From spicy romance to thoughtful and emotional literary fiction, we’ve got quite the array of fiction coming out this April. This range might remind you of the varying weather we’re getting this month, amirite? Here are the must-have novels of the month!
Tryst Six Venom by Penelope Douglas
Berkley – US, 9780593641989, PB, 528pp, £12.99, 2/4/2024
Marymount girls are good girls. Even if they weren’t, no one would know, because girls like Clay Collins keep their mouths shut. Not that Clay has anything to share, anyway. Always in control, she owns the hallways, walking tall on Monday and then dropping to her knees like the good Catholic girl she is on Sunday. What she wants, she has to hide. Liv Jaeger crosses the tracks every day for one reason: to graduate from high school and get into the Ivy League. But Clay — with her beautiful skin, clean shoes, and rich parents — torments her daily and thinks Liv won’t fight back. At least not until Liv gets Clay alone and finds out she’s hiding so much more than just what’s underneath those pretty clothes. Liv told Clay to stay on her side of town. But one night, Clay doesn’t listen. And once Liv is done with her, she’ll never be a good girl again. Penelope Douglas’s books explore sexy, taboo topics that readers of Colleen Hoover are seeking out.
Selamlik by Khaled Alesmael
Translated by Leri Price
World Editions, 9781642861488, PB, 176pp, £16.99, 2/4/2024
Furat, a Syrian in his early 20s, visits Sibki Park in Damascus, which serves as a gathering place for gay men from all over the city. He learns about the Hammams, secret meeting places for gays located throughout the old city. Inside these public baths, the air is thick with the scent of bay laurel soap, and naked men hide in the steam. Despite society, religion and regime disapproval, Furat finds the love he seeks just before being forced to flee as his world changes. Later on, Furat wakes up in a cold sweat at an asylum in the Swedish forest recalling a terrifying dream in which he was blindfolded and bound. Having seen the horrific clips of what extremists do to gays circulating on the internet, he begins to write about his experience while locked in the toilet. This is the story of Furat’s journey, along with that of other refugees, as they struggle against physical and economic challenges, migration laws, and deep-seated fears of loss, shame, and hatred.
Amma: Three generations, Three continents, Three sexualities by Saraid de Silva
Weatherglass Books, 9781739260149, PB, 250pp, £12.99, 4/4/2024
1951, Singapore. Josephina is 10. She is sexually assaulted — and then kills her attacker.
This trauma becomes the defining moment in the lives of Josephina, her daughter Sithera, and her granddaughter Annie. The effects cascade through generations as Annie sets out across the world to discover what happened to split up her family. Set in Sri Lanka, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia and London, Amma is a novel about family, displacement, secrets, and how the past lives with us forever. Written in sensuous, vivid prose, Amma is a story of the rich history and unknown future of the Sri Lankan diaspora — and of one family desperately trying to find peace.
Dr. Josef’s Little Beauty by Zyta Rudzka
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Seven Stories Press UK, 9781911710080, PB, 224pp, £12.99, 4/4/2024
A Holocaust story as fascinating and compelling as it is terrifying and puzzling — a book about aging and war crimes, pain and pride.
In the middle of summer, omnipresent heat radiates as a group of elderly people are remembering their youth. The story focuses on two sisters, Leokadia and Czechna, who live together in a retirement home not far from Warsaw. These are not ordinary stories they are sharing, because both of them spent time as children in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. At the center is Czechna, who at the age of 12 was saved from extermination by the notorious doctor Josef Mengele, the real-life Nazi officer and physician who was known as the ‘angel of death’ for the experiments he conducted on prisoners, including twins and siblings. This is a story both provocative and disturbing about the fear that lingers in victims. Was the sisters’ relationship with the executioner a desperate attempt to save their lives, or perhaps they harbour a hideous pride and sense of superiority over other prisoners? Rudzka’s extraordinary writing turns unsettling questions about memory and survival into art.
Jackdaw by Tade Thompson
Cheerio Publishing LTD, 9781739440527, PB, 160pp, £10.99, 8/4/2024
A powerful literary novella from award-winning author Tade Thompson, about obsession, the creation of art and the many ways in which the urge to make can also turn into an urge to destroy.
