Extract from ABC News
Memoir, non-fiction and novels are among the best books released in May 2026, as chosen by ABC critics. (ABC Arts: Nicola Heath)
Acclaimed American writer Elizabeth Strout's characters Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton are among the most loved in contemporary literature. In her latest novel, Strout introduces a new cast of characters led by Artie Dam, a genial history teacher with a melancholy streak.
Meanwhile, a Miles Franklin winner takes on alien abductions, Italian legal scholar Francesca Albanese, sanctioned by the US, presents the human tragedy of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and a Scottish Booker Prize winner takes us on a journey to the Outer Hebrides.
These are just some of the books our critics loved this month. Happy reading!
- The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
- Capture by Amanda Lohrey
- Yeah the Boys by Holden Sheppard
- Honey by Imani Thompson
- When the World Sleeps by Francesca Albanese
- Eat Bitter by Lydia Pang
- First Summer by Ekin Oklap
- Childhood by Brendan James Murray
- John of John by Douglas Stuart
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
Viking Fiction
"The more I get to know my characters, the more they tell me what they're going to do and how they're going to be," Strout told ABC Radio National's The Book Show. (Supplied: Penguin Books Australia)
If people said what they really meant, communicated clearly and lived unambiguous lives within properly functional political systems, novelists would be out of a job. The bookshelves are alright, then; and American novelist Elizabeth Strout is free to make art from the things unsaid, misunderstood or never confronted.
Her latest novel, The Things We Never Say, introduces an entirely new cast after years in which she created both worlds and series of novels around her (wonderful, real, spiky) characters Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton, before finally bringing these women together in her 2024 book, Tell Me Everything. But, now, we meet schoolteacher Artie Dam, well liked and passionate about history, with a wife and adult son, plenty of friends and a boat to sail on. Secretly and quietly however, he's aching with loneliness, and can't see the point of going on.
Then, something happens to make him realise the world is worth living in at the same time as the world itself begins to tilt away from him. The novel tilts too, as politics and secrets intervene in the lead up to the 2024 American election. Strout is so good at the detail of ordinary lives, the loves and complications, the relationships of family, the complexity of friendship — but here, she manages to keep that tight focus while expanding her story into a state-of-the-nation examination.
Donald Trump is never named and nor are we subject to obvious lectures. But Artie Dam suddenly discovers that a teaching strategy he has long employed is now suspect. The Civil War, migration, race and equality are no longer up for analysis but instead come with "sides"; this gentle man is under increasing scrutiny, and the things he thought he knew about his own family also begin to come undone.
This is a novel that is quietly furious but refuses to be didactic. Instead, every side character has a backstory, and we're reading our way into the present.
— Kate Evans
Capture by Amanda Lohrey
Text Publishing
Lohrey told ABC Radio National's The Book Show that Capture came from her preoccupation with the philosophical question of doubt. (Supplied: Text Publishing)
Capture begins with an arresting scene: a madman shouting on a university lawn. The students surrounding him pay no attention, captive only to their phones.
Amanda Lohrey, who has won numerous literary awards, including the Miles Franklin in 2021 for Labyrinth, ushers us into a curious world. It is a place of revelations and superstition — a world largely ignored by modernity and its disillusioned horsemen (science, resource extraction, technology and automation) — yet it coexists alongside our world of rational efficiency.
Visiting Prague for a conference, James Mather, a psychiatrist in his 60s, is a rational but open soul. He meets Helena Wolf, a friend and mentor, who he has known since he began studying medicine.
Wolf has an assignment for her former mentee: to study people convinced they have been abducted by aliens. Wolf is confident that Mather, with his combination of generosity and scepticism, is the person for the job.
Someone who needs a bit more convincing, though, is Mather himself. More used to working with clients facing suicide, he wonders: is he seeking distraction? Is engaging with those open to the "perversely sublime", as he puts it, a way of relieving himself of some personal psychic burden?
Yet Mather's research subjects are sane, successful and lucid: an engineer in his 30s. A divorced beautician in her 40s. Twenty-eight people in total. It's not a massive sample, Mather reflects, but it is "bigger and more diverse than the small number that Freud used to construct his radical rethink of the mind".
Lohrey places sly provocations throughout Capture. (Sleek symbols of modernity like ergonomic chairs, for example, are described as "mechanical totems".) There are signs, early in the book, that Mather is nonplussed by some of contemporary thinking's clinical aspects. (The term "eating disorder" prompts him to wonder: what could be more orderly than "fasting unto death"?) Working alongside his cool, considered research assistant, Lucy Cheng, Mather comes to feel he is sharing an "alternative universe" with Lucy and his subjects, one he does not wish to "domesticate".
