7 Books I Can’t Wait to Read in May

Ten-year-old Margaret hides from her brother in her family’s backyard during a game of flashlight tag. Her childhood is one of sunlit swimming pools, Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend. Then, everything changes. Twenty-five years later, newly-divorced Margaret hides under her parents’ bed, waiting for her young daughters to find her in a game of hide and seek. Called upon to be a mother to her daughters, and a daughter to her mother, she’s forced to reckon with the echoes between the past and the present, what it means to keep a child safe and how much of our lives are our own. Honor Jones’s debut novel is about the cycles of motherhood and childhood, the cost of secrets and the burden of love.

Billed as “The Parent Trap for adults,” the latest from Hannah Orenstein (Meant to Be Mine) centers on two half-sisters meeting for the first time after their father’s unexpected death. Every summer, Vivian and Lucy spend a month with their father at his Maine lake house—separately. An ambitious sommelier with a secret, Vivian was raised in New York City, while Lucy grew up in a tiny Maine town, where she’s a high school teacher. After their father dies and Vivian arrives at the lake to spread his ashes and sell his cabin, she's shocked to find Lucy there, awaiting his return. Forced to spend the summer together, they fight through hostility to untangle the messy truth about their parents’ pasts. After 30 years apart, is it too late for them to be a family?

On a trip to the tropical paradise where her fiancée died, a young woman begins to suspect the death was no accident—and the killer’s still around. The island is nothing like Abby expected: Once a bustling tourist hub, a hurricane has left it a shell of its former self, with only a handful of residents remaining. Befriending an alluring group of expats, Abby’s sense of unease surges when one of the men says he knows the truth about her fiancée Eszter’s final days. Before he can tell her more, though, he vanishes from the island. The deeper she gets in the close-knit expat community, the more she suspects that one of them is Eszter’s killer—can she discover who it is before she becomes the island’s next victim?

Calling all ‘60s fanatics: Bestselling biographer Laurence Leamer (Capote’s Women) has turned his lens on Andy Warhol in this new history of the complex women—Baby Jane Holzer, Ultra Violet, Viva, Candy Darling and more—who inspired and starred in Warhol’s legendary underground films. Each left their protected enclaves and ventured to a new world, with no idea that they’d never be able to return to their old homes and familiar ways again. From casual sex, rampant drug use and wild parties, living in Warhol’s orbit meant being transient, temporary and replaceable. Warhol’s Muses explores the lives of ten fascinating women, giving us a peek into a turbulent and transformative era.

Evie and Theo are lifelong best friends who agree to a marriage of convenience. Evie is an aspiring Foley artist, responsible for every crisp footstep, kiss and sound in film and television. She’s selected for a fellowship opportunity that would make all her career dreams come true, but there’s a catch: There are no health benefits, and she has a chronic illness. Meanwhile, Theo is an elementary school teacher who’s facing eviction after his roommates couple up and move out of their rent-controlled apartment. But there’s a loophole in his lease: Tenants must meet an income threshold, unless they’re married. If the two say ‘I do,’ Theo will be able to keep his apartment, and Evie can be added to his insurance plan. The only hitch is? Evie has never really wanted to marry anyone, and Theo has always been a little bit in love with Evie. For fans of Emily Henry, this debut adult novel from Marisa Kanter (As If on Cue) is about the messiness of relationships of all sorts. 

Prabal Gurung is an acclaimed fashion designer who has dressed American icons like Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris. Walk Like a Girl is his candid, poignant memoir—the story of a queer boy who yearned for a world beyond the confines of prejudice he experienced growing up in Nepal and India. Chronicling his rise to success in the fashion world, Gurung invites readers to rewrite their stories and to shatter the mold into which society has tried to cast them.

Carley Fortune (Every Summer After) is a queen of the beach read whose latest, One Golden Summer, is another sweet, summery love story. The novel starts with Alice’s grandmother, who always said that good things happen at the lake at Barry’s Bay. Alice spent just one summer there when she was 17—it’s where she took a photo oft three teenagers in a speedboat that changed her life. Now, as a professional photographer, she’s most comfortable behind the lens, but she’s itching for something more. When her grandmother falls and breaks her hip, Alice plans to spend another summer in that magical place, but she can’t shake the memories of Charlie, a handsome (and flirtatious) local whose photo she took from afar almost two decades years ago. Now that he and Alice are all grown up, and spending quality time together, Alice has to reckon with the fact that she’s never met someone who looks and sees her right back.