11 Must-Have Books Out This May
May is overflowing with brilliant new releases, and narrowing it down to just eleven was no small feat. This month’s round-up is packed with bold, beautiful, and brainy books you’ll want to talk about over your next flat white or fizz. From Laura Bates’ urgent takedown of tech-enabled misogyny in The New Age of Sexism, to Ocean Vuong’s much-anticipated new novel The Emperor of Gladness, these are the titles that had us dog-earing pages and frantically texting our group chats. Whether you’re in the mood for punchy cultural commentary in Girl on Girl, a darkly funny road trip with emotional baggage in the brilliantly titled Slags, or a heart-wrenching memoir of mental illness and recovery in The Episode, there’s something here to stir, shake, or soothe your soul.
Ready to refresh your reading list? Let’s get into it.
The New Age of Sexism
Out Now
AI is here, bringing a seismic shift in the way our society operates. Might this mean a future reimagined on equitable terms for women and marginalised groups everywhere?
Not unless we fight for it. At present, power remains largely in the hands of a few rich, white men. New AI-driven technologies, with misogyny baked into their design, are putting women in danger, their rights and safety sacrificed at the altar of profitability and reckless speed.
In The New Age of Sexism, Sunday Times bestselling author and campaigner Laura Bates takes us deep into the heart of this rapidly evolving world. She explores the metaverse, confronts deepfake pornography, travels to cyber brothels, tests chatbots, and hears from schools in the grip of online sexual abuse, showing how our lives – from education to work, sex to entertainment – are being infiltrated by easily accessible technologies that are changing the way we live and love. What she finds is a wild west where existing forms of discrimination, inequality and harassment are being coded into the future we will all have little choice about living in – unless we seize this moment to demand change.
Gripping, courageous and eye-opening, The New Age of Sexism exposes a phenomenon we can’t afford to ignore any longer. Our future is on the line. We need to act now, before it is too late.
Consider Yourself Kissed
Out Now
What happens when you find love, but life keeps getting in the way?
When she first meets Adam, Coralie is new to London and feeling adrift. But Adam is clever, witty, and – he insists – half an inch taller than the average British male. His charming four-year-old daughter, Zora, only adds to his appeal.
And yet ten years on, something important is missing from the life Coralie and Adam (though let’s face it, mostly Coralie) have built. Or maybe, having gained everything she dreamed of, Coralie has lost something she once had: herself.
Set against an eventful decade that included the soap opera of five Prime Ministers plus Brexit and Covid, Consider Yourself Kissed puts the subjects of love and family on a grand stage, bringing to life how the intimate drama in our homes inescapably competes for energy and attention with the shared drama of our times.
Consider Yourself Kissed is a captivating portrait of a woman in love which effortlessly balances sweetness with bite, the public with the personal, and humour with heart.
Slags
Out Now
Slag. Noun. A promiscuous woman, of cheap or questionable character. Mostly derogatory. Sometimes affectionate.
Once a slag, always a slag?
Sarah is 15, obsessed with boys and sex and getting drunk on Malibu. Most seriously of all, she’s obsessed with her teacher Mr Keaveney.
Sarah is 41, the last of the party girls. But even for her, the mad nights out are losing their shine, and there’s hardly anyone worth sleeping with anymore.
Instead, Sarah and her sister Juliette are going on a whisky-fuelled campervan trip across Scotland to celebrate Juliette’s birthday.
They haven’t always got along, but they both know how the deep, dark, mortifying secrets of your teenage years can haunt you forever.
And it’s time to dig up some demons.
From the acclaimed author of Animals and Adults, Slags is a no-holds-barred, frank and heartfelt exploration of sisterhood, friendship and teenage obsession.
Girl on Girl
Out Now
Cosmetic surgeries are at an all-time high, Ozempic is bringing back ‘heroin chic’ and TikTok trad-wives are on the rise – after four waves of feminism, what went wrong?
Despite decades of progress, the gains of the feminist movement feel more fragile than ever. But as Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert points out, this is not a unique moment. Feminism felt just as fragmented in the early 2000s, when the momentum of third-wave feminists and riot grrrls was squashed by lad culture and the commodification of Girl Power.
Casting her eye across pop culture of the past thirty years – from Madonna, the Spice Girls and the Kardashians, to MySpace, #GirlBoss and Real Housewives – Sophie Gilbert reveals a toxic pattern of progress and misogynistic backlash. Girl on Girl shows how every form of media, heavily influenced by the rise of porn, has shaped and warped women’s relationships with themselves and other women.
We cannot move forward without fully reckoning with the ways pop culture has defined us – this book shows us how.
That’s What She Said
Out Now
Eleanor Pilcher is electric in her witty, funny, and heartfelt women’s fiction debut, following polar opposite best friends Beth and Serena. When demisexual Beth decides she’s done with being a virgin and enlists Serena’s help, her new personal journey just might be the thing to end their friendship for good.
Serena and Beth are best friends who couldn’t be more different—Beth is an avowed demisexual, who lacks confidence in her career and in her chances at a happy relationship due to her sexual orientation. Serena is a free spirit who oozes with confidence, both in her job and her sexual proclivities. And yet, since the moment they met, they knew they were platonic soulmates.
So, when Beth decides that she officially wants to take charge of her sex life and explore the things that scare her the most, Serena is more than happy to help. Speed-dating, sex therapy, tantra, a perplexed but ultimately very nice escort—it’s all on Beth’s Sexual Odyssey List.
