May’s reading list spans a cult memoir, a revenge debut, a formally strange Polish novel and two quietly assured stories of female coming-of-age. Stories across the board.
The Memoir Everyone Is Talking About
The Make-Believe by Hannah Murray
Hannah Murray’s memoir moves from the structured world of film sets into something far more disorienting: a slide into a cult-like belief system with striking clarity. There’s a softness to her writing that makes the darker moments land even harder. It isn’t always an easy read – but that’s why it matters. This is a story about losing your footing, and the slow, painful process of finding it again.
The Darkly Comic Debut
Honey by Imani Thompson
In this brilliant debut novel, we meet Yrsa: an acerbic, bored Cambridge post-graduate student. When she accidentally kills a cheating, manipulative PhD supervisor by flicking a bee into his drink, she is suddenly filled with something resembling purpose: seducing and murdering diabolical men. What follows is a revenge novel that blends thriller, unhinged-girl literature, Afropessimism and hyper-contemporary storytelling. Thompson asks the question most readers won't say aloud: how would you get away with murder if you could? By the final pages, you’ll have been cheering Yrsa on longer than you expected. Honey is dripping with menace and revenge.
The Fever Dream Of Feminist Fire
Hexes of the Deadwood Forest by Agnieszka Szpila, translated by Scotia Gilroy
Fair warning: this book contains scenes of people having sex with plants. It makes a lot more sense once you’ve read it. Anna Frenza is the unsavoury CEO of a Polish oil company, who hates ‘tree huggers’ – until she’s filmed sleepwalking into the woods and having sexual relations with an oak. Admitted to a mental hospital, she moves between the present day and 16th-century ecclesiastical Silesia, where she falls in with the Earthen Ones, an all-women group who reject the patriarchy for a life in the woods. We’ve never read a book quite like it.
The Summer Novel
First Summer by Ekin Oklap
Ekin Oklap, whose translations from Turkish and Italian have been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, makes her fiction debut with a novel set across a formative summer that reshapes two girls on the cusp of adulthood. The connection between the young narrator and Clara feels fragile and inevitable, and the book evokes that fleeting threshold where imagination and desire blur. For readers who loved Call Me By Your Name, this is a similarly soft, hazy, and quietly devastating story.
The Deeply Affecting Novel
Chiquitita by Pedro Carmona-Alvarez, translated by Sean Kinsella
Nominated for the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and featured in our 2026 books to look out for list, Chiquitita follows Marisol as her childhood displacement from Chile echoes into adult life. Carmona-Alvarez writes with spare elegance, letting small details carry emotional weight. It’s an exploration of loss, identity and resilience that stays with you long after reading.
There’s More – Delve Deeper Into So Late In The Day With The Service95 Book Club...
WATCH Dua’s interview with author Claire Keegan
LISTEN to their conversation with the Service95 Book Club podcast
DISCOVER the books that inspired Claire Keegan to write So Late In The Day
EXPLORE an essay by American writer Jackson Katz on how misogyny diminishes men