Capture is especially affecting in those scenes involving Lucy's son and Mather's visits to old friends. It's also briskly paced: I don't think I'm alone in having picked up the novel and happily found myself unable to put it down again until reaching the final pages a few hours later.
Deftly sculpted, filled with resonant motifs and thoughtful reflections on the mysteries of existence — and some witty dialogue — Capture is wise, elegantly wrought and a pleasure to read.
— Declan Fry
Yeah the Boys by Holden Sheppard
Pantera Press
Sheppard won the Western Australian Premier's Book Award for an Emerging Writer in 2019. (Supplied: Hardie Grant Publishing)
West Coast Eagles star "Hammer" is a man with a secret. Terrified of becoming the first openly gay player in the AFL, he takes out his simmering rage on opponents and teammates alike and creates controversy when he hits out at the sport's Pride Round.
Meanwhile, academic over-achiever Zeke is floundering after university. Feeling like "a broken boy who once split himself in two and never recovered", he puts on a polite facade for his parents, his ex-girlfriend and housemate Sabrina, all while chasing hedonistic pleasure in secret.
After Zeke almost hooks up with old schoolmate Charlie in the shadows of a Perth bathhouse, they start hanging out for the first time in years. Charlie invites Zeke to The Tool Shed, a men-only throwback to "when gay bars were for us" that he is working on with gay elder Curtis. Charlie and friends debate collaborating with toxic influencer Xander, "the most squeaky-clean Perth gay", who could give the fledgling business a massive boost.
Zeke starts to find a sense of community playing football with the Perth Centurions, a "proudly mediocre" social team that welcomes gay players. The move brings him back in contact with Hammer, who slept with Zeke and then ghosted him years ago. The lives of the trio, who were once classmates, become further enmeshed when someone starts sending anonymous threats to out the football star. After seeing Charlie — who knows his secret — at a protest against his comments, Hammer suspects his former friend is the blackmailer.
Revisiting the core characters from Sheppard's three previous novels — his 2019 debut Invisible Boys, adapted for TV in 2025, The Brink (2022) and King of Dirt (2025) — Yeah the Boys is timely, punchy and gruffly entertaining, bellowing its cry for gay men to be accepted for who they are, not pigeonholed as glitter-clad Kylie fans.
It celebrates a rough and ready masculinity, revelling in its sexed-up, footy-loving, bourbon-swilling, proudly bogan men. It moves like Eagles star Jack Petruccelle in open space — fast and confident — as these flawed but lovable lost boys chase their vision of freedom.
— Daniel Herborn
Honey by Imani Thompson
The Borough Press
Thompson told British Vogue that Honey was born out of her desire to "flip the lens" on the ubiquitous violence against women she saw on TV. (Supplied: HarperCollins Australia)
Honey is a darkly funny campus novel about female rage and retribution. Protagonist Ysra is a PhD student at Cambridge studying Afropessimism. She spends her time teaching, dating, hanging out with friends and researching ways to kill bad men.
She is both disengaged and enraged by the hatred towards and dismissal of black women she sees both in her research and in British society. One day, she flicks a bee into a man's drink and he drops dead. Suddenly, a bad man is gone. In felling a representative of the very system she is raging against, she wonders if perhaps she's found the answer to her ennui.
Her life is filled with colour again and she begins to rationalise her actions retroactively through her research, reflecting "If violence turns subject into object, then is it only through violence that one can return to a subject position?" Is it only through literally killing her oppressors that she can feel free? This isn't murder — it's reparations; it's "theory in action".
Thompson's deft characterisation humanises Ysra, whose inconsistencies — such as her need for control and contrasting disorderliness — make her wholly relatable despite her murderous tendencies. However, as her violence builds and her justifications become cloudier, the reader is left wondering if this is really revenge against the system or just a woman with an addictive personality chasing a high. What was once "logical" turns to something uglier: "Call it redemption call it rage call it sport."
This is an ambitious debut, both a thriller and a deep interrogation of race, feminism and justice. It pulls on a lot of threads and, while not always following them to the end, offers readers a gripping ride. For fans of Yellowface, Boy Parts and My Sister, the Serial Killer, Honey is a fast-paced, sexy and slightly unhinged read about taking justice into your own hands.
— Rosie Ofori Ward
When the World Sleeps by Francesca Albanese, translated by Gregory Conti
Hardie Grant Books
Albanese told ABC's The Radio National Hour that she draws hope from "the fact there are more and more people eager to break the ties of complicity". (Supplied: Hardie Grant Publishing)
In response to her vocal criticism of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, the Trump administration placed Italian human rights lawyer Francesca Albanese on its sanctions list in July 2025, a measure previously reserved for the likes of imprisoned Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Over the years, Albanese — currently in her second term as United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestine Territories — has written at length about Palestine, mostly in legal and technical terms.
