The Best New Books to Read in May

The Manor of Dreams begins with the death of a fictional starlet named Vivian Yin, who has left her crumbling mansion to an unlikely heir: the daughter of her long-deceased former housekeeper. Vivian’s children now find themselves in a battle over their mother’s broken-down estate against someone they suspect may have had a hand in her demise. In hopes of piecing together Vivian’s final days, the warring families move into the dilapidated home together only to discover that it is being haunted by the ghosts of the late actor’s complicated past.

Jemimah Wei’s debut, The Original Daughter, tells the story of an unlikely sisterhood. Genevieve Yang’s life is completely upended when, at eight years old, she suddenly gains a de facto younger sister who is actually the daughter of an estranged relative. Set in Singapore at the turn of the millennium, the unexpected siblings quickly bond over the societal pressure to be the perfect daughter only to have a bitter betrayal tear them apart later in life. When Genevieve’s mother gets sick, the two must try and put their differences aside in this decades-spanning saga about ambition, resentment, and forgiveness.

With her debut memoir, journalist Amanda Hess uses her own experience as a first-time mom to look at what it’s like to have and raise a child in the social media age. But Second Life isn’t the new What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Hess isn’t offering parenting tips to tech-savvy caretakers. Instead, she takes readers on an eye-opening adventure down the parenting internet rabbit hole where she explores, among many things, the personification of pregnancy tracking apps, the surreal network of prenatal genetic tests, and the origins of the growing “freebirther” movement.

In this follow-up to writer and editor Michele Filgate’s acclaimed 2019 anthology, What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About, authors, poets, and essayists including Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Susan Muaddi Darraj, and Kelly McMasters unspool their complicated relationships with their dads. Across 16 essays, What My Father and I Don’t Talk About tackles difficult topics such as parental estrangement, toxic masculinity, and emotional availability in hopes of encouraging us to consider how we are shaped by our family.

After tackling the lives of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Ulysses S. Grant with his previous biographies, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow returns with a definitive portrait of another American icon: Mark Twain. Across a whopping 1,200 pages, Chernow takes a comprehensive look at the life of the author born Samuel Langhorne Clemens. The book delves into Twain’s early years working odd jobs—steamboat pilot, miner, journalist, just to name a few—before the release of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. From there, Chernow traces Twin’s life and career up until his grief-stricken final days marked by undiagnosed madness.

The latest novel from Kevin Wilson, the best-selling author of Nothing to See Here, starts with an unusual family reunion that leads to an even crazier family road trip. Twenty years after her father walks out on her and her mom, organic farmer Madeline “Mad” Hill meets Reuben, a 40-something mystery writer who claims to be her older half-brother. With the help of a private detective, Reuben has tracked down their dad, who, it turns out, has fathered multiple children. Now, Reuben is hitting the road to gather up their siblings and confront their absentee dad, and he wants Mad to come with him. Looking for answers for her dad’s disappearance, she agrees, embarking on an adventure to finally understand where she came from.

Madeleine Thien’s century-spanning fourth novel, The Book of Records, is set in a mysterious shape-shifting enclave for displaced people where the past, present, and future collide. After fleeing their home in southern China, Lina and her ailing father have taken up residence at “the Sea.” There, they live alongside a diverse group of neighbors including a Jewish scholar from 17th century Amsterdam, a poet of Tang Dynasty China, and a philosopher fleeing Nazi persecution in 1930s Germany. After her dad reveals his role in their family’s tragic past, Lina looks to her time traveling community for advice on how to reckon with her devastation.

With his twelfth book, best-selling British nature writer Robert Macfarlane argues that rivers are not just flowing bodies of water, but living beings with legal rights. Inspired by the Rights of Nature movement, the global effort to legally protect nature, Macfarlane visits a cloud-forest in northern Ecuador, the wounded creeks, lagoons, and estuaries of southern India, and a wild river in Quebec at risk of being dammed to show how activists, artists, and lawmakers are putting the concept of environmental personhood to the test.

Shamanism, anthropologist Manvir Singh’s debut, traces the evolution of the titular spiritual practice. To investigate the origins of the ancient religion, Singh travels to the Mentawai archipelago in Indonesia, a cave in southwest France, and the northwest Amazon. He studies with shamans, healers who are believed to have the power to commune with spirits, in hopes of understanding why their practices have become as popular with Burning Man festival goers as they are with Wall Street traders. Blending memoir, investigative journalism, and anthropological fieldwork, Shamanism is a deep dive into a religious tradition that is as mysterious as it is timeless.

With her second memoir, novelist Yiyun Li examines the unbearable pain of losing both her sons to suicide. Things in Nature Merely Grow paints a loving portrait of each of her teenage children, who died nearly seven years apart, and details her own battles with depression and suicidal ideation. (The latter was the focus of her 2017 debut memoir, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life.) Throughout, Li does not shy away from the magnitude of these losses. Instead, she writes of radical acceptance, offering a profound look at how a parent continues to live in a world without her children.

In Rochelle Dowden-Lord’s debut, Lush, four wine experts—a wunderkind sommelier, a food writer, a social media influencer, and the owner of a popular, but mediocre wine brand—are invited to a French vineyard for the weekend. While there, they’ll get the chance to taste the rarest wine in the world. But in order to achieve this professional milestone, they’ll have to confront their personal demons in this intoxicating look at the world of wine and those who love it.

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