by Daniel Kehlmann; translated by Ross Benjamin
This biographical novel centered on the Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst doubles as a study of art in the shadow of totalitarianism. After finding fame with silent films like “Pandora’s Box,” Pabst finds himself stuck in Europe as the Nazis come to power and compelled to make movies for the Reich. Will he manage to retain his integrity while keeping himself and his family out of danger? Kehlmann imagines a series of impossible challenges for Pabst, from meetings with Goebbels to film shoots that are doomed from the start.
Summit Books, May 6
by Rachel Cockerell
This formally inventive family history took an unexpected turn after Cockerell discovered that her great-grandfather, a London businessman, had been a prominent early Zionist, eventually persuading 10,000 Jews to leave Russia not for Palestine but for Galveston, Texas, in the early 1900s. The resulting book, fashioned from letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper articles and recordings, brings vivid life to a forgotten chapter of the Jewish search for a homeland.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May 6
by Amanda Hess
In 2020, Hess, a culture critic for The New York Times who focuses on the digital world, discovered firsthand what it means to have a baby in our very online era. From conspiracy wormholes to nursing influencers, the big-money baby industrial complex to surveillance culture, Hess examines what it means to have — and be — a child in a world shaped by troubling, fascinating and ever-shifting alternate realities.
Doubleday, May 6
by Honor Jones
In the debut novel by a senior editor at The Atlantic, a newly divorced mother of two young daughters is haunted by disturbing memories from her idyllic-seeming childhood in suburban New Jersey. As she reads one personal essay after another by women detailing their respective traumas — the protagonist is herself a magazine editor at the height of the #MeToo era — she is forced her to confront her unresolved feelings regarding her own.
Riverhead, May 13
by Ocean Vuong
A depressed Vietnamese American teenager becomes the unlikely caretaker for an elderly woman with dementia in Vuong’s second novel, which promises to challenge the familiar narrative of growth and transformation. “If you don’t improve your life in the traditional ways,” Vuong asked in a video introducing the book, “does that mean your life is worthless?”
Penguin Press, May 13
by Garrett Carr
It’s 1973 in a fishing village on the west coast of Ireland where only the weather causes much of a stir. Then, like a miracle, a barrel washes ashore and inside is a “baby, pink, eyes wide to the grey sky, well wrapped.” Carr, a Y.A. novelist making his adult debut, follows the fortunes of the boy, Brendan; the struggling couple who take him in; and the neighbors whose lives are upended by his arrival.
Knopf, May 13
by Ron Chernow
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was a lot of things before he became the peerless writer known as Mark Twain: typesetter, riverboat pilot, journalist, Confederate militiaman, miner, businessman and more. Chernow’s voluminous biography presents Twain with all his complications and flaws — disastrous financial decisions, his evolving views on race — in this account both of the man and of a nation torn apart by war and stitched painfully back together, all of it brightened by Twain’s signature humor and wisdom.
Penguin Press, May 13
by John Cassidy
Landing during a period of global economic turmoil, this meaty history by a longtime New Yorker staff writer tells the story of capitalism’s ascent through a provocative prism: its critics — including a host of lesser known figures, from the labor activist Flora Tristan to contemporary champions of degrowth. Their stories illustrate how, in its lurching cycles of prosperity and contraction, capitalism “is always in crisis, recovering from crisis, or heading toward the next crisis.”
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May 13
by Patrick McGee
Drawing on hundreds of internal memos, emails and interviews with former Apple employees, including engineers and executives, McGee, a Financial Times writer, flips the popular narrative of the company’s relationship with China on its head. It is not simply that Apple has taken advantage of China’s low-wage supply chain capabilities to drive up profits: In training and equipping a Chinese manufacturing operation larger than the entire labor force of California, Apple, he argues, has made itself — and the West — increasingly vulnerable to a “ruthless authoritarian state.”
Scribner, May 13
by Sue Prideaux
As unconventional as it was influential, Paul Gauguin’s boldly colored, formally inventive artwork inspired painters from Van Gogh and Picasso to the German Expressionists. In this new biography, Prideaux draws on recently recovered documents and artifacts to dispel myths about the Frenchman, often depicted as a dissolute libertine, who escaped Paris for Tahiti and championed the rights of its native inhabitants — the subjects of his most notable canvases.
Norton, May 13
by Sara Hamdan
Like a latter-day Mrs. Maisel, the heroine of this debut novel tries to keep her stand-up comedy aspirations a secret from her tradition-minded family. But the time and place are very different: Mia is a contemporary Palestinian American with a day job at a New York media company and a crush on her boss. Hamdan intersperses Mia’s juggling act with excerpts from a diary kept by her grandmother in 1940s Palestine, demonstrating how the need for love and belonging can cross generations.
