The Bookish Mindset

The month of multiple bank holidays is finally with us, so let me help you with the best of this month’s new releases. Get the kettle on, feel the sun on your skin and get ready for a new book. Sounds perfect, right? It’s definitely the perfect time to pick up a book being the National Year of Reading too, we’re ready to Go All In!

So let me share some of my favourite new releases for the month. Just tap on the titles to get more info from Bookshop.org and to support my work. Or if you prefer an audiobook, then I’d definitely recommend Libro.fm!

The Library of Flowers – LC Chu. Fantasy. Paperback. A blend of memory and magic, inheritance and identity, all wrapped up in a cosy bow. Publish date: 05/05.

Five – Ilona Bannister. Thriller. Hardback. Five strangers, five minutes until a train arrives and one will be dead before it does. Publish date: 05/05.

Havisham – Elle Machray. Historical. Hardback. Easily one of my favourite reads this year. Havisham reimagines Miss Havisham of Great Expectations as you’ve never seen before. Publish date: 07/05.

Honey – Imani Thompson. Thriller. Hardback. A Cambridge student on a feminist killing streak, full of campus politics and quick wit. Publish date: 07/05.

Homebound – Portia Elan. Sc-Fi. Hardback. A coming of age and space odyssey novel in which a coder connects lives through the creation of a video game. Publish date: 07/05.

One Leg on Earth – Pemi Aguda. Literary. Hardback. Set in Lagos with supernatural hunts and feelings, comes a coming of age story from the winner of the Deborah Rodgers Foundation Writers Aware 2020. Publish date: 07/05.

The Between Worlds B&B – Amy Mae Baxter. Paperback. A cosy and charming fantasy set around a magical B&B. Publish date: 07/05.

The Victors – Wren James & Beth Fuller (Illus). YA Fantasy. Paperback, Graphic Novel. After saving the world, Dirk comes back to university to find out Medusa is his roommate. Publish date: 07/05.

Sweet Heat – Bolu Babalola. Romance. Hardback. Kiki and Malakai are back, but they’ve broken up since you last met them and now have to spend time together at their best friends wedding.. What could go wrong? Publish date: 07/05.

Smallie – Eden McKenzie-Goddard. Literary. Hardback. A tale of three generations of Barbadian-British affected by the Windrush scandal. Publish date: 07/05.

Republic of Memory – Mahmud El Sayed. Sci-Fi. Hardback. Inspired by the Arab Spring and set 200 years after the destruction of Earth, The Safina is searching for it’s next inhabitable world. Publish date: 14/05.

Andromeda – E. S. McLeod. Historical. Hardback. Following the Black princess of Aethiopia, this is a beautiful queer love story. Publish date: 14/05.

Ordinary Love – Marie Rutkoski. Literary. Paperback. Emily and Gen used to be in love and 20 years later they find each other again, involved in each others far from straightforward lives. Publish date: 14/05.

Not With A Bang – Temi Oh. Sci-Fi. Hardback. The world has been torn apart by extinction while a family fights its way back to safety and survival. Publish date: 21/05.

John of John – Douglas Stuart. Literary. Hardback. From the author of Young Mungo and Shuggie Bain, comes a story of readjustment. Publish date: 21/05.

Uprising – Tahmima Anam. Literary. Hardback. Told through the eyes of their children, this is a story of sex workers revolting. Publish date: 21/05.

Katabasis – R. F. Kuang. Dark Academia. Paperback. Academics venture into the underworld to save their adviser. Publish date: 21/05.

Borderline Fiction – Derek Owusu. Literary. Paperback. A novel told between two parallel narratives, exploring masculinity and mental health. Publish date: 21/05.

The Emperor of Gladness – Ocean Vuong. Literary. Paperback. From author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous comes another heart-breaking novel. A suicide is prevented by an elderly widow who convinces him there is another way. Publish date: 28/05.

Have you planned to pick any of these up? I’d love to know!

If you like what you’ve read and would like to access more content, I’d love if you could take a look at my substack and consider supporting my content on there too. You can also find more content on my Instagram here.

And don’t forget to check out my other blogs and reviews – you can find books with similar themes in the same folder link below, or click back onto blogs to see the whole offering.

Last updated 17/05/2026