud and ashamed of, he can almost pretend that this summer will last forever. But soon John must face up to the choices before to stay or leave, to stand out or fit in, and whether to love and let himself be loved, despite or perhaps because of, the flaws that make us all human.Fun and Games is a darkly comic, beautifully crafted debut novel that is full of feeling both harsh and tender. It takes in social class and its firm borders, manhood and its frailties, family and, of course, love.A stunning, darkly comic and deeply moving debut novel following a teenage boy as he comes of age on the west coast of Ireland.

In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had “a rough few years.” She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne.For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods. There were discussions about her own childhood—misunderstandings and lack of communication with her mother and father, her early tendency to anticipate catastrophe—and the question of legacy, or, as she put it, “what it’s been worth.” The analysis would continue for more than a decade.Didion’s journal was crafted with the singular intelligence, precision, and elegance that characterize all of her writing. It is an unprecedentedly intimate account that reveals sides of her that were unknown, but the voice is unmistakably hers—questioning, courageous, and clear in the face of a wrenchingly painful journey.

Alice Scott is an eternal optimist still dreaming of her big writing break. Hayden Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize–winning human thundercloud. And they’re both on balmy Little Crescent Island for the same reason: to write the biography of a woman no one has seen in years—or at least to meet with the octogenarian who claims to be Margaret Ives. She is a tragic heiress, a former tabloid princess, and the daughter of one of the most storied (and scandalous) families of the 20th century.When Margaret invites them both for a one-month trial period, after which she’ll choose the person who’ll tell her story, there are three things keeping Alice’s head in the game.One: Alice genuinely likes people, which means people usually like Alice—and she has a whole month to win the legendary woman over.Two: She’s ready for this job and the chance to impress her perennially unimpressed family with a serious publication.Three: Hayden Anderson, who should have no reason to be concerned about losing this book, is glowering at her in a shaken-to-the-core way that suggests he sees her as competition.But the problem is, Margaret is only giving each of them pieces of her story: pieces they can’t swap to put together because of an ironclad NDA and an inconvenient yearning pulsing between them every time they’re in the same room.And it’s becoming abundantly clear that their story—just like the tale Margaret’s spinning—could be a mystery, tragedy, or love ballad…depending on who’s telling it.Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of a woman with more than a couple of plot twists up her sleeve in this dazzling and sweeping new novel from Emily Henry.

A career consists of 2,000 workweeks, and how you spend that time is one of the most important decisions of your life. Still, millions of people are stuck in mind-numbing, pointless, or just plain harmful jobs.There’s an antidote to this waste of talent, and it’s called moral ambition. Moral ambition is the will to be among the best, but with different measures of success. Not a fancy title, fat salary, or corner office, but a career dedicated to the best solutions to the world’s biggest problems—whether that means tackling climate change, making pandemics history or fighting Big Tobacco.In Moral Ambition, Rutger Bregman reveals how our conventional definitions of success are harming us and the planet, and shows how we can shift the focus from personal gain to societal benefit. In the process, he explains, we will join a growing movement of pioneers who are already living out this ethos. They’re the builders, the problem-solvers, the doers who have chosen a path less traveled. A guidebook to finding that path for ourselves, Moral Ambition reminds us that the real measure of success lies not in what we accumulate, but in what we contribute, and shows how we, too, can build a legacy that truly matters.A bold manifesto daring us to harness our talents and transform our idealism into action, all with the goal of making the world a wildly better place.EndorsementsFrom the author of the New York Times bestsellers Humankind and Utopia for Realists.“a more politically radical Malcolm Gladwell” — The New York Times

On a windswept island off the coast of the Kingdom of Bavaugh, a long-awaited royal heir is born. In ancient custom, a blessing ceremony takes place to bestow the princess with magical gifts - along with a terrible curse.Except this is not the love story you know. There is no prince to save the day, just three women — the Queen, her chief Lady-in-Waiting and Sel, a master's apprentice — who concoct a desperate plan of misdirection that changes the course of all their lives.In the chaotic aftermath of the blessing ceremony, Sel flees the castle with the cursed princess, promising to raise her in secrecy. Meanwhile, confined behind castle walls, another child grows up in her place. But plain and bookish Talia is not the princess everyone was expecting and, as Sel roams the depths of the kingdom with beautiful and otherworldly Briar, the end of the curse edges ever closer.Because dark magic cannot be tricked, and a vengeful sorceress has old scores to settle...

