The 25 Best Books Coming Out This Spring

Four years after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, writer Abdulrazak Gurnah returns with a spellbinding family saga set in his home country of Tanzania. After graduating from university, young Karim comes home to Zanzibar with a newfound sense of confidence and ambition. This catches the eye of Fauzia, an aspiring teacher anxious to make a life of her own. Once married, the couple offer a chance for a fresh start to young Badar, a boy whose adopted family left him in a position of domestic servitude.

Jamie Hood, the author of How to Be a Good Girl, raises urgent questions about how we treat survivors of sexual assault in this provocative and incisive memoir. By exploring the archetype of the rape survivor through popular culture—from the ancient Greek myth of Philomela to the portrayal of Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks—and weaving together blistering personal narratives about her own experience with sexual violence, Hood reveals how shockingly little we’ve progressed since the heyday of #MeToo. Suffice to say, this book is far from an easy read, but it is incandescently one of a kind. Hood’s unflinching prose ultimately serves as a bright herald to guide us through the battles that lie ahead.

This glittering debut novel could easily be seen as a love letter to London. Anna, an American college graduate who grew up reading Jane Austen novels to escape from her hard home life, has always wanted to live in the English city. When she finally makes the move across the pond, though, reality proves to be much drearier than expected—that is, until she meets the Wilders. The fabulously wealthy family hires Anna to tutor their teen daughter. She is then whisked off to Saint-Tropez, where she immerses herself in the kind of glamorous lifestyle she always dreamed of achieving. But a brush with two handsome men will force Anna to confront a pressing question: How far is she willing to run to escape herself?

Fans of Emily Henry’s Beach Read, prepare to be wooed by Victoria Lavine’s debut book, which follows romance writer Margot Bradley as she attempts to reinvent herself as a murder-mystery novelist. Margot may be known for her love stories, but she secretly doesn’t believe in the existence of happily ever afters. When her secret is exposed and her romance reputation subsequently tarnished, Margot decides to run off to a remote Alaskan resort to pen her first-ever thriller. Instead of finding literary inspiration, however, Margot finds herself in a terrifying wild moose chase—one that lands her right in the arms of a handsome doctor named Forrest. As the title hints, Any Trope but You is a swoon-worthy celebration of the most beloved tropes in the rom-com genre, from the enemies-to-lovers plot to a forced-proximity situation.

In this dizzying and experimental work of fiction, Katie Kitamura eschews linear storytelling for an untraditional narrative that reexamines the performances we play and the identities we dress in—unwittingly or otherwise—in our everyday lives. Split into two parts, Audition centers on an unnamed actress currently in the midst of rehearsals for her new play. She gets lunch with a young man who also works in theater, and from the Manhattan restaurant in which they sit sprouts forth a tenuous and murky relationship, one whose true boundaries may never be fully known.

Tech reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist Vauhini Vara explores how technology, social media, and AI have irrevocably shaped the way we live and relate to each other today. Through a series of essays, Vara reveals the ubiquity of Big Tech—be it through a barrage of Amazon orders or the infiltration of ChatGPT in our communication styles—and attempts to find a path forward that will allow us to have freer and more knowledgable relationships with the machines we use on a day-to-day basis.

Davis, a Julliard-trained violinist, is ready to get married to the love of his life, Everett. But when his sister unexpectedly shows up to their Montauk ceremony bearing news that their father has died in a car accident, Davis must come face-to-face with the estranged relationship he had with his dad. In life, the Reverend Doctor John Freeman tried to instill lessons on masculinity in his son, but his rigid notions of what it meant to be a man only drove Davis out of his home. Overall, the novel is a beautiful meditation on the meaning of existing as a Black queer person and the fraught tensions that can belie interracial relationships.

Shirin Bayat feels stuck. At 26 years old, she is burning out at her publishing-house job, navigating exhausting racial micro-aggressions, and questioning the crowd of duplicitous friends that surround her. Things finally seem to take a turn for the better when she goes to a London house party where she reunites with Kian, her former best friend, who she hasn’t seen for 10 years. Although mystery shrouds the reasons why, exactly, this once inseparable duo went their separate ways, Shirin and Kian are determined to rebuild a new and stronger bond.

Jessica and Linda are best friends whose bond was forged from their troubled home lives. When they turn 18, the two decide to escape their difficult pasts by attending Wilde College in Dublin, where their dynamic shifts almost immediately once they step onto the campus. Jessica gains a new friend group, while Linda falls for the charismatic and enigmatic Mark. Under Mark’s influence, the girls fall deeper and deeper into a world full of booze, drugs, and control—until an event shatters their lives forever. Fans of dark academia or Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, this one’s for you.

