Yesteryear
by Caro Claire Burke
To conservative vloggers — and many of her millions of followers on social media — Natalie Heller Mills is living the “true American dream”: Pregnant with her sixth child, she purports to spend all day frolicking on her organic farm in Idaho with her perfect kids, her cowboy husband and the flock of chickens she calls her “ladies.” The truth is, of course, much darker, and this debut novel takes us one surreal step further to illustrate the deep chasm between our digital selves and our real ones.
Knopf, April 7
American Fantasy
by Emma Straub
Stranded on the titular cruise ship without the sister who roped her into this trip in the first place, 50-year-old Annie — newly divorced, not into cruises — finds herself swept up in the tide of thousands of middle-aged women who’ve gathered at sea to sway to the music of their favorite 1990s boy band.
Riverhead, April 7
Transcription
by Ben Lerner
A journalist’s nightmare — a smartphone recorder that breaks just before an important interview — is the jumping-off point for this slender meditation on artistic legacy. Lerner’s narrator has come to Providence, R.I., to talk with his 90-year-old mentor, who is also the father of a close college friend, and doesn’t want to let on that he can’t record the conversation. How, then, in a technological age, can we hold memories close?
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, April 7
The Witch
by Marie NDiaye; translated by Jordan Stump
Compact and surreal, unspooling more mysteries than it resolves, “The Witch” is vintage NDiaye. Appearing in English for the first time since its publication in France in 1996 and currently on the long list for the International Booker Prize, the novel, narrated by a down-on-her-luck sorceress stuck in a disintegrating marriage in a drab provincial town, highlights the celebrated French author’s recurring themes of domestic entanglement and betrayal.
Vintage, April 7
The Ending Writes Itself
by Evelyn Clarke
The author V.E. Schwab and the screenwriter Cat Clarke teamed up, under the pseudonym Evelyn Clarke, to produce this meta murder mystery. Six struggling authors are summoned to a castle on a private Scottish island and challenged to ghostwrite the final chapter of a thriller left unfinished by a beloved author.
Harper, April 7
The Paris Match
by Kate Clayborn
Layla, a recently divorced doctor, approaches the destination wedding of her ex-sister-in-law with clinical precision: She will not draw attention to herself, she will be polite to her ex-husband and his new girlfriend, and she will convince everyone in her now former family that she’s totally fine. But when the bride gets cold feet, Layla teams up with the taciturn best man to salvage the wedding, and tumbles into a Parisian romance of her own.
Berkley, April 7
London Falling
by Patrick Radden Keefe
Keefe’s latest book opens with a young man plunging to his death from a balcony overlooking the Thames and retraces, through immersive reporting, the tumultuous path that brought him there. His portrait of an ambitious London teenager consumed by a desire for extreme wealth is embedded within a panoramic account of an urban underworld awash in violence, corruption and greed.
Doubleday, April 7
This Land Is Your Land
by Beverly Gage
In preparation for America’s semiquincentennial, Gage, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, hit the road — visiting dozens of museums, monuments, battlefields, roadside attractions and souvenir shops, from the celebrated (Independence Hall, Mount Rushmore) to the semi-obscure (the Eugene V. Debs House in Terre Haute, Ind.). The resulting travelogue aims to show that it’s possible to “know your history and still love your country.”
Simon & Schuster, April 7
Like, Follow, Subscribe
by Fortesa Latifi
As the first generation of social media child influencers comes of age — and as courts consider the effect of addictive social media on young lives — the journalist Latifi asks what, exactly, growing up that publicly does to kids. Where do we set the ethical boundaries for those too young to choose exposure for themselves — and can parents share (and monetize) their family’s lives without exploitation?
Gallery, April 7
Lázár
by Nelio Biedermann; translated by Jamie Bulloch
This debut novel follows a blue-blooded Hungarian family through the highs and lows of the 20th century, from imperial grandeur through two world wars and an anti-communist revolution. While paying tribute to grand European sagas, Biedermann presents the reordering of the old-world hierarchy with skillful ambivalence, avoiding easy moral judgments.
Summit Books, April 14
Go Gentle
by Maria Semple
The “Where’d You Go, Bernadette” author’s latest novel stars Adora Hazzard, a divorced, middle-aged philosopher who lives happily in a kind of makeshift commune (she calls it a “coven”) of single women in an apartment building on the Upper West Side. Her peaceful routine is upended, however, when she meets a dashing stranger at the New York City Ballet and finds herself embroiled in a dramatic plot involving both a passionate romance and a potentially stolen work of art.
Putnam, April 14
The Palm House
by Gwendoline Riley
Pull up a seat at the pub and pour one out for Sequence, the culture magazine for London’s smart set. In Riley’s gentle elegy, Edmund Putnam’s decision to leave the staff sets off a flurry of gossip, nostalgia and regret among the not young but still restless — especially his longtime friend Laura, who narrates the story. Fans of Riley’s last two novels, “My Phantoms” and “First Love,” are likely to drink deeply.
New York Review Books, April 14
Cherry Baby
by Rainbow Rowell
When her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s semi-autobiographical webcomic goes viral, even scoring a Hollywood adaptation, Cherry — heartbroken by the way it portrays her — reclaims her life in an emotional journey that’s sexy, messy, funny and raw. Helping her along the way is Russ, an old friend who reconnects with Cherry and helps her remember who she was before her ex turned her into Baby.
William Morrow, April 14
Japanese Gothic
by Kylie Lee Baker
In October 2026, after killing his roommate, an N.Y.U. student flees the country to hide out at his father’s centuries-old wooden house in rural Japan. But he’s not the only one seeking refuge there: The first night, he sees a young woman in the yard with “white robes, a sword that gleamed in the moonlight, eyes just as sharp as her blade.” She is a young samurai trying to elude imperial soldiers — and for her, it’s October 1877.
