Spring 2017 Reading List

By Haruki Murakami (Knopf, May 9)

These seven stories circle Murakami’s perennial theme of isolation—a man held in a house he can’t leave, a university student who is asked to date his coworker’s girlfriend—in prose that maintains the quiet potency of the Japanese author’s longer works.

By Courtney Maum (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, May 30)

The plot: A New York City trend forecaster is worshipped by the tech industry until her predictions start to suggest that the next fad will be to ditch smart devices for human intimacy. This novel from the author of I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You is a satirical but sincere look at our thirst for “in-personism.”

By Arundhati Roy (Knopf, June 6)

In her long-awaited second novel, 20 years after she won the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things, Indian journalist Roy tells the story of several “mad souls”—a resident of a graveyard, a bereaved father—finding love under the most improbable of circumstances.

By David Grann (Doubleday)

The author of The Lost City of Z investigates the little-known story of the murder of at least two dozen Osage Indians in Oklahoma in the 1920s, soon after the discovery of large oil reserves on their land made them some of the richest people in the U.S., and reveals the role the case played in the creation of the FBI.

By W. Kamau Bell (Dutton, May 2)

Sociopolitical comedian and Emmy-nominated host of the docuseries United Shades of America, Bell is known for his fearless approach to hotly debated subjects. A believer in laughing through tension, Bell here addresses parenting, law enforcement, and why he’s proud to call himself a “blerd” (black nerd).

By Colm Tóibín (Scribner, May 9)

The Brooklyn author’s empathetic retelling of Aeschylus’s Oresteia focuses on the motivation behind each family member’s murderous act. Tóibín, who has a knack for reimagining age-old stories (see The Testament of Mary), here explores the paranoia that comes with power.

By Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May 9)

Theroux once said, “Some large families are like nations in a long period of civil war.” His latest novel is a semiautobiographical account of one such brood on Cape Cod, struggling under the tyranny of a frugal, pious, overbearing matriarch who cannot escape the exacting gaze of her writer son.

By Sarah Gerard (Harper Perennial)

Florida has more pressing problems than invasive Burmese pythons and sinking coastlines, at least according to Gerard—whose affecting collection of essays examines the driving forces behind addiction, religion, and homelessness on her native Gulf Coast with a journalistic eye and a memoirist’s flair.

By Paula Hawkins (Riverhead, May 2)

The new thriller by the author of The Girl on the Train is set in northern England, where a single mother and a teenage girl are found dead at the bottom of a river just weeks apart. The subsequent investigation reveals the women’s perplexingly entwined histories.

By Maile Meloy (Riverhead, June 6)

Largely inspired by Richard Hughes’s 1929 novel, A High Wind in Jamaica, about kids who are accidentally taken by pirates, Maile Meloy's Do Not Become Alarmed also focuses on children who find themselves in peril, the perspective flipping between the lost kids and their frantic parents.