Her new book, When the World Sleeps, is different, laying out the human tragedy of Israel's treatment of its beleaguered neighbour. Each of the book's 10 chapters engages with an aspect of the Palestinian experience through the lens of an individual's story.
The tragic tale of six-year-old Hind Rajab — made into a film, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice film festival — is a case in point. The Palestinian girl survived an Israeli air strike that struck her family's car, killing everyone else, only to be killed in another attack hours later, along with the Red Crescent workers who were on their way to rescue her. Hind is one of more than 20,000 Palestinian children killed since 2023 and Albanese uses her story to preface a damning account of the parlous state of childhood in Gaza, which is characterised by death, injury, illness, poverty, hunger and grief.
In When the World Sleeps, Albanese resists the idea that what is happening in Gaza is a two-sided conflict that began on October 7, 2023, or that Palestinians bear collective responsibility for the Hamas attacks. She labels Israel's actions in Gaza "a full-blown genocide" — a claim supported by international law, numerous UN reports and a whole body of academic scholarship — and calls out Israel for using accusations of antisemitism to shut down criticism of its illegal occupation of Palestine.
The Gaza genocide is "a blemish on humanity for which our grandchildren will hold us to account", writes Albanese, imploring her readers to shake off their indifference to the Palestinian plight. "When the world sleeps, it falls on us, we the people, to wake it up — and now more than ever the world needs an awakening."
— Nicola Heath
Eat Bitter: A Story About Guts and Food by Lydia Pang
Chatto & Windus
"'Eat bitter' is a Chinese idiom, usually spat at you by a salty elder at your impatience or short-sightedness," Pang wrote in the Financial Times. (Supplied: Penguin Books Australia)
Hakka, Lydia Pang explains, translates loosely as "guest families" — the most diasporic of the Han Chinese community, considered nomads, pioneers, people who perpetually adapted, grafted and took risks to survive. It is a history born out of necessity, and Pang's debut is an attempt to honour it — one recipe at a time.
The book is centred on the Hakka idiom — eat bitter — omnipresent in her life, meaning to suffer pain in good humour; to push through difficulty and adversity with grace, before tasting sweetness. It's a more poetic version of "no pain, no gain", and Pang positions it as an antidote to our coddled and modern culture of quick fixes and performative busyness. Eight recipes structure the book, each anchored to a formative moment in her life relating to family, grief, fertility challenges, generational love and career. Food here is not comfort eating; it is processing. A vessel for conversation.
One such recipe is Hot Mess Wontons, poignantly shaped around her return home to Wales from Portland. What is in her eyes an admission of career defeat becomes, through the connective and meditative act of folding wontons with her father, something closer to wisdom. "Surrender," she writes, "is wholly active." It is the book at its best: raw and tender.
The book is timely. Food is our most fundamental need, so why not use it to be subversive? A new generation is doing exactly that, and Pang is among them. Almost diaristic in structure, Eat Bitter uses food as a lens to uncover the moments that have shaped Pang, who argues, ultimately, for "a more confrontational and emotional role for food in our lives".
Pang is a creative director by trade, and it shows; her instincts are sharp and the aesthetic considered. The book's zine origins are occasionally visible; some passages could be trimmed and a few food analogies are slightly stretched. Comparisons to Crying in H Mart are inevitable but feel overblown. Really, anyone who has had a connection to food through culture or heritage, will find something here to resonate with. It's not about nostalgia but more about a reckoning — culturally rich and worth cooking from.
— Ying-Di Yin
First Summer by Ekin Oklap
Summit Books
Oklap is trilingual, speaking Turkish, Italian and English. (Supplied: Simon & Schuster)
It's summer. An unnamed narrator spends most of her time during the holidays in her imagination, reading on the porch — that is, until a new girl moves in down the road.
Something about the new girl arrests her. She dreams about this new 16-year-old, Clara, the day after she arrives. As a child, our narrator enjoyed playing with the boys, but as she grows, she chafes against social norms dictating how young girls and boys should behave. She struggles to fit in. Naive and fairly innocent, her parents are divorced and she lives with her mother, a carer, who is good at understanding children although she ironically has trouble relating to her daughter.
Feeling a shared sense of loneliness, the narrator and Clara bond over mutual interests. The girls have other fortuitous points of connection: there is a mysterious secret rift between Clara's mother and the grandmother they are staying with, recalling the narrator's distance from her own mother.
The narrator discovers that, with Clara, she no longer has to filter her thoughts. She can be herself. She shares vivid childhood memories with her, experiences she has never told anyone else.