Nearly four years after Joan Didion’s death, readers can look forward to hearing the iconic writer’s singular voice once again in Notes to John. In a journal initially created for the eyes of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, Didion accumulates a decade’s worth of notes and analyses from sessions with her psychiatrist. These notes track themes of anxiety, guilt, depression, and alcoholism, and they also unpack her layered relationships with her family, including her daughter Quintana and her own parents.

In this interconnected collection of short stories, Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet offers various slice-of-life vignettes that capture the alienation of modern life for families, couples, and communities. The characters that populate these stories feel utterly familiar, and the worlds they inhabit also reflect the chaos of our own, from reflections on post-pandemic life to the digital age.

This ambitious historical novel takes place in the 15th century, at the tail end of England’s Middle Ages and during the reign of King Richard III. Loosely based on a real historical figure, the story follows peasant boy John Collan, whose life is upended when he is told that he is actually Lambert Simnel, the son of the Duke of Clarence and therefore the rightful heir to the English throne. For the start of his life, John was hidden away in the countryside to protect him from a bitter rivalry over the crown. Now, he must say goodbye to the only life he has ever known in order to be trained and educated as a true king.

From the author of the beloved novel Beautyland comes a brand-new collection of stories that brood on the overwhelming power of connection, grief, loss, and loneliness. Through her distinct prose and humor, Marie-Helene Bertino introduces an array of wacky situations and characters that ultimately cut at the core of what it means to be alive, from a short story about a girl who inherits a house with a unicorn living in its backyard to a brief tale on a woman whose ex-boyfriends quite literally rain down from the sky.

Julie Chan and Chloe VanHuusen may look exactly the same, but their lives couldn’t be more different. The twins were separated at birth, with Julie growing up to become a disenchanted supermarket cashier and Chloe achieving fame as a popular luxury lifestyle influencer. When Julie discovers Chloe’s lifeless body, she decides to shed her dull life and put on Chloe’s glamorous facade. But as she sinks deeper and deeper into a world of privilege and opulence, Julie soon finds out that not everything in Chloe’s life was as she made it out to be online.

Nearly 30 years after her death, Princess Diana still looms large in the public imagination. She was a trailblazing human-rights advocate to some and a scandalous tabloid headline to others, but much of the late Princess of Wales’s legacy remains to be excavated. In this expansive body of work, Edward White, author of The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock, attempts to pull back the veil on Diana, painting a comprehensive portrait of the British royal family’s most famous member.

Add this book to the list of titles that urgently provide context and answers to the hell storm that is [vaguely waves around] everything going on right now. Sophie Gilbert, a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, takes us back to the early aughts, a critical period that saw the overlap of third-wave feminism and an increasingly mainstream mindset that glorified the hyper-sexualization and infantilization of women. Gilbert unmasks the collective regression that continues to influence our views on misogyny, feminism, and womanhood today.

Genevieve’s life in Singapore is changed forever when Arin shows up on her family’s doorstep. Her grandfather, originally believed to have perished in the war in Malaysia, is revealed to have survived all along, raising a second family in a country far from home. Now, after his death, his granddaughter Arin has come to live with Genevieve’s grandma and parents. The two girls quickly develop a sisterly bond, but, as they grow older, that connection is severed after a stinging betrayal. As an adult, Genevieve must learn how to come to terms with her at-times contradictory notions of ambition, family, and identity.

In the latest offering from renowned romance novelist Kennedy Ryan, a young entrepreneur meets a tech mogul who completely upends all of her assumptions about love. The third installment of the Skyland series follows Hendrix, a highly accomplished and self-made businesswoman working within the cutthroat world of the entertainment industry, and Maverick, a billionaire businessman who sees Hendrix in a way she’s never felt seen before. All in all, Can’t Get Enough is a moving love story that will immediately suck you in from the very first page.

Immaculate Conception tracks the intimate and occasionally codependent bond between best friends Enka and Mathilde, who first meet each other in art school. As Enka’s artistic ambitions stall, Mathilde’s star rises, leading Enka to go to extreme measures to stay relevant in her friend’s increasingly famous life. Enka ends up marrying a billionaire whose family has developed a mentally intrusive technology that promises to enhance empathy—a tool that Enka intends to turn toward Mathilde. Through these rich characters, Ling Ling Huang raises important questions about not only the boundaries between art and tech but also the blurred lines between originality, autonomy, and possession.

In this memoir, culture journalist Harron Walker fuses investigative journalism with cultural criticism in order to paint a portrait of modern womanhood in an ultra-capitalistic society. With essays that break down pop culture and dissect her own relationship to labor—poignantly, the difficulties of enduring a toxic and transphobic workplace in order to afford her gender-affirming care—Walker cuts to the heart of what it means to be a woman in the 21st century, all accomplished with her searingly biting wit and playful humor.