33 Books We Can’t Wait to Read: April 2025
Fiction
A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton — April 1 (Soho Press)
“Beyond astonishing, imbued with witchery, lust, the isolation and connection of a game, devastating heartbreak, and the ageless, aching wrap of friendship and time. I can’t remember the last time a trans novel affected me this deeply. I can’t remember the last time any novel affected me this deeply. Jeanne Thornton is like a literary sorceress becoming more and more powerful with every new volume.” — Casey Plett, author of Little Fish
Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou — April 1 (Tin House Books)
“Captivating from the first page to the last, Sour Cherry is a haunting novel that weighs in with Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Turn of the Screw and the very best of Angela Carter—but Theodoridou writes with a magnetic strangeness that is all his own. Not many can pull off what he has, bringing new blood to folktale archetypes, blending mystery with a burgeoning, inevitable dread. Heartbreaking and tender, Sour Cherry is a dark delight. It’s so damn good I’m already looking forward to reading it again.” — Natasha Calder, author of Whether Violent or Natural
Bad Nature by Ariel Courage — April 1 (Henry Holt and Co)
“Add Hester to the canon of unlikeable female characters I can’t look away from, and Bad Nature to novels I couldn’t put down. Dark, aloof, disciplined—this novel is reminiscent of the best of Ottessa Moshfegh or Emma Cline. I thought it was brilliant.” — Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes
Audition by Katie Kitamura — April 8 (Riverhead Books)
“You have never read anything like this gorgeously disquieting book. Audition challenges our preconceptions about love, art, and selfhood—and, magnificently, our very idea of how a novel should unfold. If all the world’s a stage, Kitamura reminds us that we never stop auditioning for our parts.” — Hernan Diaz, author of Trust
The Float Test by Lynn Steger Strong — April 8 (Mariner Books)
“With surgical precision, Lynn Steger Strong dissects and then elegantly reconstructs an American family on the brink: of falling apart, of finding themselves, of saying all the things left unsaid. From the collateral damage inevitably caused by artists, to the notion that perhaps we are who we always were, Strong’s clear and confident voice and prose makes the unvarnished truths in this book sting. But that same quality makes the moments of profound tenderness and humanity linger. The Float Test—and the Floridian world of this clan—will stay with me for a long time to come.” — Xochitl Gonzalez, New York Times bestselling author of Anita de Monte Laughs Last
Sky Daddy by Kate Folk — April 8 (Random House)
Linda is doing her best to lead a life that would appear normal to the casual observer. Weekdays, she earns $20 an hour moderating comments for a video-sharing platform, then rides the bus home to the windowless garage she rents on the outskirts of San Francisco. But on the last Friday of each month, she indulges her true passion, taking BART to SFO for a round-trip flight to a regional hub. The destination is irrelevant, because each trip means a new date with a handsome stranger—a stranger whose intelligent windscreens, sleek fuselages, and powerful engines make Linda feel a way that no human ever could. . . Both subversive and unexpectedly heartwarming, Sky Daddy hijacks the classic love story, exploring desire, fate, and the longing to be accepted for who we truly are.
Make Sure You Die Screaming by Zee Carlstrom — April 8 (Flatiron Books)
“Make Sure You Die Screaming is the debut novel our country needs (but doesn’t deserve). It’s a tight little banger about the shared delusion of family that left my heart, as Zee Carlstrom’s head-wounded unnamed narrator would say, ‘as full as my bladder,’ because putting it down long enough to pee was out of the question." — Ruth Madievsky, bestselling author of All-Night Pharmacy
Heart Lamp: Selected Stories by Banu Mushtaq (translated by Deepa Bhasthi) — April 8 (And Other Stories)
In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humor, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq's years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression.
