The best books to read in May: new paperbacks from Ocean Vuong, RF Kuang and Nick Clegg

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some must-read paperbacks, from a campus novel to a history of language Ocean Vuong’s second novel is a 416‑page tour of the edgeland between aspirational fantasy and self-deception. It opens with a long slow pan over the fictional small town of East Gladness, Connecticut, beginning with ghosts that rise “as mist over the rye across the tracks” and ending on a bridge where the camera finds a young man called Hai –“19, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light” – preparing to drown himself. Instead of jumping from the bridge, Hai crosses it, to be adopted on the other side by 82-year-old Grazina, a woman suffering mid‑stage prefrontal lobe dementia. He will become her proxy grandson; they will be each other’s support in a crap world. It will be a disordered but productive relationship. Grazina, born in Lithuania, “an old country, far away”, lives on a street known locally as the Devil’s Armpit, takes 14 pills a day, and always eats Stouffer’s Salisbury Steak for dinner. She needs a carer; Hai, a pillhead in remission but longing to be back in the arms of opioids, needs a more constructive narrative of himself.