There’s nothing I love more than adding new books to my ever-growing Amazon wishlist. And the fact I’m even more active in the online book community nowadays means I’m doing it all the time — everyone just posts so many good book recommendations that I can’t control myself. Perhaps I’m deluding myself into thinking I can actually read that many books in my mortal lifespan, but if that’s the biggest problem I have right now I’ll take it!
With so many new releases I’m itching to get my hands on, it was hard to narrow down my selection. But these are definitely at the top of my wishlist and can’t wait for them to be in my hands.
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May Releases
Can you believe that it’s already May? I mean, not to sound like a cliche but this year has gone by fast.
There’s so many interesting releases for May, but I think I’m most excited for The Mother of All Things by Alexis Landau and Evocation by S. T. Gibson. I have a good feeling that I’ll really sink my teeth into these reads and maybe even finish them in one sitting!
The Mother of All Things by Alexis Landau
Kept busy by her life as a wife and mother, art history professor Ava Zaretsky has little time to devote to her research and writing. But while enduring the burden of solo parenting on her husband’s summer film shoot in Bulgaria, she has a chance encounter with her fierce feminist mentor from college, which changes everything.
Ava is swept up into a circle of women who reenact Greco-Roman female rites of initiation, bringing her research to life and illuminating where it intersects with her own story. By exploring the eternal stages of woman-hood across time, The Mother of All Things delivers a revelatory tale of a woman coming to terms with her evolving sense of responsibility to herself and her family, as she achieves a new appreciation of the gifts of female wisdom and self-belief.
Lost in the Garden by Adam S. Leslie
Heather, Rachel and Antonia are going to Almanby. Heather needs to find her boyfriend who, like so many, went and never came back. Rachel has a mysterious package to deliver, and her life depends on it. And Antonia—poor, lovestruck Antonia just wants the chance to spend the day with Heather.
So off they set through the idyllic yet perilous English countryside, in which nature thrives in abundance and summer lasts forever. And as they travel through ever-shifting geography and encounter strange voices in the fizz of shortwave radio, the harder it becomes to tell friend from foe.
Creepy, dreamlike, unsettling and unforgettable—you are about to join the privileged few who come to understand exactly why we don't go to Almanby.
The Devil knows your name, David Aristarkhov.
As a teen, David Aristarkhov was a psychic prodigy, operating under the shadow of his oppressive occultist father. Now, years after his father’s death and rapidly approaching his thirtieth birthday, he is content with the high-powered life he’s curated as a Boston attorney, moonlighting as a powerful medium for his secret society.
But with power comes a price, and the Devil has come to collect on an ancestral deal. David’s days are numbered, and death looms at his door.
Reluctantly, he reaches out to the only person he’s ever trusted, his ex-boyfriend and secret Society rival Rhys, for help. However, the only way to get to Rhys is through his wife, Moira. Thrust into each other’s care, emotions once buried deep resurface, and the trio race to figure out their feelings for one another before the Devil steals David away for good…
A Crane Among Wolves by June Hur
Hope is dangerous. Love is deadly.
1506, Joseon. The people suffer under the cruel reign of the tyrant King Yeonsan, powerless to stop him from commandeering their land for his recreational use, banning and burning books, and kidnapping and horrifically abusing women and girls as his personal playthings.
Seventeen-year-old Iseul has lived a sheltered, privileged life despite the kingdom’s turmoil. When her older sister, Suyeon, becomes the king’s latest prey, Iseul leaves the relative safety of her village, traveling through forbidden territory to reach the capital in hopes of stealing her sister back. But she soon discovers the king’s power is absolute, and to challenge his rule is to court certain death.
Prince Daehyun has lived his whole life in the terrifying shadow of his despicable half-brother, the king. Forced to watch King Yeonsan flaunt his predation through executions and rampant abuse of the common folk, Daehyun aches to find a way to dethrone his half-brother once and for all. When staging a coup, failure is fatal, and he’ll need help to pull it off—but there’s no way to know who he can trust.