Plum by Andy Anderegg — April 8 (Hub City Press)
“Plum is a truly original, tender, and heart-searing novel about the secrets we keep, all the ways a soul can be broken, and the lies we have to tell ourselves to move on. Andy Anderegg so beautifully captures the wrenching pain and wild joys of growing up and learning how to survive, and how to make a real, big life for yourself. I will never stop thinking about this book, it’s forever imprinted on my heart.” — Crissy Van Meter, author of Creatures
Big Chief by Jon Hickey — April 8 (Simon & Schuster)
“We’ve been waiting for the great Native American political novel, and here it is—a gripping story that illustrates the intricacies and intrigues of reservation politics. The book examines Native sovereignty, power, and corruption at the fictional Passage Rouge Nation, as well as issues of Indigenous community, family, and identity. Not to mention, Jon Hickey creates fantastically compelling characters and weaves in a healthy dose of Native humor. A tremendous debut.” — David Heska Wanbli Weiden, award-winning author of Winter Counts
Name by Constance Debré (translated by Lauren Elkin) — April 15 (Semiotext(e))
Name, the third novel in Constance Debré’s acclaimed trilogy, is at once a manifesto, an ecstatic poem, and a political pamphlet. By rejecting the notion of given identity, her narrator approaches the heart of the radical emptiness that the earlier books were pursuing. Name is Debré’s most intense novel yet. Set partly in the narrator’s childhood, it rejects Proustian notions of “regaining” the past. Instead, its narrator seeks a state of profound disownment: “We have to get rid of the idea of origins, once and for all, I’m not holding onto the corpses. … Being free has nothing to do with that clutter, with having suffered or not, being free is the void.” To achieve true freedom, she dares to enter this “void”—that is, dares to accept the pain, loss, and violence of life. Brilliant and searing, Name affirms and extends Debré’s radical project.
Bitter Texas Honey by Ashley Whitaker — April 15 (Dutton)
“Like any good Southern girl, Bitter Texas Honey presents itself modestly: this is a funny, extremely charming novel about an aspiring writer. But beneath this relatively breezy exterior is an absolutely merciless, clear-eyed, and passionate assessment of the political, moral, and cultural roots of our country’s current divide. Bitter Texas Honey is not just wildly entertaining—it is a bullet aimed at the dead center of American hypocrisy, cruelty, and heartbreak; as brilliant, uncompromising, and timely a book as you will read this year.” — Kristen Roupenian, author of Cat Person and Other Stories
When the Harvest Comes by Denne Michele Norris — April 15 (Random House)
“Epic, intimate, brutal, and tender, Denne Michele Norris has written a breathtaking testimony about the boundlessness of love. Each character enters like a light beam, puncturing your soul with joy, heartbreak, and unwavering faith in the ability to right their wrongs before time runs out. Seductive, symphonic, and sensitively rendered, When the Harvest Comes announces the arrival of a major new American voice.” — Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
A Line You Have Traced by Roisin Dunnett — April 15 (Feminist Press)
“A Line You Have Traced is a metamorphosis. A love letter. A manifesto on time and becoming. Behold as a queer cast of characters discover the past and the future, fall in love, bravely face the end of the world, undergo inconceivable change, and emerge unapologetically as the most natural thing they can be: themselves.” — Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
Hellions by Julia Elliott — April 15 (Tin House Books)
“Julia Elliott's fiction is its own country. Every sentence drips and unsettles, every character lusts and schemes, every landscape is alien and forbidding. But there is something eerily familiar pulsing underneath the wildness—the way your waking life snakes through the logic of your dreams. I am obsessed with these lush, feral stories.” — Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
Atavists by Lydia Millet — April 22 (W. W. Norton & Company)
The word atavism, coined by a botanist and popularized by a criminologist, refers to the resurfacing of a primitive evolutionary trait or urge in a modern being. This inventive collection from Lydia Millet offers overlapping tales of urges ranging from rage to jealousy to yearning—a fluent triumph of storytelling, rich in ideas and emotions both petty and grand.
The Bright Years by Sarah Damoff — April 22 (Simon & Schuster)
“In The Bright Years, Sarah Damoff paints a loving portrait of a Texas family shadowed by the power of addiction. The journeys of Lillian, Jet and Ryan Bright are in all ways tender, tragic and triumphant and left me rooting for each character until the very end. A beautiful debut.” — Amanda Churchill, author of The Turtle House
Show Me Where the Hurt Is by Hayden Casey — April 22 (Split/Lip Press)
“Show Me Where the Hurt Is surprises and delights at every turn. I was impressed by the symmetry of the stories here; wandered along and plucked at every new fruit, which was always just as delicious as the last. The work is compelling and deeply enjoyable. Quite a few times I wondered aloud: how did he do that? This book is terrific and Hayden Casey is a fabulous writer.” — Kristen Arnett, author of Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One
Exit Zero by Marie-Helene Bertino — April 22 (FSG Originals)
Death-shaped entities—with all of their humor and strangeness—haunt the twelve stories in Exit Zero. Vampires, ghost girls, fathers, blank spaces, day-old peaches, and famous paintings all pierce through their world into ours, reminding us to pay attention! and look alive! and offering many other flashes of wisdom from the oracle and author of Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino.
