Your Personal Release Report

New releases I picked out for you + a TEASER for something

Here again to deliver some of the most exciting new releases in publishing, all sorted by your color. My goal here everytime I hit send is to give you just a little bit more confidence walking around the new releases section of the bookstore or library — and also to get those libby holds EARLY before the word gets out and you have to wait 62 weeks to read a book.

A few things to share before the recs.

The PDF arrived

Penguin Random House sent over the typeset PDF of Read Your Color last week. I’d been bracing for it for months and then suddenly there it was, sitting in my inbox like a perfectly normal email. Very weird experience tbh! There’s something about seeing your own sentences in the actual fonts, on actual pages, with margins and chapter breaks and a real page 211. Way different voice than google docs. I scrolled through the whole thing in one sitting, occasionally thinking “ahh, wish I could rewrite that sentence”. Oh well.

It comes out November 3. We’re getting closer.

Something is brewing

I can’t say much yet. But I have a friend who runs a massive used-book sorting warehouse — an operation where good books pass through by the truckload — and we’ve been talking. The short version is that there might be a way, soon, to get curated, color-matched books in your hands at prices that make sense, while keeping perfectly good books out of landfills. That’s all I’ll say for now. More when there’s more.

Okay. Onto the books!

The usual disclaimer: These are new releases, re-releases, or new translations — out recently or coming out soon. I haven’t read every one cover to cover. I rely on early reviews, advance reading copies where I can get them, preview chapters, and trusted critics to make my placements. The color sort is my judgment call based on what these books appear to do to the reader, not what they’re about.

---

🟡 Yellow — Keeper of My Kin by Ada Ferrer

In 1963, four years after Castro came to power, Ada Ferrer’s mother fled Cuba with her infant daughter and left her nine-year-old son behind. Keeper of My Kin, out May 19 from Scribner, is the Pulitzer-winning historian’s first memoir, and it braids one family’s letters and silences into the larger story of revolution, exile, and the people who get left on either side of a border. Yellow readers will recognize this book on first contact because it’s a story about connection across distance, about the ache of a family that became geography, and about a daughter quietly piecing together what her parents couldn’t say out loud.

🔴 Red — Five by Ilona Bannister

The premise is the kind of thing that grabs you by the collar. It’s about five strangers who are waiting at a suburban train station for the 7:06 to London Victoria. In the next five minutes, one of them will be dead. Five — Ilona Bannister’s third novel, just out from HQ — unfolds in real time across that five-minute window, weaving each character’s interior life and history into a tightening countdown. Bannister told NPR she wanted to look at the ripple effect a stranger’s death can have on an entire city, and the book has already landed on the International Thriller Writers shortlist for best standalone thriller of the year. Red readers, this is built for you. Pure structural tension, four characters fighting for survival without knowing they’re in the fight, and a real-time ticking clock that doesn’t let you breathe.

🟠 Orange — Babylon, South Dakota by Tom Lin

Tom Lin’s second novel (after the Carnegie Medal–winning The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu) drops May 26 from Little Brown, and the early reviews are good! A Chinese immigrant couple homesteads on the South Dakota plains with a sack of chrysanthemum seeds and a pocket of hidden gold, but then the U.S. Army shows up to build a missile silo on their land. What unfolds is a multigenerational saga that drifts into fabulist territory. You get a daughter who communes with animals, a mother who develops a talent for seeing the future, chrysanthemums that become impervious to everything, and even a dog that cannot be killed. The book has been compared to García Márquez and Cixin Liu in the same breath. Orange readers, this is the kind of sweep you live for! You’ll get epic in scope, lush in prose, transcendent in its strangeness. Kaveh Akbar called it “wonder-full, enchanted and enchanting.” Clear a weekend.

🟢 Green — Moral Economics by Alvin E. Roth

A Nobel Prize–winning economist walks into the most heated debates of our moment and instead of staking a moral flag, asks a different question: what if these were markets, and how would we design them to actually work? Moral Economics arrives May 12 from Basic Books, and Roth (who shared the 2012 Nobel for his work on market design) brings the kind of evidence-based clarity that makes intractable arguments suddenly tractable. This is Green-reader catnip. It’s a book that hands you a better tool for thinking about the “sides” of all the arguments. You’ll close it sharper than you opened it.

🔵 Blue — The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

Strout left Maine for this one. The Things We Never Say (Random House, May 5) follows Artie Dam — high school history teacher, husband, sailor, late middle age — through what looks from the outside like a fully lived life. Inside, he’s plagued by a question: how is it that we know so little about the people closest to us? Then life hands him a secret that rearranges everything. Strout is at her most reflective and philosophical here, and the prose has that Strout signature where nothing flashy is happening on the sentence level and somehow every paragraph lands. Blue readers this is your kind of meditation. Quiet, capacious, the kind of book you finish and then sit with for an hour before doing anything else.

🟣 Purple — Ambivalence by Brian Dillon

Brian Dillon’s new book from Fitzcarraldo Editions (out May 7) is the rarest kind of memoir because it is one that’s actually about reading. It covers the years between seventeen and twenty-six, when Dillon — having lost his mother at sixteen and his father in his early twenties — found his real education in Woolf, Benjamin, Beckett, Barthes, and Derrida. The form is fragments in the present tense. The argument is that radical thinking about literature can change a life and possibly a world. Purple readers, this is THE book. Fitzcarraldo doesn’t put out anything that isn’t doing something formally interesting, and Dillon is one of the best essayists working in English right now. If you’ve ever underlined a sentence and gone back to reread it three times, you already know.

---

That’s the May report. Six books, six colors, one month to chase whichever one calls to you.

If you don’t know your color yet, the assessment is here — over two million people have taken it, and it remains the fastest way to figure out which of these six you’d grab first at a bookstore. And if you’ve already taken it: which of these are you reaching for?

More soon. Including, hopefully, news on that thing I can’t talk about yet.