When Iseul's and Daehyun's fates collide, their contempt for each other is transcended only by their mutual hate for the king. Armed with Iseul’s family connections and Daehyun’s royal access, they reluctantly join forces to launch the riskiest gamble the kingdom has ever
Save her sister. Free the people. Destroy a tyrant.
You May Now Kill the Bride by Kate Weston
The bride-to-be drops dead at her bachelorette weekend, with all of her bridesmaids as suspects for her murder, in this wry thriller full of deadly twists and characters you'll love to hate.
Who will be left standing when the bouquet is thrown?
Lauren, Saskia, Dominica, Farah and Tansy have been best friends since grade school. They wonder if that was the last time they all actually liked each other. As adults, their lives have splintered. Farah is engaged and is fast becoming a complete bridezilla. Dominica's a successful divorce attorney with no time for anything but work. Tansy runs a vegan cafe and is preparing for a shotgun marriage to awful Ivan. Lauren has had a total “failure to launch” in her career and love life, consumed by a man who has spent years stringing her along. Saskia has married into wealth and a different circle of friends in a fancy part of London. Some days it seems that the only thing holding the group together is an event that happened in their youth twenty years ago—an incident they’ve all sworn secrecy about to protect each other.
When the group is reunited at Tansy’s bachelorette-cum-wellness-retreat weekend, it doesn’t take long for old grudges to surface. Then the bride-to-be chokes to death on a poisoned drink, and all of the bridesmaids are suspects.
Kate Weston explores the complexities of female friendship in this searingly funny, page-turning thriller. One of these bridesmaids may be a killer, and the group had better watch their sash-covered backs, because your oldest friends aren’t always your closest…
June Releases
For us folks in the Southern Hemisphere, June is the beginning of winter so I’m looking for books that I can read while sipping on hot chocolate in an oversized sweatshirt and rugged up under a blanket.
I feel like A Novel Love Story by Ashley Poston will be that book for me, but I think I’m most excited for Swift River by Essie J. Chambers. As soon as I read the blurb I was adding it to my wishlist — it sounds incredible.
Swift River by Essie J. Chambers
It’s the summer of 1987 in Swift River, and Diamond Newberry is learning how to drive. Ever since her Pop disappeared seven years ago, she and her mother hitchhike everywhere. But that’s not the only reason Diamond stands out: She’s teased relentlessly about her weight, and the fact that since Pop’s been gone, she is the only Black person in all of Swift River. This summer, Ma is determined to declare Pop legally dead so they can collect his life insurance money, get their house back from the bank, and finally move on.
But when Diamond receives a letter from a relative she’s never met, key elements of Pop’s life are uncovered. She is introduced to two generations of African American Newberry women, spanning the 20th century and revealing a much larger picture of prejudice and abandonment, of love and devotion. As pieces of their shared past become clearer, Diamond gains a sense of her place in the world and in her family. But how will what she’s learned of the past change her future?
A Novel Love Story by Ashley Poston
Eileen Merriweather loves to get lost in a good happily-ever-after. The fictional kind, anyway. Because at least imaginary men don’t leave you at the altar. She feels safe in a book. At home. Which might be why she’s so set on going to her annual book club retreat this year—she needs good friends, cheap wine, and grand romantic gestures—no matter what.
But when her car unexpectedly breaks down on the way, she finds herself stranded in a quaint town that feels like it’s right out of a novel…
Because it is.
This place can’t be real, and yet… she’s here, in Eloraton, the town of her favorite romance series, where the candy store’s honey taffy is always sweet, the local bar’s burgers are always a little burnt, and rain always comes in the afternoon. It feels like home. It’s perfect—and perfectly frozen, trapped in the late author’s last unfinished story.
Elsy is sure that’s why she must be here: to help bring the town to its storybook ending.
