Once called “the Julia Child of Chinese cooking,” Fu Pei-Mei taught generations of Taiwanese people to cook through her long-running TV show and many cookbooks. King presents not just a biography of an indomitable woman, but a portrait of how cultures eat.
Norton, May 7
Coming Home, by Brittney Griner and Michelle Burford
In February 2022, Griner — arriving in Russia to play basketball in the off-season — was detained by Russian authorities, who claimed she had hash oil in her luggage. The W.N.B.A. star spent 10 months in a women’s penal colony before she was freed in a prisoner swap; this is the story of her ordeal.
Knopf, May 7
If liberal democracy is to survive as a form of government, it needs a complete rethink. So argues Chandler, a British economist and philosopher, in this rousing homage to the political philosopher John Rawls, whose “realistic utopia,” the book contends, provides a blueprint for a society premised on both individual freedom and true equality.
Knopf, May 7
Min’s debut novel is a complicated family story, told in reverse. The novel opens in 2040 with a family simmering with secrets and tensions, and then the story works its way backward to 2014, revealing how each person got to where they are.
Spiegel & Grau, May 7
Whale Fall, by Elizabeth O’Connor
It’s 1938, and 18-year-old Manod has never known a life outside the harsh, sparsely populated confines of her remote and rocky home off the coast of Wales — until a pair of self-styled English ethnographers arrive to both document and disrupt the island’s residents.
Pantheon, May 7
How to survive the strains of middle-age marriage? The unnamed heroine of July’s comic novel plans a cross-country road trip, only to stop 30 minutes from home. There she lavishly redecorates a motel room and begins an odd, passionate but platonic affair with a younger man who works at a rental-car agency.
Riverhead, May 14
Wallace, an award-winning journalist, turns a thoughtful lens on his own grapplings with sexuality, intermittent homelessness and life as the son of a Black single mother fighting to stay afloat. But bleakness is not the operative mode of this debut memoir; the book turns as often toward joy and self-discovery as it does hardship.
MCD, May 14
Challenger, by Adam Higginbotham
The Challenger space shuttle disaster — in which millions of people watched, in real time, as the shuttle exploded, killing all on board — was a pivotal moment for American culture, and certainly its space program. Higginbotham, the author of “Midnight in Chernobyl,” tells the 1986 story in granular detail, using vivid reporting and new archival research to describe a true-life thriller with all-too-real consequences.
Avid Reader Press, May 14
A heady novelist with the instincts of a thriller writer, Kunzru brings his singular mix of dread and intrigue to his latest fiction, an intricate tale of artistic creation, greed and exploitation set in upstate New York under the specter of Covid.
Knopf, May 14
This is the story of a Malaysian high school dropout who bribed and extorted U.S. Navy personnel with gifts, favors and sex to make a steady profit as a military contractor servicing American ships in East Asia ports for inflated prices. As Whitlock, an investigative journalist for The Washington Post, makes clear, the bigger problem is that so many in the Navy decided to look the other way.
Simon & Schuster, May 14
As the fiery front woman of the seminal alt-punk band Bikini Kill and later Le Tigre, Hanna was foundational to the ’90s riot-grrrl movement; she also famously inspired the title of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Her wide-ranging memoir offers a snapshot of that era, as well as the challenging childhood that shaped her.
Ecco, May 14
When the Japanese military took control of a crucial road near the border of Burma in 1942, the Allies were left with no choice but to transport supplies to China by air over a dangerous stretch of the Himalayas. As the conflict drags on, Alexander matches immersive descriptions of perilous flights through blizzards and monsoons with the uneasy negotiations between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek.
Viking, May 14
A photographer begins a clandestine relationship with an injured ballet dancer in Kwon’s second novel, which she recently described as “shot through with physical longing, queer lust and kink.”
Riverhead, May 21
The author of “Crazy Rich Asians” returns with another beach-ready confection starring pampered people in designer clothing behaving badly — this time at a decadent Hawaiian wedding where secrets erupt with the force and heat of lava.
Doubleday, May 21
What do we know about Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, aside from the fact that she was married to John F. Kennedy Jr.? Twenty-five years after their death in a plane crash, Beller asks this question, then fills in the blanks with a thorough examination of a life cut short.
The Editor, by Sara B. Franklin
A noted food journalist pays tribute to a mentor and role model — the former Knopf editor Judith Jones, who, over a six-decade career, published Julia Child, James Beard, John Updike and Sylvia Plath, and was instrumental in seeing Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl” translated into English.
Atria, May 28
