10 Books to read in May 2025
BY SHAHANA SHERIN
30 April 2025
As the days grow longer and spring turns into summer, there’s no better time to get lost in the pages of a great book. May 2025 brings a dazzling array of new releases and literary gems—stories that stretch across time, continents, and genres. Whether you’re looking for mind-expanding non-fiction, emotionally rich novels, gripping thrillers, or sharp-witted satire, this month’s book list offers something for every kind of reader. Here are ten standout books to add to your reading list in May—each one a compelling reminder of the power of storytelling to challenge, comfort, and inspire.
1. Second Life: Having a Child in a Digital Age by Amanda Hess
Amanda Hess is an acclaimed American journalist and critic-at-large for The New York Times, known for her deep dives into internet culture. Her writing, which often explores the intersections of technology, identity, and society, has appeared in Wired, ESPN, and Elle. With a sharp and insightful voice, she brings clarity to the often-chaotic world of digital life.
In Second Life, Hess turns the lens on herself as she documents the emotional and technological complexities of becoming a mother in an era dominated by digital surveillance and online mythologies. What begins as a personal account of pregnancy soon transforms into a sobering examination of how the internet shapes parenting in unsettling ways. From prenatal genetic testing to social media-fueled anxieties, Hess exposes the subtle, often invisible pressures that technology imposes on expectant parents. Through humor, heartbreak, and critical insight, she navigates fertility apps, Facebook groups, YouTube influencers, and the commercialization of motherhood. The result is a deeply personal yet universally relevant meditation on what it means to bring a child into a hyperconnected world—and how that world, in turn, reshapes us.
2.What My Father and I Don’t Talk About, edited by Michele Filgate
Michele Filgate is a celebrated writer and editor whose work has been featured in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Paris Review Daily, and more. An MFA graduate from NYU and a Stein Fellow in Fiction, Filgate is best known for her ability to curate deeply intimate and emotionally resonant essays that explore the silences in family relationships.
This powerful anthology, What My Father and I Don’t Talk About, serves as a sequel to the bestselling What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About. With contributions from sixteen diverse voices, the collection shines a light on the unspoken aspects of father-child relationships—whether distant, nurturing, or somewhere in between. Writers like Andrew Altschul, Jaquira Díaz, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, and Susan Muaddi Darraj share moving reflections on everything from absenteeism and trauma to love and admiration. The stories range from poignant to funny, and each one is a raw, honest reckoning with the weight of paternal influence. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the complexities of family, memory, and identity.
3. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese American poet and novelist whose debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous became a literary sensation. A recipient of the T.S. Eliot Prize and Whiting Award, Vuong is known for his lyrical prose and his exploration of memory, trauma, and identity through queer and immigrant lenses.
In The Emperor of Gladness, Vuong delivers another breathtaking novel, this time centered around Hai, a 19-year-old dropout contemplating the end of his life. A chance encounter with Grazina, an elderly widow facing dementia, alters the course of Hai’s existence. What follows is a delicate, emotionally rich story about unlikely companionship and the power of chosen family. Vuong’s poetic style lends tenderness and gravity to this exploration of survival on the margins. As Hai builds a new life working at a diner and supporting Grazina, he finds connection, hope, and the possibility of healing. A deeply affecting novel about second chances, this is Vuong at his most compassionate and profound.
4.Mark Twain by Ron Chernow
Ron Chernow is one of America’s most esteemed biographers. He is a Pulitzer Prize winner and the author of landmark works on Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and the Rockefeller family. Known for his meticulous research and narrative skill, Chernow brings history’s most complex figures vividly to life.
In his latest biography, Chernow turns his attention to Samuel Clemens—better known as Mark Twain, the father of American literature. This sweeping, deeply researched book traces Twain’s journey from his Missouri boyhood and steamboat dreams to his rise as a national literary icon. Along the way, Chernow captures Twain’s ambition, wit, financial misadventures, personal tragedies, and contradictions. Drawing from unpublished manuscripts and thousands of letters, the biography portrays Twain as a man shaped by fame, haunted by loss, and unafraid to critique the American project. Whether you’re a Twain fan or a history buff, Chernow’s Mark Twain is a definitive portrait of a writer whose legacy continues to shape American culture.
5.Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li is a Chinese-born American writer acclaimed for her haunting fiction and lyrical nonfiction. A recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Li writes with profound emotional depth, often exploring themes of grief, memory, and identity. She teaches creative writing and serves as an editor for A Public Space.
In Things in Nature Merely Grow, Li turns her gaze inward in an extraordinary act of literary courage and philosophical grace. Written in the aftermath of the loss of her two sons to suicide, the book is neither a memoir nor a self-help guide. Instead, it is a deeply contemplative exploration of being, time, and memory. Through gardening, music, and philosophical inquiry, Li reflects on how to live with the unfathomable. There is no easy closure in her words—only a brave insistence on presence and love. This is a remarkable testament to resilience, language, and the boundless nature of parental devotion. It is not a book about grief—it is a book about being.
6. Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane
Robert Macfarlane is one of Britain’s most lyrical nature writers, known for re-enchanting the landscape through language. A Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Macfarlane’s acclaimed books like The Old Ways, Underland, and The Lost Words have explored deep ecological and cultural questions. His work often blends memoir, travel writing, and environmental philosophy, and he has been tipped as a Nobel Prize contender for his contribution to literature.
In Is a River Alive?, Macfarlane asks one of the most profound questions in environmental thought: can a river be considered a living entity? Through poetic prose and rigorous research, he traverses ancient myths, indigenous cosmologies, and modern legal systems that grant rivers rights and personhood. From the sacred Ganges to the Whanganui River in New Zealand—legally recognized as a living being—Macfarlane blends stories of resistance, reverence, and renewal. This is not just a book about rivers—it’s a meditation on our moral and spiritual relationship with nature. Luminous, philosophical, and deeply urgent, Is a River Alive? reshapes how we think about the natural world—and our place within it.
7. The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien
Madeleine Thien is a Canadian literary powerhouse whose works traverse national borders and historical trauma with rare precision and grace. Her critically acclaimed novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing won major awards and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A profound thinker on identity, memory, and political change, Thien’s work consistently elevates the global dimensions of Canadian literature.
Her latest, The Book of Records, is a sweeping, time-bending novel that reads like a philosophical odyssey. The story follows Lina, a young woman who arrives at a mysterious refuge called “The Sea,” a liminal space between eras and migrations. In this dreamlike enclave, she converses with historical figures across centuries—from a Jewish scholar in 1600s Amsterdam to a Tang Dynasty poet and a German philosopher fleeing fascism. These dialogues, luminous with ethical and emotional complexity, guide Lina as she confronts a painful truth about her own father’s past. At once intimate and epic, this novel examines how memory and history shape our choices and our futures. The Book of Records is a remarkable feat of imagination, a novel of ideas that brims with heart, intellect, and hope.
8.Spent by Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel, the trailblazing cartoonist behind Fun Home and Dykes to Watch Out For, returns with a dazzling comic novel that’s as biting as it is brilliant. A MacArthur “Genius” Grant winner and creator of the famed Bechdel Test, she has long pushed the boundaries of graphic storytelling—turning personal, political, and philosophical introspection into a high art.
In Spent, Bechdel delivers a riotous auto-fictional romp where “Alison Bechdel,” a goat-farming cartoonist in Vermont, is plagued by environmental despair, existential crises, and professional envy. As her TV adaptation Death and Taxidermy becomes a surprise hit, Alison finds herself spiraling into jealousy—and obsessively wondering why she isn’t hosting a feel-good, ethically radical makeover show like Queer Eye. Her musings on capitalism, climate change, and queer identity are both devastatingly funny and sharply reflective. With its madcap ensemble of aging radicals, viral wood-chopping tutorials, and Emmy-fueled angst, Spent is wildly original, meta to the bone, and deeply human. Bechdel remains one of the most fearless and inventive voices in contemporary comics.
9.Never Flinch by Stephen King
Stephen King, the undisputed master of horror and suspense, is back with a spine-chilling thriller that feels both classic and urgent. With more than 60 novels and 200 short stories to his name, King has redefined American fiction over five decades—and Never Flinch proves that his storytelling powers are as potent as ever.
This pulse-pounding novel centers on a chilling letter received by a police department, threatening to murder “thirteen innocents and one guilty” in retribution for a wrongful death. Detective Izzy Jaynes enlists the help of fan-favorite Holly Gibney as the case grows darker and deadlier. Parallel to this, feminist icon Kate McKay is being stalked on her national lecture tour, and Holly is recruited as her reluctant bodyguard. With a villain as twisted as any King has created, and a cast that spans fame, politics, and grassroots justice, Never Flinch explores the blurred lines between guilt and innocence, vengeance and redemption. Taut, layered, and wickedly satisfying, this novel is King at his most socially attuned and narratively explosive.
10.We All Live Here by Jojo Moyes
Jojo Moyes, beloved author of Me Before You, returns with a moving and wise novel that delves into the beautiful chaos of modern family life. With more than 40 million books sold worldwide, Moyes has become a literary staple for readers who crave stories that blend romance, humor, and emotional depth.
In We All Live Here, we meet Lila Kennedy—a woman overwhelmed by the crumbling pieces of her life: a failing marriage, rebellious daughters, a collapsing house, and a stepfather who’s taken up residence in her living room. Just when it seems things can’t get worse, her estranged biological father—a once-glamorous Hollywood dropout—shows up unannounced. As Lila navigates the tensions of her unruly blended family, she begins to reevaluate what it means to be loved and to belong. With her signature warmth and wit, Moyes crafts a novel that celebrates second chances, flawed relationships, and the quiet strength of women. We All Live Here is a deeply relatable and delightfully uplifting story about finding joy in imperfection.
From thought-provoking literary fiction and riveting suspense to biting comic novels and lyrical explorations of nature, these ten books reflect the richness and diversity of contemporary storytelling. Whether you’re in the mood for a philosophical journey through time, a hilarious autofictional romp, or a moving family saga, these new reads are perfect companions for your May reading list. So grab a blanket, head to your favorite reading spot, and let these unforgettable stories carry you through the month—and well beyond.