Books We Can't Wait to Read This April
In these uncertain and strange times, we need books now more than ever! Here is a list of some of the fiction, poetry and nonfiction we are excited about this April.
Fiction
Godshot by Chelsea Bieker - March 31 (Catapult)
Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. He promises, through secret “assignments,” to bring the rain everybody is praying for. Lacey’s life begins to unravel when her mother is exiled from the community and runs off when a man she barely knows. Gold God glitter falling from church ceilings, the pain of mother loss, baptisms with soda instead of water, and a grandmother who loves taxidermied mice, Godshot is a dazzling debut from a gifted writer who can weave poetic, sparkling language with the pain of family and the mysteries of God.
The Beauty of a Face by Sahar Mustafah — April 7 (W.W. Norton)
Afaf Rahman is the principal of Nurrideen School for Girls, a Muslim school in the suburbs of Chicago, when a shooter—radicalized by the alt-right online—attacks the school. Alternating between the attack and her memories of Palestine, The Beauty of Your Face explores faith, family, and hate with haunting precision.
How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang — April 7 (Riverhead)
Named one of the most anticipated books of 2020 by The Millions, The Week, Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, Electric Lit, Vogue.com, Medium, Paste Magazine, and more, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is debut novel set against the twilight of the American gold rush, two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape—trying not just to survive but to find a home.
Sin Eater by Megan Campisi — April 7 (Atria)
In 16th-century England, 14-year-old May is arrested after stealing a loaf of bread and sentenced to become a Sin Eater: one of the women who hear the last confessions of the dying, and then eat ritual foods representing their sins, taking on their burdens so the dying may go to heaven. But when May’s silent mentor refuses to eat the errant deer heart on a dead woman’s coffin—and is executed herself for her refusal—May begins to investigate the mystery herself. Which is not super easy when you’re forbidden from speaking and other people shrink at your presence.
Afterlife by Julia Alvarez — April 7 (Algonquin)
Afterlife, first adult novel in almost fifteen years by the internationally bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, centers on Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves—lines from her favorite authors play in her head like a soundtrack—but now she finds that the world demands more of her than words. Said to be one of the most anticipated books of the year by O, The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, Vogue, Bustle, BuzzFeed and more, this is a must-read this month.
Perfect Tunes by Emily Gould — April 14 (Avid Reader Press)
It’s the early 2000s; 22-year-old Laura has left her home in Columbus, Ohio, to chase her dream of making it as a singer-songwriter in NYC. As she’s starting to gain some traction, she begins dating (and doing drugs with) Dylan, an up-and-coming musician — until he dies while high. When his bandmates offer her the opportunity to take his place in the band, Laura, pregnant with Dylan’s child, opts instead to settle into a quieter life — but 14 years later, when her rebellious daughter starts asking questions about her dad, she must revisit and contend with that wild time of her life.
Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh — April 21 (Penguin Press)
This has been on everyone’s minds since we learned of its release last year. Moshfegh brings us the dark, suspenseful, and morbidly funny whodunit Death in Her Hands, which follows elderly widow Vesta Gul as she happens upon a mystery that quickly obsesses her. Walking with her dog in the woods by her new lake house, Vesta finds a note that reads, “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” — but there is nobody. Vesta commits herself to not only solving this mystery but also understanding the woman at the center of it.
Take Me Apart by Sara Sligar — April 28 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
When the famed photographer Miranda Brand died mysteriously at the height of her career, it sent shock waves through Callinas, California. Decades later, old wounds are reopened when her son Theo hires the ex-journalist Kate Aitken to archive of his mother’s work and personal effects. As Kate sorts through the vast maze of material and contends with the vicious rumors and shocking details of Miranda's private life, she pieces together a portrait of a vibrant artist buckling under the pressures of ambition, motherhood, and marriage. But Kate has secrets of her own, including a growing attraction to the enigmatic Theo, and when she stumbles across Miranda's diary, her curiosity spirals into a dangerous obsession. A seductive, twisting tale of psychological suspense, Take Me Apart draws readers into the lives of two darkly magnetic young women pinned down by secrets and lies. Sara Sligar's electrifying debut is a chilling, thought-provoking take on art, illness, and power, from a spellbinding new voice in literary suspense.
