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It’s time to check out book club picks for May 2024!
How’s your reading month going so far? I’m currently reading Emily Henry’s Funny Story and I’m really enjoying it. I’ve read quite a bit of her books but I missed Happy Place, however, am so glad I picked up Funny Story.
So I consider May the first summer month, but I know in some places in can still be cold. When we lived in Colorado, it actually snowed for Mother’s Day one year! But as many schools get ready to be out for summer, we’re all thinking about warm weather and sunny days.
And summer equals— a ton of books published each month! As always, my monthly lists covers three new releases and two older titles. The older titles include my original book club questions too.
If you’re looking for more new releases, be sure to check out my huge must-read book club picks for 2024 list!
Let’s get to the book picks!
Newer Titles
The Heirloom by Jessie Rosen (May 7)
The Heirloom by Jessie Rosen sounds like the ideal book to kick off summer reading season. The novel follows a recently engaged woman whose long-held superstition about heirloom engagement rings sends her on a journey around the world to ensure her ring—and her marriage—contains “forever energy.” So excited for it! Synopsis here:
Shea Anderson’s beloved Nonna had endless rules for a happy, healthy life: avoid owls, never put a hat on a bed, and never, ever accept a marriage proposal that comes with an heirloom ring. Happily ever after is hard enough without bad karma in the mix.
Naturally, panic sets in when Shea’s boyfriend, John, proposes with an heirloom ring. Yes is her answer, but Nonna’s warning sets Shea on a mission to ensure the ring contains forever energy: She will find its previous owners wherever they may be. With the help of her long-suffering big sister and a nosy journalist eager for a big story, Shea embarks on a journey that takes her from Los Angeles and New York to Italy and Portugal.
Sophisticated, cinematic, and full of lively observations, The Heirloom is a diamond-sharp read for everyone who’s ever tried to make their own good luck.
Shanghailanders by Juli Min (May 7)
I’m so intrigued by the premise of Shanghailanders by Juli Min. This debut novel follows a cosmopolitan Shanghai household backward in time—beginning in 2040 and moving through our present and the recent past—exploring their secrets, their losses, and the ways a family makes and remakes itself across the years. Here’s the synopsis:
2040: Wealthy real estate investor Leo Yang—handsome, distinguished, a real Shanghai man—is on the train back to the city after seeing his family off at the airport. His sophisticated Japanese-French wife, Eko, and their two eldest children, Yumi and Yoko, are headed for Boston, though one daughter’s revelation will soon reroute them to Paris. 2039: Kiko, their youngest daughter and an aspiring actress, decides to pursue fame at any cost, like her icon Marilyn Monroe. 2038: Yumi comes to Yoko in need, after a college-dorm situation at Harvard goes disastrously wrong.
As the years rewind to 2014, Shanghailanders brings readers into the shared and separate lives of the Yang family parent by parent, daughter by daughter, and through the eyes of the people in their orbit—a nanny from the provinces, a private driver with a penchant for danger, and a grandmother whose memories of the past echo the present. We glimpse a future where the city’s waters rise and the specter of apocalypse is never far off. But in Juli Min’s hands, we also see that whatever may change, universal constants remain: love is complex, life is not fair, and family will always be stubbornly connected by blood, secrets, and longing.
Brilliantly constructed and achingly resonant, Shanghailanders is an unforgettable exploration of marriage, relationships, and the layered experience of time.
Long After We Are Gone by Terah Shelton Harris (May 14)
A book that absolutely sounds ideal for book clubs is Long After We Are Gone by Terah Shelton Harris. The story follows four siblings—each fighting their own personal battle—who return home in the wake of their father’s death in order to save their family’s home from being sold out from under them. Here’s the synopsis:
“Don’t let the white man take the house.”
These are the last words King Solomon says to his son before he dies. Now all four Solomon siblings must return to North Carolina to save the Kingdom, their ancestral home and 200 acres of land, from a development company, who has their sights set on turning the valuable waterfront property into a luxury resort.
While fighting to save the Kingdom, the siblings must also save themselves from the secrets they’ve been holding onto. Junior, the oldest son and married to his wife for eleven years, is secretly in love with another man. Second son Mance can’t control his temper, which has landed him in prison more than once. CeCe, the oldest daughter and a lawyer in New York City, has embezzled thousands of dollars from her firm’s clients. Youngest daughter Tokey wonders why she doesn’t seem to fit into this family, which has left an aching hole in her heart that she tries to fill in harmful ways. As the Solomons come together to fight for the Kingdom, each of their façades begins to crumble and collide in unexpected ways.
Told in alternating viewpoints, Long After We Are Gone is a searing portrait on the power of family and letting go of things that no longer serve you, exploring the burden of familial expectations, the detriment of miscommunication, and the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children.
Older Titles
A Great Country by Shilpi Somaya Gowda
For an impactful literary fiction story that focuses on a family, be sure to check out A Great Country by Shilpi Somaya Gowda. It’s one of the best books I’ve read so far in 2024. So not quite ‘old’ as it’s only been out since March, but want to make sure it’s on your radar. Very impactful and thought-provoking. Check out my book club questions here.
Pacific Hills, California: Gated communities, ocean views, well-tended lawns, serene pools, and now the new home of the Shah family. For the Shah parents, who came to America twenty years earlier with little more than an education and their new marriage, this move represents the culmination of years of hard work and dreaming. For their children, born and raised in America, success is not so simple.
For the most part, these differences among the five members of the Shah family are minor irritants, arguments between parents and children, older and younger siblings. But one Saturday night, the twelve-year-old son is arrested. The fallout from that event will shake each family member’s perception of themselves as individuals, as community members, as Americans, and will lead each to consider: how do we define success? At what cost comes ambition? And what is our role and responsibility in the cultural mosaic of modern America?
For readers of The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett and Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, A Great Country explores themes of immigration, generational conflict, social class and privilege as it reconsiders the myth of the model minority and questions the price of the American dream.
The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult
A new Jodi Picoult book will publish in August, but I was thinking back to how much I enjoyed her older title, The Book of Two Ways. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend it! Go in with an open mind and then let me know what you think. Check out my book club questions here.
Everything changes in a single moment for Dawn Edelstein. She’s on a plane when the flight attendant makes an announcement: Prepare for a crash landing. She braces herself as thoughts flash through her mind. The shocking thing is, the thoughts are not of her husband but of a man she last saw fifteen years ago: Wyatt Armstrong.
Dawn, miraculously, survives the crash, but so do all the doubts that have suddenly been raised. She has led a good life. Back in Boston, there is her husband, Brian, their beloved daughter, and her work as a death doula, in which she helps ease the transition between life and death for her clients.
But somewhere in Egypt is Wyatt Armstrong, who works as an archaeologist unearthing ancient burial sites, a career Dawn once studied for but was forced to abandon when life suddenly intervened. And now, when it seems that fate is offering her second chances, she is not as sure of the choice she once made.
After the crash landing, the airline ensures that the survivors are seen by a doctor, then offers transportation to wherever they want to go. The obvious destination is to fly home, but she could take another path: return to the archaeological site she left years before, reconnect with Wyatt and their unresolved history, and maybe even complete her research on The Book of Two Ways—the first known map of the afterlife.
As the story unfolds, Dawn’s two possible futures unspool side by side, as do the secrets and doubts long buried with them. Dawn must confront the questions she’s never truly asked: What does a life well lived look like? When we leave this earth, what do we leave behind? Do we make choices . . . or do our choices make us? And who would you be if you hadn’t turned out to be the person you are right now?
Happy reading!