Awakened by A. E. Osworth — April 29 (Grand Central Publishing)
“Pay attention! Awakened might change your life. This novel is at once a fantastical queer romp through magic and technology as well as a deep and unforgettable meditation on existence. As with the zany, caring, often hilarious coven of trans witches that populate this story, A.E. Osworth’s new novel defies classification: their work is in a league of their own.” — Nick White, author of How to Survive a Summer and Sweet and Low
Howling Women by Shelby Hinte — April 29 (Leftover Books)
“In Howling Women, the past doesn’t die on its own, it has to be hunted down. A confessional written in an exacting, explosive, and at times darkly funny voice vibrating with rage and redemption. Hinte has concocted a fearless, cunning, and honest to the core novel that will sit on my shelf next to Animal by Lisa Taddeo and Cruddy by Lynda Barry. A remarkable, voicey, and unforgettable debut. A knockout.” — Chelsea Bieker, author of Godshot & Madwoman
The Sea Gives Up the Dead by Molly Olguín — April 29 (Red Hen Press)
“Witty, witchy, darkly brilliant, Molly Olguín's metamorphic tales radiate insight and intelligence, exploding into visions as fresh and surprising as those of Angela Carter or Octavia Butler, Jeanette Winterson or Kirstin Valdez Quade.” — Andrea Barrett, author of Natural History and Ship Fever
Non-Fiction & Poetry
Ecstasy by Alex Dimitrov — April 1 (Knopf)
Alex Dimitrov embraces a life on the edge in New York and the finely wrought poetry that can come out of it as he explores sex, drugs, parties, pleasure, and God in the 2020s, and looks back to a coming-of-age in the 1990s that still informs who his generation is and will be. His unabashed and drivingly musical poems are a call against repression, a rebuke of cultural norms and shame, and a celebration of human authenticity—even if to live under such philosophies is dangerous.
Myth by Terese Mason Pierre — April 1 (House of Anansi Press)
Myth, the much-anticipated debut collection from the multi-talented Terese Mason Pierre, weaves between worlds (‘real’ and ‘imaginary’) unearthing the unsettling: our jaded and joyful relationships to land, ancestry, trauma, self, and future. In three movements and two interludes, the poems in Myth move symphonically from tropical islands to barren cities, from lucid dreams to the mysteries of reality, from the sea to the cosmos. A dynamic mix of speculative poetry and ecstatic lyricism, the otherworldly and the sublime, Pierre’s poems never stray too long or too far from the spell of unspoiled nature: “The palm trees nod / at the ocean / the ocean does / what it always does / trusts the moon completely.”
Home of the Happy, A Murder on the Cajun Prairie by Jordan LaHaye Fontenot — April 1 (Mariner Books)
“No one wants to belong to the murdered great-grandfathers club, but I feel better knowing that Jordan LaHaye Fontenot is here with me, tackling generational trauma and secrecy with tenderness, ethics, and the precision of a surgeon. Home of the Happy is true crime at its best. I simply cannot fathom how LaHaye Fontenot not only conducted her own investigation of her great-grandfather’s murder, but braided it with stirring personal and historical anecdotes into a taut and thrilling masterpiece. I absolutely inhaled it.” — Ruth Madievsky, bestselling author of All-Night Pharmacy
Searches, Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara — April 8 (Pantheon)
“Searches is that rare thing: a genuinely thrilling book that breaks open existing forms and structures to offer something entirely new. Vara brings the rigor of a reporter and the exhilarating impulses of an artist into this extraordinary, sui generis book: with wit, insight, tenderness, humility, and clear-eyed candor, she explores the wild frontiers of what our lives have already become. The stakes are high. The ride is terrifying and illuminating at once. This book will leave you changed and stay with you for good.” — Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story
EKHO: A Poem in Three Parts by Roslyn Orlando — April 8 (Soft Skull)
A profoundly playful poem in three parts, this work considers the echo as a social and historical phenomenon. From Ekhō, the nymph of Greek mythology whose voice was stolen by the gods, to the advent of Amazon’s Echo smart speaker, the echo has been described as a condition of voicelessness, unfulfilled desire, loss, and entrapment. These poems reconsider echoing as a poetic practice and as an orienting device that tunes the world in to itself. Roslyn Orlando’s debut collection combines Ancient Greek mythology with big tech to produce a philosophical, political, and psychological exploration of love, capitalism, resonance, and rage.
