Releasing in May, we have a fascinating biography of Emily Brontë and an insightful dive into the world of Artificial Intelligence. Enjoy 5 New Non Fiction Books May 2026!
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5 New Non Fiction Books May 2026
This Dark Night by Deborah Lutz
Emily Jane Brontë was just 27 when she started writing the wayward and electric novel Wuthering Heights. Three years later, she was dead. Out of step with her own time and remembered as the strangest of the Brontë sisters, there’s much that we don’t know about her — most of her papers were destroyed after her death. But as Deborah Lutz explores in this, one of the first biographies of Emily in 20 years, the writing that has survived seethes with storm and strife and with the beautifully desolate landscape of Yorkshire.
Drawing on a vast quantity of unexplored archival materials, Deborah reconstructs the texture of Emily Brontë’s days, bringing us closer to one of the greatest and fiercest writers we have, by showing us her creative process and her confidence in her strange art.
This book has much to reveal to readers of Wuthering Heights, as we accompany Emily around the wild moorlands she loved so much. Also threaded through with the contemporary politics and events of the era (from the early labour movements of the Chartists and reformists, to the slave uprisings in the colonies), and authors and locals that Emily read about or knew (from proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft to the masculine lesbian Anne Lister).
A Course Called Home by Tom Coyne
One day, at the urging of a course superintendent who is hoping to save his local nine-hole gem from shuttering just shy of its one hundredth anniversary, Coyne pays a visit to Sullivan County Golf & Country Club in upstate New York. When he arrives, the course is buried under ice and snow; what he can see of the clubhouse is falling apart. By the time he leaves, all he can see is his next adventure: discovering how owning a course is vastly different from playing one.
A Course Called Home is Coyne’s most personal and profound book yet: a heartfelt and often humorous chronicle of restoration, resilience, and finding purpose in unexpected places. It’s a story about digging in—literally and figuratively—as Coyne trades tee times for mower hours, learning how to contour a fairway, water a green, and revive a course rich in history but fading from memory.
I Am Not a Robot by Joanna Stern
What happens when intelligent machines aren’t just in our pockets but are also driving our cars, making our decisions, folding our laundry, and educating our kids? You’ve heard the hype: AI will make us healthier, give every child a personalized tutor, run our businesses more efficiently, return hours of free time to our overworked brains, and make discoveries previously unimagined by humankind. The AI future is going to be unlike any other technological revolution.
But what does that really mean? And will AI truly make life better? To find out, award-winning journalist Joanna Stern surrendered her life to artificial intelligence for one year. The results are both hilarious and unsettling. I Am Not a Robot is like a time machine trip to the very near future, where AI promises to be your doctor, chauffeur, teacher, masseuse, coworker, therapist, financial planner, chef, housekeeper, and even . . . romantic partner.
Your colleague might be using ChatGPT to write emails at work, but Joanna used AI tools and robots to do household chores, to manage her health, and to transport her family on vacation. If there was a decision to make or a task to do, she let AI go first. Along the way, she conducted exclusive interviews with the tech leaders building this future, then reported back from the front lines as your funny, no-nonsense tour guide. Of course, tech’s sunny promises never tell the whole story, and that’s what Joanna is here to share.
Filled with illustrations and photographs, this book offers less hype, more clarity, and as little jargon as humanly (or robotically) possible. It’s an AI guide for ordinary people—not the tech bros who tried to sell you a cruise to the metaverse or an NFT of a cartoon monkey. This book is not the definitive story, because we’re only a few years into the AI revolution. But after a year of living as a human lab rat, Joanna delivers one of the clearest—and funniest—pictures yet of what’s really happening and what it means for you.
Big Time by Laura Vanderkam
Many of us have an adversarial relationship with time. We’re always trying to beat the clock—behaviour rooted in a fear that time is scarce and must be obsessed over, hoarded and ultra-optimised. But time management expert Laura Vanderkam argues that even busy people can come to feel that time is abundant.
Drawing on original research about how hundreds of real people spend their time, and her own experience of tracking her time for a decade, Vanderkam offers simple tactics for how to manage a complex life, stick with long-term projects by breaking big goals into tiny steps and make the most of leisure time many people don’t even notice. By turns surprising, thought-provoking and encouraging, Big Time shows readers that the daily experience of time can be quite spacious—and that, managed well, each day’s hours can be a source of happiness and satisfaction.
The Lost Empire of Emanuel Nobel by Douglas Brunt
With the exception of the tsar, Emanuel Nobel was likely the wealthiest man in early twentieth-century Russia, and one of the wealthiest in the world. Over three generations, he and his family grew the Russian petroleum industry into a behemoth that surpassed even John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. The Nobels imported the best practices from America and improved on them, transforming every aspect of the industry. Though Emanuel’s uncle Alfred would become world famous thanks to his creation of the Nobel Prize, the even more successful Nobels in Russia have been largely forgotten. The reason why is one of history’s most gripping untold stories.
Working in the oil fields of southern Russia at the same time as Emanuel was a troubled young man from a peasant family in Georgia. Though educated to be a priest, he took a different path when he discovered the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx. In and out of prison in Siberia, charismatic and committed, always at the center of a fight, this young man would become known to the world as Joseph Stalin, a leader of the Bolshevik Revolution and eventually one of the most brutal dictators in history. Directly in Stalin’s crosshairs was Emanuel Nobel, who represented everything Stalin despised about capitalism. As the world turned upside down, Emanuel began to plan a life-or-death escape from Russia. But would he make it out in time? And what would be the fate of the immense empire he and his family had built?
Sweeping across more than a hundred years of history, from the dawn of the Victorian Age to World War I to the Russian Revolution and beyond, this captivating book chronicles one of the most influential men in history, a man whose name has been stricken from memory, and returns him thrillingly to life.
If you enjoyed 5 New Non Fiction Books May 2026, check out 5 New Non Fiction Books April 2026