In this shocking, and at times darkly comic, novel, a psychiatrist hired to write a short piece on Francis Bacon becomes obsessed with the artist, his life, and the characters who surrounded him. As he becomes consumed with the need to understand Bacon, and to create his own art, his grip on reality becomes increasingly tenuous, and he is haunted by disturbing figures. This short, bold piece of fiction explores how the passion needed to create art can also destroy the artist.
The Long Delirious Burning Blue by Sharon Blackie
September Publishing, 9781914613463, PB, 448pp, £10.99, 11/4/2024
A glorious, soaring novel about breaking free from the past and learning to live truly in the present from the author of If Women Rose Rooted.
Cat Munro, aged 39, quits her corporate job in Arizona and — in a bid to conquer her fear of flying — starts flying lessons in a small plane over the desert instead. Her mother, Laura, moves to the Scottish village where she lived when first married to Cat’s violent father and attempts to come to terms with the past. From the excoriating heat of the Arizona desert to the misty flow of a north-west Highland sea-loch, Sharon Blackie’s first novel presents us with the transformative power of landscape, and of storytelling, as Cat learns to finally let herself go and Laura learns how to forgive herself. An honest and moving exploration of the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, The Long Delirious Burning Blue is above all a story of courage, endurance and redemption.
Juliet the Maniac: A Novel by Juliet Escoria
Melville House Publishing, 9781685891275, PB, 336pp, £16.99, 11/4/2024
A confident and raw novel from a talented young writer, portraying the unravelling of a teenage girl as she plunges into self-destruction.
Juliet is a typical teenage girl — a little beast. Shrewd and frank and real, this novel follows her efforts to survive herself, as she tries to make sense of her on-and-off relationship with recovery, while traipsing through mid-90’s, Southern California. Juliet knows she should be poised for success. She knows her honours English teacher shouldn’t be pity changing her grades from F’s to C’s, knows she shouldn’t be snorting coke and chain-smoking at the Palms, knows she shouldn’t be hallucinating shadowy, Joan-of-Arc-like messages from God. But there is something dark and violent inside of her fourteen-year-old heart that makes it impossible for her to stop self-destructing. The two forced hospitalisations didn’t help her, neither did the outpatient facility for gay, depressed art kids — maybe Redwood Trails therapeutic boarding school will? Through her Didion-esque lens, Escoria captures the brutality of girlhood — its fleeting, toxic friendships, the monstrous ways anger transforms, and the constant feeling of being close to normal, but not normal at all.
After Nora by Penelope Curtis
Les Fugitives Ltd, 9781739778347, PB, 205pp, £13.99, 15/4/2024
In early 1920s England, Nora’s life in a state of flux. A gifted painter, married to man named Herbert, she has fallen in love with another. Sent away to her parents’ home to consider her position, she decides to take control of her life. She divorces her first Herbert to marry the second, then embarks on an existence on the margin of the artistic and political elite. This quest for control of her life as an artist, mother and wife will continue. Nora is a gifted painter but struggles to find the focus that seems to come so easily to male artists who are not required to fit their work into their domestic lives. In late 1960s Glasgow, young biologist Maria de Sousa wrestles with her feelings for Adam, her older colleague. Fifty years later, his daughter seeks out Maria to discover what really happened between them. Adam is the author’s father, and Nora the grandmother she never knew. After Nora is an original novel in two distinct but connected parts, interweaving timelines, extant documents, biography and fiction.
Anomaly by Andrej Nikolaidis
Translated by Will Firth
Peirene Press, 9781908670892, PB, 144pp, £12.99, 16/4/2024
An exhilerating new novel from one of Europe’s most distinctive literary voices.
New Year’s Eve. The last day of the last year of human existence. A high-ranking minister criss-crosses the city with blood on his hands, a dying necrophile attempts to go clean before God, and a traumatised nurse is pressured into keeping a powerful secret. With undisguised glee, a nameless narrator unravels these twisted tales of moral turmoil, all of which are brought to an abrupt close by a cataclysmic collision of time and space. What will remain on New Year’s Day? In a cabin in the Alps, the last people on earth — a musicologist and her young daughter — search for a five-hundred-year-old musical score that might explain the catastrophe. Outside the cabin, hidden in shadow, a sinister figure waits for them to accept their fate. Anomaly is an exhilarating, provocative carnival of a novel, from one of Europe’s most distinctive literary voices.
Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong
Tramp Press, 9781915290137, PB, 220pp, £13.99, 18/4/2024
Old Romantics is a collection of witty and acutely observed stories from an astonishing new talent. Slippery, observant and flawed, Maggie Armstrong’s narrators navigate a world of awkward expectation and latent hostility. Armstrong is a fresh and exciting new voice in Irish fiction. While this is a collection short stories, it also connects together and follows in Tramp’s tradition in publishing first-class debut writers.
Ellen, Countess of Castle Howel by Anna Maria Bennett
Honno Welsh Women’s Press, 9781912905997, PB, 600pp, £12.99, 18/4/2024
Marked by the sometimes scandalous life experiences of its author, Ellen, Countess of Castle Howel (1794) is an insightful, often humorous look at Wales, and Britain, at a time of changing social norms and attitudes. Raised in relative seclusion in Wales, where she is preyed on by a corrupt English lord, Ellen marries Lord Castle Howel, a wealthy, older man, in order to save her grandparents’ ancient estate. Transplanted to London, accompanied by her indefatigable Welsh maid, Winifred, Ellen’s innocence about the workings of fashionable society brings about a separation from her husband and the loss of her reputation. Following a dash to the north of England, where she gives birth to her son, she is reunited with her husband and her good name is restored. When Lord Castle Howel is killed in a riding accident, Ellen returns to Wales and sees her and her family’s fortunes transformed.
The Wings Upon Her Back by Samantha Mills
Tachyon Publications, 9781616964146, PB, 336pp, £17.99, 23/4/2024
This gripping science-fantasy novel from a Nebula and Locus Award-winning debut author is a complex, action-packed exploration of the costs of zealous faith, brutal war, and unquestioning loyalty.
Zenya was a teenager when she ran away from home to join the mechanically-modified warrior sect. She was determined to earn mechanized wings and protect the people and city she loved. Under the strict tutelage of a mercurial, charismatic leader, Zenya became Winged Zemolai. But after twenty-six years of service, Zemolai is disillusioned with her role as an enforcer in an increasingly fascist state. After one tragic act of mercy, she is cast out, and loses everything she worked for. As Zemolai fights for her life, she begins to understand the true nature of her sect, her leader, and the gods themselves.
The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan
Peninsula Press, 9781913512460, PB, 176pp, £10.99, 25/4/2024
A young woman reorients her relationship to the world in the wake of sudden deafness in this mesmerizing debut novel for readers of Rachel Cusk, Clarice Lispector, and Fleur Jaeggy.
An artist in her late twenties awakens one morning to a deep drone in her right ear. She is diagnosed with Sudden Deafness, but is offered no explanation for its cause. As the spectre of total deafness looms, she keeps a record of her year — a score of estrangement and enchantment, of luck and loneliness, of the chance occurrences to which she becomes attuned — while living alone in a New York City studio apartment with her dog. Through a series of fleeting and often humorous encounters — with neighbours, an ex-lover, doctors, strangers, family members, faraway friends, and with the lives and works of artists, filmmakers, musicians, and philosophers — making meaning becomes a form of consolation and curiosity, a form of survival. At once a rumination on silence and a novel on seeing, The Hearing Test is a work of vitalizing intellect and playfulness which marks the arrival of a major new literary writer with a rare command of form, compression, and intent.
The Damages by Genevieve Scott
Verve Books, 9780857308696, PB, 352pp, £10.99, 25/4/2024
What I remember best about that week in January is trying to keep track of all the lies I told…
1998. Ontario has been hit by a days-long, life-endangering ice storm, and on Regis University campus, with classes cancelled, the students are partying. In the midst of it all, eighteen-year-old Ros’s roommate Megan goes missing. As a panicked search ensues, Ros is blamed for not keeping a closer eye on Megan, and the incident casts a shadow over the next two decades of her life. 2020. Ros’s former partner, Lukas, the father of her eleven-year-old son, is accused of a sexual assault. The accusation brings new details of an old story to light, forcing Ros to revisit a dark moment from her past. Ros must take a hard look not only at the father of her child, but also at her own mistakes, her own trauma, and at the supposedly liberal period she grew up in.