Born in Türkiye, raised in Italy, and now living in London, Ekin Oklap's translations from Turkish and Italian have been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and other awards. In First Summer, her debut novel, Oklap subtly captures her narrator's burgeoning sense of closeness to Clara in sylvan and summery prose. The setting of this Sapphic coming-of-age story is never named, although the heat and a reference to the late-90s television show Breakers, a short-lived TV series with its own Sapphic subplot, suggest it is perhaps set somewhere in Australia.
Sweet and gently affecting, this touching, indelibly wrought novel perfectly captures the transformative power of ordinary events in a young person's life. As Oklap writes, "It is a rare and precious feeling to be able to share something with another person, something small and trivial or quite important, and to be held in their mind and understood in their heart, and feel not quite so alone, not quite so bewildered anymore."
— Declan Fry
Childhood: A memoir of growing up, parenting, teaching, and discovering what children need most by Brendan James Murray
Picador Australia
"[Children] have a way of cutting through the adult nonsense and seeing things as they are," Murray told ABC Conversations. (Supplied: Pan Macmillan Australia)
The childhoods Brendan James Murray writes about in his memoir Childhood — a follow-up to his acclaimed 2021 memoir, The School: The Ups and Downs of One Year in the Classroom — aren't particularly happy ones.
There is Murray's former classmate Aiden, whose mysterious and disturbing appearance on a freeway overpass one Boxing Day morning serves as Childhood's structural ballast.
Then there is a little girl on a pink bicycle who is snatched from the street in Seadale — the pseudonym Murray gives his hometown on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula — by a stranger in a blue hatchback and later found murdered. Murray's little sister has the same bike, and the episode triggers an episode of anxiety in the 10-year-old Murray that leads to school refusal, now known as emotionally based school avoidance (EBSA), and months off school.
For Murray, a sensitive and imaginative child, childhood in his concrete-girded hometown was laced with danger and characterised by scarcity. His parents were loving but the family's financial position precarious.
Decades later, as an English teacher at the same high school, Murray is keenly aware of how easy it is for children to slip through the cracks in a system not designed for them. In freewheeling, lyrical prose and frequent imaginative leaps, Murray uses the "many worlds" theory of quantum mechanics to illustrate the misfortune of poverty and how disadvantaged kids are let down in the classroom.
Murray fears the education system, preoccupied with capitalist notions of data and productivity, stamps out the more existential quality of imagination. This loss, he writes, "is one of the greatest invisible tragedies in the lives of children" that "carries them into lives of squandered potential, or worse".
Murray argues there is nothing childish about imagination; rather, it is a critical faculty in the current era of rapid technological change. Children need imagination to determine their path forward in life just as adults need imagination to feel empathy. In a world of increasing income inequality, declining reading rates and the proliferation of generative AI, Murray's book is an urgent cry to pause and consider the effect of these changes on our children.
— Nicola Heath
John of John by Douglas Stuart
Picador
Stuart told Interview Magazine after Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo, he wanted to write about queer loneliness in a rural setting. (Supplied: Pan Macmillan Australia)
Scottish writer Douglas Stuart burst onto the literary scene with his highly autobiographical novel, Shuggie Bain, in 2020, which won the Booker Prize that year. In vivid and bruising prose, it let us into the working-class world of young Shuggie and his alcoholic mum Agnes in a story of survival and grit, shame and pain, love and (eventually) a sexual awakening too. Stuart writes gay love and longing with a sort of fierce tenderness, complete with barriers to fulfilment, which continued into his second novel, Young Mungo.
Now, with his third novel, John of John, we're leaving the mainland and heading to a small, rocky, Scottish island. John-Calum Macleod, known as Cal, left for art school but, as the story opens, he has to return. Every week, he had called his dour father John from a payphone, there to be belaboured with psalms and lines from the Bible, with the harsh words of the Calvinist Free Church. It's all fire and brimstone, judgement and wrath, that feels ancient and cold, with a wind still blowing into the 1990s.
Cal is a young gay man, who outrages his father by dyeing his long hair, dressing as he pleases, defying the rules of the church. John is furious as well as tough, speaking to his son in Scots-Gaelic so his mother-in-law won't hear in their tiny croft; his wife absent and the reason for her leaving a mystery.
Then we realise it's not Cal's story after all. It's John's story. This calloused weaver and sheep farmer has been in love with the man up the road since they were both teenagers, inventing jobs to do together so they can touch with tenderness and desire.
Father and son both work with colour and thread and beauty. If only they knew what else they shared.
— Kate Evans
Tune in to ABC Radio National at 10am Mondays for The Book Show and 10am Saturdays for The Bookshelf.
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