Hanover Square Press, April 14
Famesick
by Lena Dunham
The creator of “Girls” and author of the best-selling 2014 memoir “Not That Kind of Girl” describes this highly anticipated follow-up as “ostensibly” about the years 2010-20, during which her HBO series wrapped up its groundbreaking run. “But,” she wrote, “it’s also about illness as teacher, body as tattletale, our societal relationship to women on the edge and the conditions that create art versus the conditions that create happiness.”
Random House, April 14
RFK Jr.
by Isabel Vincent
Who is the most Kennedy-like Kennedy of them all? In this biography of the embattled secretary of health and human services, Vincent, an investigative journalist for The New York Post, argues that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might reflect more of his progenitors’ characteristics than his more progressive relations would like to acknowledge. Through diaries and interviews with dozens of associates, the author pieces together the life of a politically ambiguous man who struggled with drug use and reckless womanizing in the decades before his rise to prominence in the second Trump administration.
William Morrow, April 14
Rasputin
by Antony Beevor
Beevor, a veteran biographer, turns his attention to one of history’s most enigmatic figures: Grigori Rasputin, the faith healer who climbed to the highest echelons of Russian society before his assassination in 1916. Was he a mystic or a charlatan? A trustworthy adviser to the imperial family of Nicholas II, or a sinister Svengali? Beevor examines the man’s mysterious life, famous death and the currents of Russian history that have buffeted his legacy.
Viking, April 14
Into the Wood Chipper
by Nicholas Enrich
After Trump won a second term in 2024, Enrich, a career civil servant who had worked at U.S.A.I.D. under four presidents, was optimistic about his agency’s prospects. The authors of Project 2025 liked their work, as did the incoming secretary of state, Marco Rubio. But the tech mogul Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency had other plans, as the author shows in this ground-level account — part memoir, part government tell-all — of the agency’s demise.
Summit Books, April 14
Self-Help From the Middle Ages
by Peter Jones
Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, Jones combines history, memoir and, yes, self-help to argue that the deadly sins of pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust were not merely a moral cudgel for the medieval mind, but rather a practical road map for living — one we can still learn from today.
Doubleday, April 14
The Book That Taught the World to Orgasm and Then Disappeared
by Rosa Campbell
Published in 1976, “The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality” was a cultural bombshell in its moment — hailed and debated, decried and debunked, and selling like crazy. In the wake of a 2023 documentary on Shere Hite, the report’s author, comes this book by a British historian of feminism. Why, she asks, do Hite and her work seem to have been forgotten?
Melville House, April 14
Small Town Girls
by Jayne Anne Phillips
This coming-of-age memoir by a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist is composed of essays centered on her small hometown, Buckhannon, W.Va. It’s a nuanced love letter to a landscape, to family and to the power of memory.
Knopf, April 21
American Men
by Jordan Ritter Conn
For this investigation into contemporary masculinity, Conn spent years talking to the four men whose lives he chronicles. The diverse quartet’s shared struggles — with alcohol, anger, depression, relationships and sexual identities — illuminate the “inadequacies men feel but rarely speak aloud.”
Grand Central, April 21
How It Feels to Be Alive
by Megan O’Grady
Wide-ranging and deeply personal, this meditation by the critic O’Grady on the power of art — to provoke, awe, bore, transfix and transform us — considers artists and work across media, from Agnes Martin’s grid paintings to Carrie Mae Weems’s “Kitchen Table Series” photos and Barbara Kruger’s collages.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, April 21
Ghost Town
by Tom Perrotta
Perrotta has name-checked Philip Roth and Stephen King as inspirations for his 11th book, whose novelist narrator revisits his working-class adolescence in a New Jersey suburb in the 1970s. Grief, drugs and Vietnam are in the air; a fascinating girl with a Ouija board promises some kind of solace.
Scribner, April 28
We Burned So Bright
by TJ Klune
As a rogue black hole approaches the planet, Don and Rodney realize they have a month before their 40-year relationship is crushed into nothingness. So the husbands pack up and hit the pavement on an apocalyptic cross-country road trip, witnessing the madness of the last days on Earth in this slim and tender novel.
Tor, April 28
A Violent Masterpiece
by Jordan Harper
In the grimy underbelly of Los Angeles, three unlikely people — a lawyer who’s just been drafted to defend a pedophile producer, a livestreaming influencer and a concierge to the fantastically rich — join forces to investigate the L.A. Ripper, a serial killer terrorizing women across the city.
Mulholland Books, April 28
The Radiant Dark
by Alexandra Oliva
Oliva’s latest novel is many things: a sweeping family story, an otherworldly mystery and an existential meditation. It’s 1980. Carol Girard is struggling with both a new baby and a crumbling marriage when Earth receives contact from an extraterrestrial entity. Over the next half-century, the Girards must figure out how to live fulfilling, meaningful lives in the face of the unknown and in the light of a changing world.
SJP Lit, April 28
From Life Itself
by Suzy Hansen
Struggling to make sense of the sweeping changes that have transformed Turkey in the past decade under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — a frenzy of construction, war in the Kurdish region, an influx of refugees and, especially, a sharp autocratic turn — Hansen, a Pulitzer Prize finalist who has long lived in the country, homes in on residents in a single Istanbul neighborhood to create a richly textured human history.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, April 28
Selling Opportunity
by Mary Lisa Gavenas
Before her name became synonymous with direct-sale cosmetics, Mary Kay Ash was a Texas housewife, thrice divorced and twice widowed, struggling to make ends meet. The story of her rise to riches is as colorful as the iconic pink Cadillacs helmed by Mary Kay’s most successful saleswomen.
Viking, April 28
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