Robots, Soccer, King Arthur and More : 10 Books To Read in May

May often kicks off the serious summer reading season with prestige fiction, major nonfiction, literary sci-fi, and the kinds of books that fill vacation bags, book clubs, and annoying group chats. This year, with the North American World Cup, May is the month that kicks off the kicking off. Here are this month’s books most worth your attention.

• • I Am Not a Robot — Joanna Stern
    The former Wall Street Journal tech columnist spent all of 2025 letting AI into nearly every corner of her life — a funny, unnerving, and highly readable dispatch from the future that is already here and indeed, may already have gone.
    Publisher: Harper Business
    Release date: May 12, 2026
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• • Radiant Star — Ann Leckie
    Leckie returns to the Imperial Radch universe with a standalone about scarcity, power, and imperial decline . She’s such a good writer that this will be one of the year’s biggest science fiction releases.
    Publisher: Orbit
    Release date: May 12, 2026
    Order/Preorder (Bookshop)
  • 
    Galahad and the Grail — Malcolm Guite
    The almost 70-year-old white-bearded Anglican priest, academic and minor Youtube star releases his first volume of the Arthur sequence, Merlin’s Isle. Guite’s Arthurian epic in verse includes Camelot, Grail quests, Christian mysticism, and the healing of a broken land.
    Publisher: Rabbit Room Press
    Release date: April 20, 2026 (but we are reviewing it in May!)
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• • Backtalker — Isaac Fitzgerald
    From a New York Times best-seller, a book about walking with yourself through history. What it’s like to walk, and talk, and think, in a land where other things happened. For the walkers, talkers, and thinkers among you. Blurbed by Tara Westover, Colson Whitehead, and Ethan Hawke!
    Publisher: Knopf
    Release date: May 12, 2026
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• • Backtalker — Kimberlé Crenshaw
    A major new work from one of the most influential legal thinkers of the last half-century — race, law, argument, and public power.
    Publisher: Simon and Schuster
    Release date: May 5, 2026
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• • The Long Game — Leander Schaerlaeckens
    U.S. soccer’s long march toward relevance gets the serious treatment — perfect timing ahead of the World Cup circus.
    Publisher: Viking
    Release date: May 12, 2026
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• • Relegated — Todd Smith
    An American goes to find himself on a voyage of discovery not in India, not in Mexico, not in Africa, but on a  football pilgrimage from the Premier League to the bottom of the English pyramid — pints, pies, doomed clubs, and transcendence through misery.
    Publisher: Gallery Books
    Release date: May 19, 2026
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• • The Things We Never Say — Elizabeth Strout
    Strout is a best-selling Pulitzer Prize winning writer and this is getting a lot of excellent pre-release attention. Artie, the history teacher at the center of this novel, seems fulfilled until he finds out something that cracks him wide open.
    Publisher: Random House
    Release date: May 5, 2026
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• • Steve Jobs in Exile — Geoffrey Cain
    For 12 years Steve Jobs left Apple and both he and the now behemoth floundered. Cain gives the NeXT years the full-scale treatment: Silicon Valley exile, reinvention, and the strange road back to Apple.
    Publisher: Portfolio
    Release date: May 19, 2026
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• Inside the Box — David Epstein
  A smart business/psychology argument for why constraints improve creativity — catnip for productivity obsessives and management readers.
  Publisher: Riverhead
  Release date: May 5, 2026
  Order/Preorder (Bookshop)