And just like that, we wrapped up the fifth month of 2025. How time flies! May has been, essentially, an extension of April. It was quite “heated” here in the Philippines. The summer heat has been oppressive, although the rainy season has recently begun to make its presence felt. Nevertheless, I hope everyone is somewhere comfortable. As the year enters its sixth month, how is the year so far? I hope it has been treating everyone with kindness. If not, I hope that the coming months will be brimming with positive changes, growth, development, life-changing lessons, and blessings. I hope 2025 will go well for everyone. I hope everyone’s wishes and prayers will be answered.

But before I could wave goodbye to May, let me share the book titles I acquired during the month. A stark contrast to April when I acquired just three books, May was literally about binge-buying books. I acquired way more than I can read; this is against my New Year’s resolution of reading more and buying less. Because of the number of books I acquired during the month, I will be dividing it into parts. The first part features works that have been recently released.

Title: Deviants
Author: Santanu Bhattacharya
Publisher: Fig Tree
Publishing Date: 2025
No. of Pages: 285

Synopsis: 

Vivaan, a teenager in India’s silicon plateau, has discovered love on his smartphone. Intoxicating, boundary-breaking love. His parents know he is gay, and their support is something Vivaan can count on, but they don’t know what exactly their son gets up to in the online world.

For his uncle, born thirty years earlier, things were very different. Mambro’s life changed forever when he fell for a male classmate at a time, and in a country, where the persecution of gay people was rife under a colonial-era law criminalizing homosexuality.

And before that was Mambro’s uncle Sukumar, a young man hopelessly in love with another young man, but forced by social taboos to keep their relationship a secret at all costs. Sukumar would never live the life he yearned for, but his story would ignite and inspire his nephew and grand-nephew after him.

Bold and bracing, intimate and heartbreaking, Deviants is a story of the histories we inherit and the legacies we leave behind.

Title: Water Moon
Author: Samantha Sotto Yambao
Publisher: Del Rey
Publishing Date: 2025
No. of Pages: 372

Synopsis: 

On a backstreet in Tokyo lies a pawnshop but not everyone can find it. Most will see a cozy ramen restaurant. And only the chosen ones – those who are lost – will find a place to pawn their life choices and deepest regrets.

Hana Ishikawa wakes on her first morning as the pawnshop’s new owner to find it ransacked, the shop’s most precious acquisition stolen, and her father missing. And then into the shop stumbles a charming stranger, quite unlike its other customers, for he offers help instead of seeking it.

Together, they must journey through a mystical world to find Hana’s father and the stolen choice – by way of rain puddles rides on paper cranes, the bridge between midnight and morning, and a market in the clouds.

But as they get closer to the truth, Hana must reveal a secret of her own – and risk making a choice that she will never be able to take back.

Title: Vanishing World
Author: Sayaka Murata
Translator (from Japanese): Ginny Tapley Takemori
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Publishing Date: 2025 (2015)
No. of Pages: 233

Synopsis: 

Amane is ten years old when she discovers she’s not like everyone else. Her school friends were all conceived the normal way, by artificial insemination, and raised in the normal way, by parents in ‘clean’, sexless marriages. But Amane’s parents committed the ultimate taboo: they fell in love, had sex and procreated. As Amane grows up and enters adulthood, she does her best to fit in and live her life like the rest of society: cultivating intense relationships with anime characters, and limiting herself to extramarital sex. Still, she can’t help questioning what sex and marriage are for.

When Amane and her husband hear about Paradise – Eden, an experimental town where residents – women and men fitted with artificial wombs – are selected at random to be artificially inseminated en masse, the family unit does not exist and children are raised collectively and anonymously, they decide to try living there. But can this bold experiment create the brave new world Amanae desires, or will it push her to breaking point.

Title: The South
Author: Tash Aw
Publisher: 4th Estate
Publishing Date: 2025
No. of Pages: 280

Synopsis: 

When his grandfather dies, a boy named Jay travels south with his family to the property he left them, a once-flourishing farm that has fallen into disrepair. The trees are diseased, the fields parched from months of drought.

Still, Jay’s father, Jack, sends him out to work the land or whatever land is left. Over the course of these hot, dense days, Jay finds himself drawn to Chuan, the son of the farm’s manager, different from him in every way except for one. Out in the fields, and on the streets into town, the charge between the boys intensifies. Inside the house, the other family members confront their own regrets, and begin to drift apart. Like the land around them, they are powerless to resist the global forces that threaten to render their lives obsolete.

At once sweeping and intimate, The South is a story of what happens when private and public lives collide. It is the first in a quartet of novels that form Tash Aw’s masterful portrait of a family navigating a period of great change – a reimagined epic of our times.

Title: The Emperor of Gladness
Author: Ocean Vuong
Publisher: Penguin Press
Publishing Date: 2025
No. of Pages: 397

Synopsis: 

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Garzina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to transform Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community on the brink.

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Ocean Vuong’s writing – formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness – are on full display in this bighearted story of chosen family, unexpected friendship, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.

Title: Dream Count
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Publishing Date: 2025
No. of Pages: 399

Synopsis: 

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until – betrayed and brokenhearted – she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America – but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is it true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations of the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.

Title: Flesh
Author: David Szalay
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Publishing Date: 2025
No. of Pages: 349

Synopsis: 

Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour – a married woman close to his mother’s age – as his only companion. Their encounter shift into a clandestine relationship that István barely understands, and his life soon spirals out of control.

As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the twenty-first century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.

Spare and penetrating, Flesh is the finest novel yet by a master of realism, asking profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.

Title: Sister Europe
Author: Nell Zink
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Publishing Date: 2025
No. of Pages: 195

Synopsis: 

Naema, an elderly princess dedicated to her pet causes, is in a bind: Struck by a malady that maroons her in Montreux, she’s unable to host an exclusive gala dinner in Berlin to honor the author Masud al-Huzeil for his lifetime achievement in Arabic literature. Not only is she unable to attend, RSVPs have been slow to materialize, and she’s reduced to begging the ancient award winner to find some attendees at the last minute. Masud invites his old friend Demian, a native Berliner, who in turn invites his two best friends: the troubled innocent Livia and an American publisher, Toto, who will do anything for a free meal.

But Toto doesn’t come alone. In tow are his younger internet date – she’s stood him up often enough to be nicknamed “the Flake” – and Demian’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Nicole. Not to mention the cop who’s been trailing Nicole since she left the red-light district. Presiding over the affair is Naema’s infinitely rich, endlessly disaffected grandson, Prince Radi, whose pass at Nicole culminates in an epic midnight food run that changes all their lives.

With sophistication and tenderness, Nell Zink weaves a vividly colored tapestry of a milieu at odds with itself, taking her trademark ambiguity, daring, and humor to new heights.