Authority by Andrea Long Chu — April 8 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
“Andrea Long Chu is one of the most charismatic and original thinkers at work today. These essays made me want to call a friend and get into an argument—about literature, about culture, about life. With style and bracing humor, she has located the exact pulse of our moment and taken its measure. A writer and critic to be reckoned with.” — Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans
Dysphoria Mundi: A Diary of Planetary Transition by Paul B Preciado — April 15 (Graywolf Press)
In Dysphoria Mundi, Paul B. Preciado, best known for his 2013 cult classic Testo Junkie, has written a mutant text assembled from essays, philosophy, poetry, and autofiction that captures a moment of profound change and possibility. Rooted in the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, and taking account of the societal convulsions that have ensued, Preciado tries to make sense of our times from within the swirl of a revolutionary present moment.
Depth Control by Lauren W. Westerfield — April 15 (Unsolicited Press)
Depth Control is an experimental exploration by an essayist, aiming to make sense of and reflect on personal identity, belonging, and the choices that shape us. It captures a rich, sensory understanding of coming of age, experiencing sexuality, contemplating gender, and navigating relationships. While the themes may be timeless—a young woman finding her way, understanding her body, and dealing with the end of one relationship while considering new ones—the narrative itself breaks traditional forms, seamlessly blending different modes of existence. Throughout, the body remains central, serving as the primary means of engaging with and understanding the world.
The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza — April 22 (Catapult)
“Excruciating, to live in a nation, a culture, a moment in which one must continuously insist upon their own humanity and the humanity of those they love. And yet, so many of history’s greatest writers—from Darwish to Morrison—have taken up this project, fractalling shards of unprecedented experience into something as vital, precious, undeniable, as life itself. Sarah Aziza sings herself into that chorus with clarity and tenderness, writing, ‘Palestine: an orientation toward a life that names, and holds open, the ruptures loving makes.’ The Hollow Half is inventive, propulsive testimony, a lush love letter to a place, a people, and the resilience of memory.” — Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
Becoming Ghost by Cathy Linh Che — April 29 (Washington Square Press)
“Cathy Linh Che’s Becoming Ghost is a new masterpiece of American love lyric, in the vein of Rita Dove’s timeless Thomas and Beulah or Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic. Love: ‘To misunderstand / each other, but to stick around.’ Love: ‘I mapped our escape.’ Love: ‘I knew you in your bowl cut, the red car in the driveway, the lens of your father’s eye.’ I’m getting goosebumps just typing. Che is a mighty poet, nimble across a variety of forms and voices, with a dazzling instinct for how one image, line, photograph, might illuminate the next. Becoming Ghost is an indelible reminder of all the people, known and unknown, who loved us enough to survive.” — Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr! and Pilgrim Bell
Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert — April 29 (Penguin Press)
“Girl on Girl is a work of overwhelming meticulousness and clarity. If you’re confused about the current uncertainty about feminism’s power, Sophie Gilbert has done the work of painstakingly and granularly tracing every cultural thread to reveal how we got here. Gilbert unmasks an insidious cultural coup that seemingly overnight dethroned the transgressive women of the 90s; ‘Just like that they were gone–replaced by girls,’ she writes. Over and over, Gilbert reminds us: it wasn’t always this bad—in fact, it was getting better, then it got taken away. Girl on Girl is a necessary corrective of cultural memory, but more importantly, it is a definitive archive of that disempowerment and its ensuing cruelties.” — Elamin Abdelmahmoud, host of CBC’s Commotion and author of Son of Elsewhere
