The best new books to read in May 2024 feature new books by bestselling and award-winning authors including contemporary fiction, thrillers, popular science, psychology, and science biographies. Enjoy spring and prepare for summer with these 10 new highly anticipated May books. Available to purchase now or preorder, these are the most anticipated books of May 2024.

The Best New Books To Read In May 2024

1. The Ministry of Time: A Novel by Kaliane Bradley

Release Date: May 7

Part time travel romance, part spy thriller and 100% “multi-faceted joyride” (Harper’s Bazaar, UK)

2. The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth By Zoë Schlanger

Release Date: May 7

Award-winning Atlantic staff writer Zoë Schlanger delivers a groundbreaking work of popular science that probes the hidden world of the plant kingdom and reveals the astonishing capabilities of the green life all around us.

3. Long Island by Colm Tóibín

Release Date: May 7

From the beloved, critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author comes a spectacularly moving and intense novel of secrecy, misunderstanding, and love, the story of Eilis Lacey, the complex and enigmatic heroine of Brooklyn, Tóibín’s most popular work twenty years later.

4. See: Loss. See Also: Love: A Novel by Yukiko Tominaga

Release Date: May 7

A tender, slyly comical, and shamelessly honest debut novel following a Japanese widow raising her son between worlds with the help of her Jewish mother-in-law as she wrestles with grief, loss, and—strangest of all—joy.

5. Feel It All: A Therapist’s Guide to Reimagining Your Relationship with Sex by Casey Tanner

Release Date: May 14

A groundbreaking guide to sexuality that dispels the stale cultural attitudes about sex that leave too many feeling inadequate, and offers an expansive, attachment-based framework to free us and develop bolder, more satisfying relationships with our sexual selves.

6. Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham

Release Date: May 14

From the New York Times bestselling author of Midnight in Chernobyl comes the definitive, dramatic, minute-by-minute story of the Challenger disaster, based on fascinating in-depth reporting and new archival research—a riveting history that reads like a thriller.

7. All Fours: A Novel by Miranda July

Release Date: May 14

“A frank novel about a midlife awakening, which is funnier and more boldly human than you ever quite expect….the bravery of All Fours is nothing short of riveting.”—Vogue

8. Lies and Weddings by Kevin Kwan

Release Date: May 21

From the iconic internationally bestselling author of the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy: A forbidden affair erupts volcanically amid a decadent tropical wedding in this outrageous comedy of manners from the iconic author of Crazy Rich Asians.

9. Exhibit: A Novel by R.O. Kwon

Release Date: May 21

From bestselling author R. O. Kwon, an exhilarating, blazing-hot novel about a woman caught between her desires and her life.

10. One Perfect Couple: A Novel by Ruth Ware

Release Date: May 21

Harkening to Agatha Christie’s classic And Then There Were None, this high-tension and ingenious thriller follows five couples trapped on a storm-swept island as a killer stalks among them—from Ruth Ware, the New York Times bestselling author who “is turning out to be as ingenious and indefatigable as the Queen of Crime” (The Washington Post).

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