But when Beth’s crush from her old job comes back and Serena’s favorite friend-with-benefits pushes for more than just sex, it throws their whole world into a tailspin. And suddenly, this sexual odyssey is more than a fun gag. It’ll set them down a course that’ll make them so much closer—or end their friendship for good.
- Read Less
The Search for Othella Savage
Out Now
When one of their own is found unconscious in the boot of her car, Scotland’s Sierra Leonean community is cast into a state of shock. And the young woman’s death a few days later sparks a murder investigation.
Though Hawa Barrie lives on the fringes of that community, which revolves around the Lion Mountain Church, the disappearance of a second woman – her childhood friend Othella Savage – draws her in.
But as the police investigation drags on, Hawa grows increasingly suspicious of the charismatic Pastor Ronald Ranka – and increasingly fearful for her friend, Othella. Desperate, she launches her own search, which will take her from Scotland to Sierra Leone and back again, revealing the true nature of Ranka’s church whilst exposing dark secrets within the fabric of both countries she calls home.
A darkly compelling read inspired by a real incident, The Search for Othella Savage is an engaging and compulsive debut which examines the insidious nature of corruption – both religious and political – whilst also exploring the enduring power of friendship.
The Episode
Out Now
One fine April day, Mary Ann Kenny’s husband died suddenly while jogging near their family home. In the months that followed, Mary Ann – who had no history of mental illness – began suffering from depression, and then from a terrifying succession of physical and psychological symptoms, including the delusion that her young children had been harmed by her medications.
In this gripping memoir, Mary Ann details her descent into psychosis, her hospitalization, and her inspiring journey back to health and happiness. Drawing on her detailed medical files and on her own recollections, she has created a day-by-day account of what it is like to lose touch with reality while dealing with grief and living in the dreadful knowledge that everything you care about in life is under threat. And The Episode tells the inspiring story of how Mary Ann recovered from her illness, came to terms with her trauma, and spoke truth to the health service about the limitations of medical psychiatry. It reminds us that anyone could end up in Mary Ann’s situation, while also showing that recovery and happiness are possible even after severe mental illness.
Written with the pace of a thriller and the insight of a great psychological novel, The Episode is a brilliant act of personal reclamation and an essential read for anyone who is interested in the workings of the mind.
The Emperor of Gladness
Out Now
Ocean Vuong returns with an achingly beautiful novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive
One summer evening in the town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on a bridge, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond.
The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which our lives are changed by the most unexpected of people. When Hai takes a job at a diner to support himself and Grazina, his fellow workers become the family he didn’t expect to find. United by desperation and circumstance, and existing on the fringes of society, together they bear witness to each other’s survival.
No Such Thing as Normal
Out Now
‘Mental illness has led to some of the worst times of my life… but it has also led to some of the most brilliant. Bad things happen, but good things can come from them. And strange as it might sound, my mental health has been vastly improved by being mentally ill.’
From depression and anxiety to personality disorders, one in four of us experience mental health issues every year and, in these strange and unsettling times, more of us than ever are struggling to cope. In No Such Thing As Normal, Bryony offers sensible, practical advice, covering subjects such as sleep, addiction, worry, medication, self-image, boundary setting, therapy, learned behaviour, mindfulness and, of course – as the founder of Mental Health Mates – the power of walking and talking. She also strives to equip those in need of help with tools and information to get the best out of a poorly funded system that can be both frightening and overwhelming. The result is a lively, honest and direct guide to mental health that cuts through the Instagram-wellness bubble to talk about how each of us can feel stronger, better and just a little bit less alone.
Come What May
Out Now
We all know that at some point in life, we will experience pain, uncertainty and loss. Widowhood, redundancy, a life-changing diagnosis, pregnancy loss, or a global pandemic. So how can we weather the storms, and cope with whatever comes next?
No one can answer this better than Lucy Easthope, an emergency planner whose job is to support survivors of major disasters. She has been there after countless earthquakes, fires and floods. Time and again she has watched how people rebuild: the work, the pitfalls and the fragile joy. In Come What May, she distils for us what she has learned about how to carry on during and after terrible times.
Through poignant stories and hard-won wisdom, she offers a roadmap for resilience in the face of adversity. She explains what shape the recovery journey might take, how to triage your life in an emergency, how to plan for ‘the slump’ (also known as the lasagne phase), how to take stock of what has happened to you, how to watch out for ‘learned helplessness’, and what good (and bad) help looks like.
This is a book for all of us existing in ‘the after’ who want not just to survive, but to live and unleash strengths we never knew we had.
The Secret History of Sharks
Out Now
From ancient megalodons to fearsome Great Whites, this book tells the complete, untold story of how sharks emerged as Earth’s ultimate survivors, by world-leading palaeontologist John Long.
Sharks have been fighting for their lives for 500 million years and today are under dire threat. They are the longest-surviving vertebrate on Earth, outlasting multiple mass extinction events that decimated life on the planet. But how did they thrive for so long? By developing superpower-like abilities that allowed them to ascend to the top of the oceanic food chain.
John Long, who for decades has been on the cutting edge of shark research, weaves a thrilling story of sharks’ unparalleled reign. The Secret History of Sharks showcases the global search to discover sharks’ largely unknown evolution, led by Long and dozens of other extraordinary scientists.
As the tale unfolds, Long introduces an enormous range of astonishing organisms: a thirty-foot-long shark with a deadly saw blade of jagged teeth protruding from its lower jaws and bizarre sharks fossilized while in their mating ritual. With insights into the threats to sharks today, how they contribute to medical advances, and the lessons they can teach us about our own survival, The Secret History of Sharks is a riveting look at scientific discovery with ramifications far beyond the ocean.
