Even if you have a big stack of new titles acquired at the recent L.A. Times Festival of Books, you’ll want to fill your beach totes for Memorial Day weekend later this month. New book releases include a story of new life in old age, the highly anticipated second novel from the author of “The Help” and unexpectedly tender essays from David Sedaris. Happy reading!
FICTION:
(Scribner)
Homebound: A Novel
By Portia Elan
Scribner: 304 pp., $28
(May 5)
Even if the term “floppy disk” sounds like Old English to you, you’ll be captivated by this debut novel about a 1980s digital game that connects a queer teen named Becks with characters far in the future. There’s a spacecraft and a robot and pirate references, all catnip for sci-fi and dystopia lovers and all very well done. However, the deeper theme has to do with how human beings create chosen families, with or without tech.
(Henry Holt & Co.)
Enormous Wings: A Novel
By Laurie Frankel
Henry Holt & Co.: 304 pp., $29
(May 5)
Pepper Mills, age 77, blames her punny name on her ex-husband and her new apartment at a Texas continuing care facility on her kids, but what happens next is entirely due to her own actions: She falls for a fellow resident, Moth, and the two begin a delightful romance that is interrupted by Pepper’s doctor-confirmed pregnancy. Before she can even think about the ramifications, word gets out and everyone else’s opinions drown out Pepper’s own wishes.
(Summit Books)
A Little Bit Bad: A Novel
By Cassandra Neyenesch
S&S/Summit Books: 352 pp., $29
(May 5)
If a roofer falls from a ladder and dies, will anyone in sunny San Diego notice? Married mother of two Perdie (short for Perdita) does, because she’d convinced herself she was in love with the contractor in question, Nando Acuña, after meeting him in her next-door neighbor’s yard in 2007. After his 2010 death, Perdie realizes Nando’s ex, Charleigh, is stalking her. What happens next cannot be spoiled, only experienced, with startled laughter.
(Spiegel & Grau)
The Calamity Club: A Novel
By Kathryn Stockett
Spiegel & Grau: 656 pp., $35
(May 5)
Seventeen years ago, Stockett published “The Help,” and some objected to her, as a white woman, appropriating Black speech patterns and cultural themes. In her very long and very twisty new novel, the author examines a Depression-era sterilization law in Mississippi, thereby connecting three white female characters. Meg, Birdie and Charlie are each in very different circumstances, but join forces in hopes of creating better futures for themselves.
(Grove Press)
John of John: A Novel
By Douglas Stuart
Grove Press: 416 pp., $28
(May 5)
John-Calum McLeod, or Cal, returns to Scotland’s Isle of Harris after attending art school in Glasgow and finds it difficult to coexist with his father, also named John, who disdains everything about him. John McLeod Sr. expects Cal to attend the strict local church and work at the family’s weaving shed. While Cal resists this parental rigidity, the two do share something fundamental that threatens their community’s long-held foundations.
NONFICTION:
(Harper Business)
I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything
By Joanna Stern
Harper Business: 320 pp., $32
(May 12)
Spoiler alert: Journalist Joanna Stern used AI in the process of writing this stunt memoir. She didn’t use AI to generate prose, but she did use it to transcribe interviews, edit text and corral data. With humor and skepticism, she relates experiences like riding in Waymo cars, getting a massage from a robot and speaking to chatbots. One of her observations is that, given AI’s existence, we have to accept that younger people will need different kinds of instruction.
(Scribner)
Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter
By Ada Ferrer
Scribner: 384 pp., $30
(May 19)
Ferrer won a 2022 Pulitzer for “Cuba: An American History.” Here she examines immigration and distance in her own family — she was just 10 months old in 1963, when they arrived in New York. Sadly, her half-brother Poly had been left behind, and while her mother wrote to him daily, his fate is ultimately a tragic one. Ferrer later learns of another half-brother, her father’s son; these fraught relationships are the pillars of a gorgeous meditation on belonging.
(/Simon & Schuster)
An Inconvenient Widow: The Torment, Trial, and Triumph of Mary Todd Lincoln
By Lois Romano
Simon & Schuster: 480 pp., $31
(May 19)
Leave all “Oh, Mary!” jokes aside before you start this well-researched biography of President Lincoln’s complicated spouse. Yes, the bright young woman from Lexington, Ky., had challenges that included deep grief (she outlived three sons and her husband), but the author contends that her achievements as a political spouse have been overshadowed by negative press due to contemporary and even present-day misogyny.
America, U.S.A.: How Race Overshadows the Nation’s Anniversaries
By Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
Crown: 288 pp., $31
(May 26)
The 1976 Bicentennial celebrations in this country had a much different tone than this year’s 250th-anniversary events will, regardless of your partisan leanings, and that is due in part to what we’ve acknowledged and learned in the last half-century. However, as Glaude (“Begin Again”) reminds us in his new examination of American mythology, we still have a great deal to acknowledge and learn before we can truly celebrate the United States as a just nation.
(Little, Brown and Company)
The Land and Its People
By David Sedaris
Little, Brown & Company: 272 pp., $30
(May 26)
Most of the 28 essays in this collection are new, so clear your calendar and devote at least a day, if not a weekend, to savoring the inimitable Sedaris as he reflects on his long relationship with his partner Hugh, his indulgences (both monetary and cerebral) and the frailties of his beloved family members. Those who have followed along with the author’s oeuvre (14 books, now) will appreciate the grace tempering his ever-sharp wit.
Patrick is a freelance critic and author of the memoir “Life B.”
More to Read
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