5 Marvelous New Books for May 2024

Up next month we have a new ‘darker’ short story collection from Stephen King, a time travelling debut from Kaliane Bradley and an eerie horror tale from Layla Martinez. Enjoy our picks of 5 Marvelous New Books for May 2024.

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5 Marvelous New Books for May 2024

You Like It Darker by Stephen King

From legendary storyteller and master of short fiction Stephen King comes an extraordinary new collection of twelve short stories, many never-before-published.

“You like it darker? Fine, so do I,” writes Stephen King in the afterword to this magnificent new collection of twelve stories that delve into the darker part of life—both metaphorical and literal. King has, for half a century, been a master of the form, and these stories, about fate, mortality, luck, and the folds in reality where anything can happen, are as rich and riveting as his novels, both weighty in theme and a huge pleasure to read. King writes to feel “the exhilaration of leaving ordinary day-to-day life behind,” and in You Like It Darker, readers will feel that exhilaration too, again and again.

“Two Talented Bastids” explores the long-hidden secret of how the eponymous gentlemen got their skills. In “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” a brief and unprecedented psychic flash upends dozens of lives, Danny’s most catastrophically. In “Rattlesnakes,” a sequel to Cujo, a grieving widower travels to Florida for respite and instead receives an unexpected inheritance—with major strings attached. In “The Dreamers,” a taciturn Vietnam vet answers a job ad and learns that there are some corners of the universe best left unexplored. “The Answer Man” asks if prescience is good luck or bad and reminds us that a life marked by unbearable tragedy can still be meaningful.

King’s ability to surprise, amaze, and bring us both terror and solace remains unsurpassed. Each of these stories holds its own thrills, joys, and mysteries; each feels iconic. You like it darker? You got it.

Shanghailanders By Juli Min

The future contained in the past, the past contained in the future . . .’

2040: Leo Yang – handsome, distinguished, a real Shanghai man – is on the train back to the city after seeing his family off at the airport. His wife, Eko, and their two eldest children, Yumi and Yoko, are headed for Boston, though one daughter’s revelation will soon reroute them to Paris.

2039: Kiko, their youngest daughter and an aspiring actress, decides to pursue fame at any cost, like her icon Marilyn Monroe.

2038: Yumi comes to Yoko in need, after a college-dorm situation at Harvard goes disastrously wrong.

As the years rewind to 2014, Shanghailanders brings readers into the shared and separate lives of the Yang family parent by parent, daughter by daughter, and through the eyes of those in their orbit. Through the speed, technology and history of this old, futuristic city, we catch glimpses of an uncertain, unknowable future.

Whatever may change, universal constants remain: love is complex, life is not fair and family will always be stubbornly connected by blood, secrets and longing. Brilliantly constructed and achingly resonant, Shanghailanders is a mesmerising exploration of marriage, relationships and the layered experience of time.

The Physics of Sorrow By Georgi Gospodinov

From the author of the International Booker Prize-winning Time Shelter comes another mind-expanding adventure in the realms of memory, empathy and the history we can’t escape, as the unnamed narrator tries to live with a pathological condition that leads him to wander into other people’s memories.

‘In the small and the insignificant – that’s where life hides, that’s where it builds its nest.’

Our unnamed narrator is not well. He suffers from attacks of ‘pathological empathy’, which cause him to wander unbidden into other people’s memories. He moves from recollection to recollection – from a Bulgarian country fair in 1925, where he meets a Minotaur, to inside the mind of a slug, as it is swallowed by his own Grandfather.

Part family history, part coming-of-age story, part meditation on life in Communist Europe, The Physics of Sorrow is a dazzlingly inventive, mind-expanding novel from one of Europe’s most important writers.

Woodworm By Layla Martinez

The house breathes.

The house contains bodies and secrets.

The house is visited by ghosts, by angels that line the roof like insects, and by saints that burn the bedsheets with their haloes.

It was built by a small-time hustler as a means of controlling his wife, and even after so many years, their daughter and her granddaughter can’t leave.

They may be witches or they may just be angry, but when the mysterious disappearance of a young boy draws unwanted attention, the two isolated women, already subjects of public scorn, combine forces with the spirits that haunt them in pursuit of something that resembles justice.

Layla Martínez’s eerie debut novel Woodworm is class-conscious horror that drags generations of monsters into the sun.

The Ministry of Time By Kaliane Bradley

In the near future, a disaffected civil servant is offered a lucrative job in a mysterious new government ministry gathering ‘expats’ from across history to test the limits of time-travel.

Her role is to work as a ‘bridge’: living with, assisting and monitoring the expat known as ‘1847’ – Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to find himself alive and surrounded by outlandish concepts such as ‘washing machine’, ‘Spotify’ and ‘the collapse of the British Empire’. With an appetite for discovery and a seven-a-day cigarette habit, he soon adjusts; and during a long, sultry summer he and his bridge move from awkwardness to genuine friendship, to something more.

But as the true shape of the project that brought them together begins to emerge, Gore and the bridge are forced to confront their past choices and imagined futures. Can love triumph over the structures and histories that have shaped them? And how do you defy history when history is living in your house?

If you enjoyed 5 Marvelous New Books for May 2024 check out our Book of the Month Selection for April