Except there is a character in Eloraton that she can’t place—a grumpy bookstore owner with mint-green eyes, an irritatingly sexy mouth and impeccable taste in novels. And he does not want her finishing this book.
Which is a problem because Elsy is beginning to think the town’s happily-ever-after might just be intertwined with her own.
Middle of the Night by Riley Sager
The worst thing to ever happen on Hemlock Circle occurred in Ethan Marsh’s backyard. One July night, ten-year-old Ethan and his best friend and neighbor, Billy, fell asleep in a tent set up on a manicured lawn in a quiet, quaint New Jersey cul de sac. In the morning, Ethan woke up alone. During the night, someone had sliced the tent open with a knife and taken Billy. He was never seen again.
Thirty years later, Ethan has reluctantly returned to his childhood home. Plagued by bad dreams and insomnia, he begins to notice strange things happening in the middle of the night. Someone seems to be roaming the cul de sac at odd hours, and signs of Billy’s presence keep appearing in Ethan’s backyard. Is someone playing a cruel prank? Or has Billy, long thought to be dead, somehow returned to Hemlock Circle?
The mysterious occurrences prompt Ethan to investigate what really happened that night, a quest that reunites him with former friends and neighbors and leads him into the woods that surround Hemlock Circle. Woods where Billy claimed monsters roamed and where a mysterious institute does clandestine research on a crumbling estate.
The closer Ethan gets to the truth, the more he realizes that no place—be it quiet forest or suburban street—is completely safe. And that the past has a way of haunting the present.
We Shall Be Monsters by Tara Sim
Frankenstein meets Indian mythology in this twisty, darkly atmospheric fantasy where the horror is not the monsters you face but the ones you create.
After her sister Lasya’s sudden death, Kajal vows to do whatever it takes to bring her back. No cost is too great, even if it means preventing Lasya’s soul from joining the cycle of reincarnation. But as Kajal prepares for the resurrection, her sister’s trapped soul warps into a bhuta—a violent, wraith-like spirit hell-bent on murdering those who wronged it in life. With each kill, the bhuta becomes stronger and fiercer, and Kajal’s chances of resurrecting Lasya with her soul intact grow slimmer.
Blamed for Lasya’s rampage and condemned as a witch, Kajal is locked away with little hope of escape. That is, until two strangers who label themselves rebels arrive and offer to free her. The catch: She must resurrect the kingdom’s fallen crown prince, aiding their coup to overthrow the usurper who sits the throne. Desperate to return to Lasya’s body, Kajal rushes to revive the crown prince . . . only to discover that she’s resurrected another boy entirely.
All her life, Kajal has trusted no one but her sister. But with Lasya dead and rebels ready to turn her over to the usurper’s ruthless soldiers, Kajal is forced to work with the boy she mistakenly revived. Together, they must find the crown prince before the rebels discover her mistake, or the bhuta finally turns its murderous fury on the person truly responsible for Lasya’s death: Kajal.
Rue Siebert might not have it all, but she has enough: a few friends she can always count on, the financial stability she yearned for as a kid, and a successful career as a biotech engineer at Kline, one of the most promising start-ups in the field of food science. Her world is stable, pleasant, and hard-fought. Until a hostile takeover and its offensively attractive front man threatens to bring it all crumbling down.
Eli Killgore and his business partners want Kline, period. Eli has his own reasons for pushing this deal through—and he’s a man who gets what he wants. With one burning exception: Rue. The woman he can’t stop thinking about. The woman who’s off-limits to him.
Torn between loyalty and an undeniable attraction, Rue and Eli throw caution out the lab and the boardroom windows. Their affair is secret, no-strings-attached, and has a built-in deadline: the day one of their companies will prevail. But the heart is risky business—one that plays for keeps.
What book releases are you looking forward to in May and June? Are you adding any of the above books to your TBR? Let me know in the comments!
Until next time,
- Madeline
I've read an ARC of You May Now Kill The Bride and it was a great ride of a book!
adding we shall be monsters to my TBR list asap - thank you for this!