Here are the books coming out in April that I’m most excited about. All descriptions are the publisher’s copy.

A stunning, expansive chronicle of Suriname from Astrid Roemer, whose On a Woman’s Madness was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award. Evoking Toni Morrison and Edward P. Jones, Off-White, in translation from Dutch by Lucy Jones and David McKay, continues Astrid Roemer’s long overdue introduction to English-language readers.

It’s 1966 in Suriname, on the Caribbean coast of South America, and the long shadow of colonialism still hangs over the country. Grandma Bee is the proud, cigar-smoking matriarch of the Vanta family, which is an intricate mix of Creole, Maroon, French, Indian, Indigenous, British, and Jewish backgrounds. But Grandma Bee is dying, a cough has settled deep in her lungs. 

The approaching end has her thinking about the members of her family she’s lost, and especially one of her favorite granddaughters, Heli, who has been sent away to the Netherlands because of an affair with her white teacher. Ultimately, there’s only one question Bee must answer: What is a family? If her descendants are spread across the world, don’t look similar, don’t share a heritage, and don’t even know each other, what bond will they have once she has died?

A moving portrait of a woman finding peace in the legacy that is her daughters and granddaughters, Off-White, keenly translated by Lucy Scott and David McKay, is also a searing and complex portrait of male violence, the legacy of colonialism, and a dismantling of what it means to be “white”. Written after a nearly 20-year break from publishing, Off-White is another masterpiece from the only Surinamese author to win the prestigious Dutch Literature Award.

Releases April 9. Pre-order here.

A sexually fluid narrator mourns a failed relationship over the course of two harsh winters in this raw, unprecedented portrait of millennials living in Seoul.

The time is roughly now in Seoul, and Kai, a bisexual white-collar worker, has just been abandoned by his longtime lover. Follow him through the city’s alleyways as he reels from this sudden departure. Walk with him up snowy mountains where he contemplates ending his own life. That mourning can be both a sensuous and revelatory art is epitomized in the paths that Kai crosses and the lives he alters for better or worse. 

Kai is not the only one feeling disoriented and aimless these days. Those in his inner circle similarly experience personal crises as they go through their thirties in a nation simmering with class and generational tensions, as well as the specter of new and old wars. The center of Kai’s heartbreak, Seoul in all of its millennial glory and turmoil, is brought to the forefront in austere, visceral prose. Doing for Seoul what Kathy Acker and Constance De Jong once did for New York City, Ery Shin offers rare insight into the psyches of those in and around the margins, living under the contemporary geopolitical tensions of the peninsula—her characters are sexually fluid, depraved, nihilistic, impotent, prone to violence, and obsessed with suicide. The result is a phantasmagorical story and a poignant meditation on queer life in a city beset by North Korea’s shadow.

Releases April 9. Pre-order here.

Three generations of Italian women live together under the same roof-but each provides a different perspective on her life and family.

Three generations of women live together under the same roof. Though they are united by blood, each of the Cascadei women has a very different personality and way of expressing herself. Teenage daughter Lori scribbles impulsively in her diary, so eager to speed off on her moped that she rarely bothers with punctuation. Mother Maria, a professional translator, writes detailed and observant letters yet doesn’t see what is happening right in front of her. And grandmother Gesuina, a former stage actress, speaks into an audio recorder, giving a provocative and brutally candid performance for an imagined audience that might never listen. 

Life, Brazen and Garish offers a fresh take on the epistolary novel, telling the story of a family through the fragmented and disparate perspectives of daughter, mother, and grandmother. Yet even as each woman endures her private struggles with love and betrayal, youth and maturity, knowledge and ignorance, reality and illusion, the Cascadeis forge a solidarity that transcends generations. In turns heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny, this novel is a triumph of narrative voice and literary style from one of Italy’s most renowned writers.

Releases April 12. Pre-order here.

A gem of a debut novel about a young mother navigating the instabilities of teaching, parenting, and marriage in the wake of the pandemic.

With deadpan humor and a keen eye for the strangeness of our days, Negative Space follows a week in the life of an English teacher at a New York private school. At home, her two children, increasingly restless, ask constant questions about mortality and find hidden wisdom in the cartoons they watch on television. Her husband tends to his plants and offers occasional counsel between Zoom calls to Hong Kong and Australia. And at school, as she navigates the currents between wealthy, increasingly disconnected students and bewildered faculty, she accidentally witnesses an ambiguous, possibly inappropriate interaction between a teacher and a student.… She feels compelled to say something, but how can she be sure of what she saw?

Precisely rendered and filled with sly observations about our off-kilter days, Negative Space is a witty and resonant portrait of a woman caught between the pressures of home and work, parenting and teaching, what’s normal and what isn’t. Writing with an acute sense of dread and delight, Gillian Linden has crafted a stunning debut that examines what we owe the people who depend on us in a fractured and indifferent world.

Releases April 16. Pre-order here.

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 Helena, who live together in a retirement home not far from Warsaw. These are not ordinary stories they are sharing, because both of them were imprisoned as children in Auschwitz during World War II. At the center is Helena, 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 harbor a hideous pride and sense of superiority over other prisoners? Rudzka’s extraordinary writing turns unsettling questions about memory and survival into art.

Releases April 30. Pre-order here.

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Let me know what you’re looking forward to reading in the comments!