Whether summer of 2022 will be a season of sex or celibacy is yet to be revealed, but the best books of May 2022 feature enough vivid sex and descriptions of desire to last through the hot weather.
There’s Lillian Fishman’s protagonist in Acts of Service, who believes that her body’s purpose is “not to fuck but to get fucked.” Francesca Giacco’s traveller in Six Days in Rome, who takes in many views of the city, including the angle she can see out the window of a stranger’s bed. Or Diana Goetsch, who in her memoir This Body I Wore meets with many other bodies on her path to coming out as trans. You can alternate between turning pages and swiping for your next summer reading buddy.
Not looking for anything steamy? We also have family dramas, skin-care guides, and fairy-tale heroines transported to contemporary trauma support groups. Happy reading!
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Hogarth1/10
Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman (May 3)
“The purpose of my life at large remained mysterious but I had come around to the idea that my purpose as a body was simple,” Eve, the narrator of Acts of Service announces, at the open of the book. “I was meant to have sex—probably with some wild number of people,” she realizes. “I was meant not to fuck but to get fucked.” Okay! Good morning, Eve! Eve’s voice is conversational, frank, and canny as she takes us on her journey to get fucked. Fishman is already earning comparisons to literary darling Ottessa Moshfegh; her style also evokes that of Raven Leilani, the author of the 2020 hit Luster, who described Acts of Service as “depicting the liquid frequencies of need and power with a thoughtful, savage eye.”
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Scribner2/10
Love Marriage by Monica Ali (May 3)
Yasmin is Muslim, the daughter of Bengali immigrants. Joe is secular, the son of a feminist scholar and provocateur. At the hospital where they both work as doctors, their lives seem blendable. But as they bring their families together to put on a wedding, cultures do not just clash but collapse in on themselves. Ali successfully skewers everyone—white feminists, children of immigrants, overconfident male doctors. “Marriage without risk is impossible,” Yasmin’s mother tells her. Watching Ali’s characters discover the truth of that statement is funny and satisfying.
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Hatchette3/10
Six Days in Rome by Francesca Giacco (May 3)
In the immediate aftermath of a breakup, our heroine spends six days in Rome alone—time she was meant to be accompanied by her boyfriend. “Rome doesn’t know what to do with a woman alone,” she reflects, wandering the ancient streets. She processes the relationship as she ducks into churches, slides between a stranger’s linen sheets, and sketches a waitress while drinking a spritz in the late afternoon. Giacco’s rendering of collecting pieces of a shattered heart is relatable and encouraging: “Today I am alone. I am in a beautiful place. I am honest, with nothing to hide. I am better off.” But an even greater draw is the feeling that just under a week in Italy really is included in the cover price, through descriptions of pistachio gelato drowned in olive oil, jasmine snaking up a crumbled Roman column, and exchanging the deep love of a partner for the rough kiss of an espresso-drinking stranger.
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HQ4/10
“Black Skin: The definitive skincare guide” by Dija Ayodele (May 17)
New bible just dropped—Ayodele is an aesthetician, salon owner, and highly sought-after skincare expert in London. Her readable and research-backed book explains everything that your white-centric skincare guides probably skipped: she goes over aging and the science behind the saying “Black don’t crack”, she’ll tell you what you need to know about SPF (Yes, Black women should wear SPF!) and she offers basic skincare knowledge that everyone should read. Skincare goddess Caroline Hirons wrote the foreword.
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Harper Collins5/10
“Holding Her Breath” by Eimear Ryan (May 17)
Beth, a university student in Dublin, is a very particular kind of campus celebrity—the granddaughter of a great, late poet and his brilliant academic wife. Instead of spending first year at school downing beers and dancing, she searches for her place in her grandfather’s long shadow, but finds every relationship colored by her grandfather’s genius, embarking on an affair with a charismatic scholar of her grandfather. At the same time, she’s navigating setbacks in a swimming career that once had an Olympic trajectory. Ryan’s writing is quick and understated and addictive, and the story offers points of entry for many readers—competitive athletes, people who love literary drama, anyone who felt unmoored and different in college.
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Bloomsbury6/10
We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies by Tsering Yangzom Lama (May 17)
It’s a gift to have a Tibetan writer published in English and widely accessible. In We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies, Tsering Yangzom Lama takes readers through 50 years of Tibetan exile, on a journey with two sisters, Lhamo and Tenkyi. The book is a multigenerational family narrative pegged to a part of history most of us don’t know well enough. It opens with National Uprising Day, the day in 1959 when Tibetans surrounded the Dalai Lama’s winter palace to defend the teenage leader from the occupying Chinese army. And it ends with the protagonist describing her profound sense of exile: “This is a familiar threshold, facing in opposite directions: Toward a country I cannot truly enter. And back to a world that cannot be my home.” The characters stand “on this edge of becoming,” Lama writes, poignantly.
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Simon and Schuster7/10
You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi (May 24)
Emezi’s first novel, The Death of Vivek Oji, was a best seller, highly praised by critics and the literary establishment. So it’s particularly thrilling that their follow-up novel is a steamy summer romance. We already know that romance novels can be literary triumphs as well as cotton candy fantasies, and Emezi deftly demonstrates this again in their new book. Amazon is set to produce the adaptation, which will be developed by Michael B. Jordan, Deadline reported last year. Read it now, and get in on the ground floor of the fandom.
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Farrar, Straus and Giroux8/10
This Body I Wore by Diana Goetsch (May 24)
“How can you spend your life face-to-face with an essential fact about yourself and still not see it?” Poet and essayist Diana Goetsch is an impeccable writer, but she’s also a longtime teacher, and it shows. In her memoir of her life and her transness, she is generous in a way many writers who make themselves their own subjects are not. She charts her life, decade by decade, lover by lover, sensation by sensation. As trans people, especially children, are now under constant and increasing attack by state governments, it’s an especially urgent read.
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Simon and Schuster9/10
The Shore by Katie Runde (May 24)
The Shore looks like a beach read, and sure, it’s set at the beach; yes, okay, there are caramel apples and salt taffy. But this novel is, in fact, an emotional family drama about how two teenage girls and their mom living on the Jersey Shore spend a summer of loss. Evy and Liz’s dad has a brain tumor that affects his behavior and turns their mom, Margot, into his round-the-clock aide, grieving for a man who is still living. The girls create a fake online profile to interact with their mother on a support group for people who are caregivers to their spouses. It’s a premise that’s both devastating and a little bit hilarious, and Runde pulls it off beautifully, with endearing characters and deep insights.
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Little, Brown, and Company10/10
How to Be Eaten by Maria Adelmann (May 31)
The women of How to Be Eaten have been tapped for the same “narrative therapy” research experiment in Manhattan—each week, one trauma survivor will tell her story. They meet in a basement, but their lives have been very, very public. The names Gretel and Ruby might ring a bell for you, Bernice and Ashlee, less so. They’re fairy-tale protagonists in contemporary times. Gretel was once kidnapped along with her brother, Hansel; Ruby is known for her riding hood; and Raina, a mom from Queens, has a tale that is not immediately clear. The classic characters transfer horrifyingly well to our times. “They have already laid their fortunes in the hands of the most obvious psychopaths—billionaires and reality TV producers, metaphorical witches and literal wolves,” Adelmann writes. The book is funny and dark, and poignant, as the characters long to be believed in a world that often sees violence against women as just a myth.
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