How big are the books of May? So big that one of them features three name-brand authors for the price of one.

That would be the latest from award-winning Francine Prose, whose novel “Five Weeks in the Country” is about a real-life beef between two literary giants. Her book comes out the same day as “Mare,” which is about the intense relationship between a woman and her beloved horse and is the adult debut from young people’s author Emily Haworth-Booth.

Here are five other titles we can’t wait to get our hands on this month:

‘The Calamity Club’ by Kathryn Stockett

Stockett has made readers wait 19 years for a follow-up to her blockbuster “The Help,” but what she lacks in speed, she makes up for in heft: “The Calamity Club” is 656 pages long. Like “The Help,” it’s set in Mississippi in the 20th century and, like “The Help,” it’s about female strangers who bond despite their differences. This time, they include a young resident of an orphanage who, during the Great Depression, becomes friends (and forms the titular club) with two women on the margins of society. One other similarity with “The Help”? A first-person narrator with a vivid, wise-cracking voice: “I arrived here at the orphanage two birthdays ago. Most folks just call it the Orphan or else the Old Orphan, though I have yet to find where this New Orphan is and believe me I have asked.” (May 5)

‘Five Weeks in the Country’ by Francine Prose

Hans Christian Andersen really did visit Charles Dickens at his British country estate in 1857, and the bickering Dickens family really did grow to hate him over the course of what turned out to be a lengthy stay. Some details are known about his visit (“Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks — which seemed to the family AGES,” read a note Dickens pinned on a wall) but Prose, whose novels include “Blue Angel” and “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris, 1932,” imagines what else happened between Andersen and the Dickens clan. Pro tip for hosts: Don’t invite guests when your marriage is falling apart. (May 5)

‘The Tuxedo Society’ by Paul Rudnick

“James Bond but make it gay” could be the shorthand description of the latest from the playwright (“Jeffrey”), screenwriter (“Sister Act”), movie critic (under the pseudonym Libby Gelman-Waxner) and vicious Trump administration satirist on X. It’s about a down-on-his-luck actor who’s invited to a dinner that turns out to be a meeting of gay superspies. Soon, he’s drawn into a global conspiracy that involves a sketchy televangelist who, in true 007 fashion, is bent on world domination. Even without reading a word, this one has “Jonathan Groff movie adaptation” written all over it. (May 26)

‘We Are Mighty’ by Sharon McMahon, illustrated by Susanna Chapman

Subtitled “12 Ordinary Americans Who Did the Next Needed Thing,” “We Are Mighty” works as a children’s companion to the bestselling Duluth writer and historian’s popular “The Small and the Mighty.” Some of the dozen are not all that ordinary — the book opens with Gouverneur Morris, who wrote the preamble to the Constitution — but the fascinating bunch also includes a pair of lesser-known Idas. A lighthouse keeper dubbed “the bravest woman in America,” Ida Lewis was credited with saving many lives, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who has a street named after her in downtown Chicago, was a trailblazing journalist, suffragist and activist. (May 19)

‘Where Is My Sister?’ by Shannon Gibney, illustrated by Huy Voun Lee

There are plenty of picture books that help children sort out their feelings when their parents bring home a new sibling, but “Where Is My Sister?” is about figuring out what to do when the baby doesn’t come home. In the prolific Minneapolis writer’s latest, young Salome and her brother Gerald are excited to welcome the new arrival and confused when their mom has to explain that the baby died and what that means. (May 19)

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