Paperbacks to Look Out For in May 2026: Part One

Lots of paperbacks to look forward to as we head towards what publishers see as the holiday reading season. My first choice might well fall into that category. Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory sees an apparently perfect marriage between two academics begin to crumble through the long summer vacation. Simone’s made her mark as the star of their college’s creative writing department with a successful memoir under her belt while Ethan’s struggled to publish a novel since he was twenty-six. Despite this mismatch, they’re happy together, their long marriage seemingly unassailable yet both will have strayed by the end of the summer. ‘Deliciously smart and bitingly funny, Seduction Theory is a novel about love and betrayal, truth and fiction, power and attraction’ says the blurb suggesting some enjoyable entertainment.

Eric Puchner’s Dream State is a doorstopper which takes its readers from wedding preparations in the late twentieth century through to the mid-twenty-first before coming full circle with the wedding itself. When the novel opens, Charlie, Cece and Garrett are in their late twenties. Charlie forges ahead in his career as an anaesthesiologist but while Cece and Garrett have embarked on adult life, they’re not entirely tethered to it. Puchner charts a path for these three that leads through marriage, parenthood, tragedy and ageing over a half-century which sees the climate crisis worsening, always with the friendship between Charlie and Garrett at its foundation, holding firm despite the challenges thrown at it. Puchner knows how to spin an engrossing story, lightening it now and again with a dash of humour, and his characters are well drawn.

In Maria Turtschninoff’s Tangled Roots an old soldier lays claim to land in the Finnish forest from which he tries to scratch a living. His descendants continue to farm his croft over centuries, despite the challenges of the wilderness in which it sits. ‘Like dragonflies darting over the marsh, their lives glimmer briefly and then are gone: a young girl entranced by the forest folk, a faithless fiancé who meets his match beneath the age-old branches, a farmhand with a strange obsession…. What endures is the wild, and the certainty that wherever we put down roots, the land will grow roots in us too’ says the somewhat florid blurb which might have put me off but I’m attracted to the novel’s setting.

Anna Hope’s Albion spans five days as the Brooke family bury the man who’s wielded so much influence over their lives. Frannie and her father established the Albion Project a decade ago, rewilding the Sussex estate as a contribution to a better future for all. Before his death, Philip promised his son enough land to establish a centre for the psilocybin therapy Milo believes cured his addiction. While Frannie and Milo wrangle over the estate’s precarious finances the daughter of one of Philip’s many lovers has decided to attend his funeral, about to drop a bombshell. An ambitious novel, which tackles important issues while engaging readers in an engrossing story. I found the ending a bit too neat and tidy, but it does leave readers with hope.

Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s The Sisters follows four Swedish Tunisians across several decades and continents. The paths of the three Mikkola sisters, each very different from the other, crisscross Jonas’s from Tunis to Berlin to New York. When Evelyn disappears, it’s Jonas who manages to track her down. Not much else to be gained from the blurb but I enjoyed both The Family Clause and Everything I Don’t Remember making me keen to read this one despite its doorstepping length.

Lucy Steeds’s The Artist met with lots of approbation when it was published last year, and deservedly so. It begins in 1957 with a woman gazing at a painting she knows intimately in London’s National Gallery before winding back to the summer of 1920 when a young art journalist travels to France, hoping to interview the notoriously reclusive Edouard Tartuffe. Tata’s every need is attended to by Ettie, so self-effacing Joesph barely notices her at first. As the summer wears on, Joseph unravels a perplexing mystery, and Ettie sees a way for her talent to be recognised. Steeds’s debut is gorgeously immersive, the summer Provençal landscape and the food it produces vividly evoked.

A dark, brooding novel, Chloe Michelle Howarth’s Heap Earth Upon It is very different from her debut, Sunburn. Set in 1960s rural Ireland, it follows the O’Learys who’ve left their home village hoping to put a distance between themselves and the most recent of the tragedies that have struck their family. The siblings arrive on a horse drawn cart to a good deal of curtain twitching but Tom sets about ingratiating himself, desperate for work and eager for acceptance. We’re kept guessing, as Howarth slowly reveals the events that overshadow the O’Learys through hints and implications in the siblings’ narratives as the lies Tom has spread around the village begin to unravel.

That’s it for the first batch of May’s paperbacks. A click on a title will take you either to my review or to a more detailed synopsis should you want to know more. If you’d like to catch up with new fiction, it’s here and here. Paperbacks next week when H and I are back from our travels.