Nonfiction
Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life by Marie Kondo — April 7 (Pan Macmillan)
Marie Kondo is back and once again encouraging you to find that which sparks joy—this time, in your professional life. Teaming with Rice University business professor Scott Soneshein, Kondo offers anecdotes, research, and strategies for eliminating clutter in your office and establishing a happier and more productive work life.
Heaven by Emerson Whitney —April 14 (McSweeney's Publishing)
At Heaven's center, Whitney seeks to understand their relationship to their mother and grandmother, those first windows into womanhood and all its consequences. Whitney retraces a roving youth in deeply observant, psychedelic prose-all the while folding in the work of thinkers like Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and C. Riley Snorton-to engage transness and the breathing, morphing nature of selfhood.
An expansive examination of what makes us up, Heaven wonders what role our childhood plays in who we are. Can we escape the discussion of causality? Is the story of our body just ours? With extraordinary emotional force, Whitney sways between theory and memory in order to explore these brazen questions and write this unforgettable book.
Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America by Laila Lalami — April 28 (Pantheon)
What does it mean to be American? In this starkly illuminating and impassioned book, Pulitzer Prize Finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S. citizen, using it as a starting point for her exploration of the rights, liberties and protections that are traditionally associated with American citizenship. Tapping into history, politics and literature, she elucidates how accidents of birth—such as national origin, race or gender—that once determined the boundaries of Americanness still cast their shadows today. Throughout the book, she poignantly illustrates how white supremacy survives through adaptation and legislation, with the result that a caste system is maintained, keeping the modern equivalent of white male landowners at the top of the social hierarchy. Conditional Citizens weaves together Lalami’s own experiences with explorations of the place of nonwhites in the broader American culture.
Poetry
Gold Rush by Claire Caldwell — April 1 (Invisible Publishing)
From the Klondike to an all-girls summer camp to the frontier of outer space, Gold Rush explores what it means to be a settler woman in the wilderness. Drawing on and subverting portrayals of nature from Susanna Moodie to Cheryl Strayed, Caldwell’s poems examine the tension between the violence and empowerment women have often sought and found in wild places; this is the violence young girls inflict on each other; colonial violence perpetrated by white, settler women; violence against nature itself. Many of these poems portray a climate in crisis, suggesting that even wilderness buffs are complicit in climate change. Whether they’re trekking the Chilkoot Trail, exploring the frontiers of their own bodies and desires, or navigating an unstable, unfamiliar climate, the girls and women in these poems are pioneers—in all the complexities contained by the term.
Obit by Victoria Chang — April 7 (Copper Canyon Press)
After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief during a feverish two weeks by writing scores of poetic obituaries for all she lost in the world. In Obit, Chang writes of “the way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.” These poems reinvent the form of newspaper obituary to both name what has died (“civility,” “language,” “the future,” “Mother’s blue dress”) and the cultural impact of death on the living. Whereas elegy attempts to immortalize the dead, an obituary expresses loss, and the love for the dead becomes a conduit for self-expression. In this unflinching and lyrical book, Chang meets her grief and creates a powerful testament for the living.
POP by Simina Banu— April 14 (Coach House Books)
POP rummages through the stale Cheetos after the love poem: what remains? What never existed to begin with? The book invites the reader to journey both forward and backward in time, to retrace steps, solve word searches, hold pages to the light. POP delineates the intensities of a volatile relationship through a variety of lenses. As the speaker tries to anchor her experience, she is met with a clamour of perspectives: it is a junk food fight of poetic styles, each line fried and seasoned using recipes passed down for generations; it is a sad clown’s skincare routine; it is a singalong, a cartoonish cacophony of pots and puns. The speaker shakes the love poem for all it’s worth, leaving behind a trail of lint, wrappers, fibs, and soap foam, but opening up enough space to move in herself.
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