It’s the second day of the week! It’s also time for a Top 5 Tuesday update. Top 5 Tuesdays was initially created by Shanah @ the Bionic Bookworm but is now currently being hosted by Meeghan @ Meeghan Reads.

This week’s topic: Top 5 anticipated reads for Q2 2026

Title: Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun
Author: Mónica Ojeda
Translated from: Spanish
Release date: April 9

Synopsis: 

The ear is the organ of fear. It is a door to that which is not of this world.

Leaving behind the dread and decay of the city, Noa and her best friend, Nicole, travel up into the Andes, headed for Solar Noise: an eight-day festival that takes place in the infinite expanse of the páramo. Nestled on the side of a volcano, it is a world of mysticism, shamanism and underground music, a world in tune with the thunder of the earth and the bellows of the mountains, a world in which the belief systems of Ecuador’s indigenous communities live on.

Noa also harbours a secret motive for attending the festival: she’s been drawn there in search of her father, who abandoned her as a child, and who now lives somewhere near the festival site. But soon after their arrival, she becomes prone to somnambulism and begins speaking in a voice that is not her own. Uncertain of whether Noa is in danger or is communing with something primal and eternal, Nicole struggles to care for her friend. Until, as the party spills into Inti Raymi – the Incan festival of the sun – the girls’ desire for belonging burns, incandescent, collapsing the thin membrane separating life from death, trauma from transcendence, and ecstasy from oblivion.

Wild and incantatory, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun is both an hallucinogenic trip of a novel, and a heartfelt meditation on love, family and kinship – one that announces the arrival of a major writer. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: John of John
Author: Douglas Stuart
Expected Release: May 5

Synopsis: 

From the Booker-winning author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo comes a vivid, moving, and beautifully crafted novel following a young man returning to his Hebridean island home, a portrait of a close-knit community and a fraying family, of a father’s expectations and a son’s desires

Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the island of Harris to find that little has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal begrudgingly resumes his old life, stuck between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for several decades. Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son’s long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved. As lambing season turns to shearing season, everything seems poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly knotted.

John of John is a singular novel about duty and patience and the transformative power of the truth. It is a magnificent literary work that shows Douglas Stuart working at an even higher level of artistic creation. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Abundance
Author:  Hafeez Lakhani
Expected Release: May 5

Synopsis: 

Two generations of a Muslim Indian family grapple with what parts of life we control and what we must humbly accept in pursuit of the American dream—for readers of Min Jin Lee, Mohsin Hamid, and Ayad Akhtar

In suburban Miami, sixty-year-old Sakeena—co-owner of a Dunkin’ franchise along with her husband, Ramzan—has nine months to live unless she consents to an organ transplant. Thirty years ago, at Ramzan’s behest, she left her beloved Rawalpindi, India, for the United States. In the years that followed, she compromised her belief in naseeb, the Muslim notion of destiny, and acquiesced to fertility treatments. This time, she is adamant that she should live as intended—without medical intervention. As her health deteriorates, Ramzan desperately seeks to reunite their grown children with the hope of convincing Sakeena to extend her life.

But there are complications. Eldest daughter Fareen is consumed by an important business deal that, if successful, will land her a highly desired (and lucrative) promotion. Meanwhile, youngest son Adnan is living abroad and unable to return to the States due to his own unscrupulous business practices, a pattern stretching back to his adolescence. If they have any hope of saving their mother’s life, the siblings must take extraordinary action to wrestle with their life choices, actions that reveal the always-present tension between ambition and fate.

Brought to life by prose that captures the spirit of contemporary Miami as effortlessly as it conveys the challenges of running a Dunkin’ franchise, Abundance is a beautiful, moving read from an exciting new American voice. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Babylon, South Dakota
Author: Tom Lin
Expected Release: May 26

Synopsis: 

From the author of the Carnegie Medal in Fiction winner The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu comes a tantalizing, American West saga about a Chinese American family trying to survive on their Dakota farm as a powerful, mysterious, and morally dubious military secret shapes their lives.

When Saul Keng Hsiu and his wife, Mei Lee, move from China to the United States to take possession of a 160-acre homestead bequeathed to them by a distant relative, all they have are the possessions on their back, some hidden gold, and a pocketful of chrysanthemum seeds. After a rocky start and a long, harsh winter, the couple find themselves successfully raising chrysanthemums and livestock, and soon after, a daughter, Mara.

But when representatives from the US Army Corps of Engineers buy an acre of the Hsiu’s farmland and begin building a missile silo, the inexplicable starts to Mara can commune with the animals on the farm, Mei develops a hidden talent for augury, and the chrysanthemums become impervious to everything. When the Hsius learn that the project on their farm is an effort to make America’s nuclear deterrent invulnerable, they see firsthand the long arm of power and empire.

In the years and generations that follow, increasingly impacted by the silo and its residue, the Hsius experience strange, wondrous, and tragic events on their farm. An ambitious epic and an ode to the beauty and glory of our connection to the natural world, Babylon, South Dakota upends the idea of “strangers in a strange land” to become a classic American story. It is a daring novel about how choices reverberate across generations and asks us what we owe to one another. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Contrapposto
Author: Dave Eggers
Release Date: June 9

Synopsis: 

A sweeping novel about friendship, love, and the lifelong pursuit of art from Dave Eggers, the award-winning, bestselling author of The Circle, Hologram for the King, and The Eyes & the Impossible

Cricket Dib, born on the American prairie, has no particular prospects or ambitions until, in grade school, he realizes he can draw. He soon meets a girl, Olympia Argyros, one year older, who is captivating and brilliant and far more worldly. Recognizing his talent, she convinces him to deface, with profound vulgarity, a popular playground. Under her direction, he does it willingly, already in love, and thus begins a sixty-five-year entwining between Cricket and Olympia, encompassing friendship, working partnership and love affair. Together they go to art school—an experience of dubious value—and then navigate the art world for the next fifty years, together and apart.

Contrapposto is a moving and very funny novel about allies and art, and what it means to be an artist. All through their lives, Cricket sees Olympia as his soulmate and destiny, and while she is always his champion, romantically her eyes are always seeking something—and someone—else. Their love changes over the decades, but their commitment to each other, and their search for meaning in the making of art, never wanes. The novel spans the globe, from New York to Cambodia, Indiana to Paris, and follows Cricket and Olympia through sickness and health, war and death.

The novel is a wild and beautiful examination of the rules and market forces of the art world, but chiefly it’s about two friends who believe they can change that world, and bring new meaning to it, if only they can start their own movement, dodge charlatans, remain open-eyed and open-hearted, avoid going mad, avoid dying young of rare cancers, stay true to their ideals, and never tire of beauty. Not easy, but not impossible, either. (Source: Goodreads)