Holt, May 20
by Madeleine Thien
The fourth novel by the Canadian author of “Do Not Say We Have Nothing” is an imaginative work of historical fiction about a father and daughter residing in a mysterious “no man’s land” called the Sea, after being exiled from their home in Foshan, China. In the Sea, centuries overlap as the daughter, 7-year-old Lina, comes to know her fellow travelers, including a Tang dynasty poet, a 17th-century Dutch scholar and a Jewish philosopher fleeing Nazi Germany.
Norton, May 20
by Naomi Xu Elegant
Since having her heart broken two years ago, Penelope Lin, the 20-something protagonist of Elegant’s debut novel, has remained closed off to love and sex — spending her days working in a Philadelphia museum, organizing its archive of hundreds of shoes for Qing dynasty women with bound feet. Then she meets Hoang, a cancer researcher who’s just turned himself in for releasing the lab mice he was supposed to euthanize, and whose unguarded demeanor will gradually release Penelope from the confinement of her own self-protection.
Norton, May 20
by Alison Bechdel
Throuples, lockdown, pickleball, peak TV — these are just a few of the au courant subjects the author of “Fun Home” takes on in her latest, and especially sardonic, graphic novel. Also: inequality, book bans and many, many goats. In the words of Bechdel’s illustrated alter ego (still short-haired, spectacled and wry), “When did life get so complicated?”
Mariner, May 20
by Robert Macfarlane
Through Macfarlane’s eyes, the natural world is a thrilling place, rife with meaning and poetic beauty. For his latest book, the British author, whose best-selling “Underland” explored the mysterious realm beneath the earth’s surface, takes us to far-flung cloud forests, lagoons, creeks and streams, urging us to consider our river systems as living things, entitled to the same reverence and legal protections as human beings.
Norton, May 20
by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson
This exposé by Tapper — CNN’s chief Washington correspondent, a best-selling thriller writer and occasional Donald Trump punching bag — and Thompson, a political reporter for Axios, promises a devastating accounting of Joe Biden’s fateful decision to run for a second term and of the politicians, staffers and donors who witnessed the president’s decline but covered it up, deluding themselves and the public that he could still win.
Penguin Press, May 20
by Barry Diller
The billionaire media mogul’s fingerprints are all over cherished movies and TV shows like “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Cheers” and “The Simpsons.” While his memoir spends plenty of time on his Beverly Hills roots and Hollywood career, the juiciest bits may be Diller’s chronicles of his romantic life: from years in the closet to falling in love with the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, whom he married in 2001.
Simon & Schuster, May 20
by Rich Cohen
The Duloses seemed to be living the dream: college sweethearts who were raising a family in an upscale Connecticut enclave. But a bitter divorce turned deadly when Jennifer Dulos disappeared and her husband and his mistress were implicated in her murder. Cohen turns this tabloid whodunit into a searching examination of the American dream, our fascination with lurid tragedy and the cost of perfection.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May 20
by Tochi Onyebuchi
Noir meets fantasy in Onyebuchi’s latest, about a chronically unlucky private eye who gets roped into a simmering war in French-colonized West Africa after a woman shows up bleeding at his house, mysteriously vanishes and then reappears floating in the sky, dead.
Tor, May 27
by Tash Aw
Set over the course of one languid summer, “The South” follows the intertwining dramas of a Malaysian family grappling with expectations and personal secrets at their remote, run-down farm. At the center of the story is Jay, the family’s young, queer son, who finds himself developing a tense friendship/possible romance with the farm manager’s rebellious son.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May 27
by Alexis Daria
Daria concludes her Primas of Power series with a steamy, emotional story of love after heartbreak. Ava was crushed when her husband left, leaving her to pick up the pieces of her life. So when a chance encounter with a wealthy hotelier offers her a night of escape, she seizes it. But her no-strings fling gets decidedly knotty when she shows up at her cousin’s engagement party to discover that Roman, her one-night stand, is the groom’s best man.
Avon, May 27
by Stephen King
King interweaves two story lines in his latest novel, bringing back the brilliant and eccentric investigator Holly Gibney. The first narrative begins with an anonymous letter threatening to kill “13 innocents and one guilty” as a bizarre act of retribution; the police detective put on the case turns to Holly for help. The second follows a feminist writer on a lecture circuit that has been disrupted by a violent stalker; who better to hire for protection than Holly? King raises the stakes — and the body count — as the twin plots converge, with a cast of new and familiar characters searching for answers.
Scribner, May 27
by Paul Elie
While crosses burned behind her and a Black saint came to life, Madonna sang “Like a Prayer” — and accusations of blasphemy followed. That 1989 music video brouhaha was one of many instances in which “art, faith, sex and controversy” exploded into view in the pop culture of the 1980s, Elie argues. Other “cryptoreligious” creative figures in his book include Martin Scorsese, Toni Morrison and Prince.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May 27
by Jordan Thomas
Thomas is a firefighter with the Los Padres Hotshots — a squad responsible for battling some of California’s wickedest megafires — and an anthropologist. The combination makes for a riveting story of the costs of climate change and the realities of this terrifying work, as well as an examination of the history that got us here and the very real lives now at risk.
Riverhead, May 27