‘The week I shot a man clean through the head began like any other . . .’From Emma Stonex comes The Sunshine Man, a tangled mystery about a terrible crime and a revenge plotted over decades.In January 1989, Birdie wakes to the news she’s been waiting eighteen years to hear. Jimmy Maguire, the man who killed her sister, has been freed from jail. Birdie leaves for London with a gun and a plan to find him and make him pay. But there’s another side to the story, and she’s about to enter a world of family lies, worn-out loyalties and long-buried betrayals.Did Jimmy kill Birdie’s sister, or is he the only one she can really trust? And when the truth is finally revealed, will she choose forgiveness — or retribution?A heart-stopping new novel of murky shared pasts and a fury-fueled present, The Sunshine Man is a thrilling cat and mouse chase set against the salt-drenched backdrop of England’s south coast.Endorsements‘A deeply thrilling and emotionally rich page-turner. One of my books of the year’ — Lucy Clarke‘Fiendishly gripping’ — Rosie Walsh

In 2017, Megan Hunter burst onto the literary scene with her debut novel, The End We Start From, a startlingly beautiful story of climate change and motherhood that is now a feature film starring Jodi Comer. Her second book, The Harpy, fiercely explored marriage and power through a dark, imaginative tale of revenge. A writer of remarkable range, Hunter now delivers her first historical novel, a gorgeous story of art, desire, and faith set against the backdrop of a changing England.Easter Sunday, 1938. Ivy is nineteen and ready for her life to finally begin. Her sprawling, bohemian family and their friends gather in the idyllic English countryside for lunch, arranging themselves around well-worn roles. They trade political views and artistic arguments as they impatiently await the arrival and first sight of Frances, the new beau of Ivy’s beloved older brother, Joseph. In this auspicious atmosphere of springtime, Ivy’s world feels on the cusp of something grand—but neither she nor those closest to her predicts how a single, enchanted evening will alter the rest of their lives.A radiant, philosophical, and intimate journey through time, Days of Light chronicles six pivotal days across six decades to tell the story of Ivy’s pursuit of answers—to the events of this fateful Easter Sunday and to the shifting desires of her own heart. Moving through the Second World War up to the close of the 20th century, Hunter captures the galvanic beauty to be found in loss and love and the transformative days, hours, and moments that define a winding, beautiful life.A sweeping, sensual historical novel about one woman’s unconventional life lived in search of an answer by the award-winning author of The End We Start From and The Harpy, Megan Hunter. She marvels at the way a single day can unravel everything, like ribbon pulled from a present.

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Vuong’s writing — formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness — are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.Ocean Vuong returns with a big-hearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.

Fleeing a nameless war, an unknown soldier emerges from deep within the Mediterranean scrubland, dirty and exhausted. A chance meeting forces him to rethink his journey, and the price he puts on a life. On 11 September 2001, aboard a small cruise ship on the River Havel near Berlin, a conference of scientists pays homage to the late East German mathematician Paul Heudeber, a Buchenwald survivor and steadfast antifascist who remained loyal to his side of the Berlin Wall despite the collapse of the Communist utopia, unaware that a new era of violence is about to descend. Out of the tension between these narratives, everything that is at stake in times of conflict – in love as in politics – comes to commitment and betrayal, loyalty and lucidity, hope and survival. Translated by Charlotte Mandell, this latest work by Mathias Énard vividly lays bare the devastations of war on the most intimate aspects of our lives.

