The Best Book Club Books of May

Bestselling and award-winning poet-turned-novelist Ocean Vuong’s latest looks at found family, survival, and second chances. One summer evening, 19-year-old Hai stands atop a bridge, ready to jump, when Grazina, a dementia-stricken elderly widow, talks him into going down another path. So begins the pair’s journey together, which involves Hai becoming Grazina’s caretaker and him reckoning with himself and his place in his community. Zooming out, we see what it means to live in the margins in America, and how loneliness, love, and labor are foundational to this society.

You’ve seen many coming-of-age novels by now, I’m sure, but have you ever seen a coming-of-middle-age one? In Curtis’s debut, Abe Jacobs is a 43-year-old Ahkwesáhsne man who begrudgingly returns to the reservation where he grew up after more than 20 years. The reason for his return? Doctors have told him he’s dying, and he’s decided on the way treatment he never thought he would: a healing at the hands of his unceremonious, recovered alcoholic great uncle Budge. Now, he remains skeptical of being healed, but in his exploring it, there’s a seed of hope. Through witty lines and the musings of Abe’s poet alter ego, Dominick Deer Woods, we see him confront all those things that kept him away from his home for all that time.

From the author of the bestselling The Three Mothers comes a book that hits right at one of the biggest cultural issues of the moment. In Erased, Tubbs looks at America’s particular brand of patriarchy and what it has costed us. She uses academic research to explore how, despite this country’s history of enforcing a strict gender binary that is bound to whiteness, there has always been freedom fighters who fought against patriarchy despite necessary, oppression-fighting tools being hidden. Those tools, Tubbs contends, are available to us now.

Bechdel, the lesbian cartoonist so iconic as to have a tool named after her that measures representation in media, is back with a funny and biting look at the life of a pygmy goat sanctuary manager and cartoonist named Alison Bechdel. Alison found success with her first graphic memoir about growing up with a taxidermist father, which got adapted into an award-winning show. But then her outdoorsy partner goes viral for a how-to wood-chopping video, and suddenly Alison is jealous and having to contend with her own privilege.

Creepy-gothic-queen and author of The Luminous Dead and The Death of Jane Lawrence has granted us a medieval fever dream of a novel in our time of need.

Right as Aymar Castle is on its last rations—and certain extreme measures start to be considered—from being under siege for six months, miraculous saviors arrive. Suddenly, the food is replenished and divine figures of saints have arrived, even though the gates have been barricaded. What’s more, the castle inhabitants fall into a hedonistic stupor, courtesy of their saviors. That is, except for war hero Ser Voyne, nun-turned-sorceress Phosyne, and serving girl Treila. The three women are the only ones to resist falling completely into the widespread debauchery that happens within the castle, despite the army waiting just outside its walls. But they aren’t totally immune, from the mysterious and terrible saviors or each other. Eventually, they realize that a vast world restructuring will need to transpire to save the castle. But first, violence.

Here, Tourmaline brings luster to the life of Marsha P. Johnson, who was said to have thrown the first brick during the 1969 Stonewall Uprising. This is actually the first official biography of Marsha, and through it, we see the queer icon as an activist and a performer who worked alongside RuPaul and the drag troupe The Hot Peaches.

This has to be one of the juiciest-sounding gothic novels ever. It, like any other gothic novel worth its salt, starts with a death, Vivian Yin’s specifically. Yin was a trailblazing starlet and the first Chinese actress to win an Oscar, but spent the latter years of her life as a recluse in a sprawling California garden estate. When she dies, her daughters expect to inherit her home, but a last minute will change grants it to an estranged family member. So now both sides of the family move into the mansion to lay a claim to it. But there are questions about what happened in the last week’s of Vivian’s life, and something sinister is haunting her mansion’s halls.

Vara, author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated The Immortal King Rao, explores the long-lasting effects of having AI-powered technology communicating like human beings. She uses the viral essay about her sister’s death that she composed with the help of ChatGPT, as well as her history using online chat rooms as a teen to look at how technology has changed the way we communicate, and how we can use it to our actual benefit (and not just some corporate entity’s).