This courageous and honest trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing, explores themes of family, sex, motherhood, abortion, addiction, and being an artist.Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, and The Copenhagen Trilogy (1969–71) is her acknowledged masterpiece. Childhood tells the story of a misfit child’s single-minded determination to become a poet; Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband.Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, and she writes about female experience and identity in a way that feels very fresh and pertinent to today’s discussions around feminism. Ditlevsen’s trilogy is remarkable for its intensity and its immersive depiction of a world of complex female friendships, family and growing up—in this sense, it’s Copenhagen's answer to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels. She can also be seen as a spiritual forerunner of confessional writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy. Her trilogy is drawn from her own experiences but reads like the most compelling kind of fiction.Born in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen in 1917, Ditlevsen became famous for her poetry while still a teenager, and went on to write novels, stories and memoirs before committing suicide in 1976. Having been dismissed by the critical establishment in her lifetime as a working-class, female writer, she is now being rediscovered and championed as one of Denmark's most important modern authors.Endorsements'A masterpiece' — The Guardian

Emma Donoghue returns with a sweeping historical novel about an infamous 1895 disaster at the Paris Montparnasse train station.Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a propulsive novel set on a train packed with a fascinating cast of characters who hail from as close as Brittany and as far as Russia, Ireland, Algeria, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia. Members of parliament hurry back to Paris to vote; a medical student suspects a girl may be dying; a secretary tries to convince her boss of the potential of moving pictures; two of the train’s crew build a life away from their wives; a young anarchist makes a terrifying plan, and much more.The Paris Express is an evocative masterpiece that effortlessly captures the politics, glamour, chaos, and speed that marked the end of the 19th century.Endorsements“soul-stirring” — Oprah Daily“writing is superb alchemy” — Audrey Niffenegger, New York Times bestselling author

Award-winning broadcaster and natural historian David Attenborough and longtime collaborator Colin Butfield present a powerful call to action focused on our planet's oceans, exploring how critical this habitat is for the survival of humanity and the future of Earth.Through personal stories, history and cutting-edge science, Ocean uncovers the mystery, the wonder and the frailty of the most unexplored habitat on our planet — and the one which shapes the land we live on, regulates our climate and creates the air we breathe. The book showcases the oceans' remarkable resilience: they are the part of our world that can—and in some cases have—recovered the fastest, if we only give them the chance.Drawing a course across David Attenborough's own lifetime, Ocean takes readers on an adventure-laden voyage through eight unique ocean habitats, through countless intriguing species, and through the most astounding discoveries of the last 100 years to a future vision of a fully restored marine world, even richer and more spectacular than we could possibly hope for. Ocean reveals the past, present and potential future of our blue planet. It is a book almost a century in the making but one that has never been more urgently needed.

On her wedding day in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1968, Rafaela Acuña y Daubón has mild misgivings, but she marries Peter Brennan Jr. anyway, in a blaze of romantic optimism. She has no way of knowing how dramatically her life will change when she uproots her young family to start over in the American Midwest, unleashing a fleet of disappointments. Against the backdrop of her mother’s isolation in St. Louis, Missouri in the 1980s, Rafaela’s daughter, Ruth Brennan, longs only to belong. Eager to fit in, Ruth lets go of her language, habits, and childhood memories of Puerto Rico. It's not until decades later, when Ruth’s own daughter, Daisy, returns to Puerto Rico that her mother and grandmother begin to truly reflect on the choices that have come to define their lives.When a hurricane ravages the island in 2023, leaving Daisy critically injured, Rafaela and Ruth return to the city where it all began. As they gather at Daisy’s bedside, they’re confronted by the pasts that brought them to this point. We follow them as they come of age, fall in love, take risks, and contend with all the heartbreaks, triumphs, and reversals of fortune — both good and bad — that make up a meaningful life. As old memories come to light, so do buried secrets, leaving everyone in the family wondering exactly where it is that they belong.A striking, resonant examination of marriage, family, and identity, Speak to Me of Home is ultimately a story of mothers and daughters that asks: how can three women who share geography and genetics have such wildly different ideas of where it is they come from? And more importantly, can they discover the common language to find their way home?A deeply felt multigenerational family story that asks: What does it mean to call a place home?EndorsementsFrom #1 New York Times bestselling author Jeanine Cummins.