11 Books To Read This Spring
So Far Gone A Novel By Jess Walter
A few weeks after the 2016 election, at Thanksgiving with his daughter and her belligerent new husband, Rhys Kinnick finally snapped. After an escalating fight about politics, he hauled off and punched the jerk. Immediately horrified by what he'd done, by the state of the world around him, and by his own spiraling mental health, Rhys chucked his smartphone out the car window and fled for a remote cabin in the woods of the Pacific Northwest.
Seven years later, when his grandchildren show up on his doorstep, Rhys barely recognizes them. Their mother has disappeared, and they need a safer place to stay than with their father, who has taken up with a Christian Nationalist militia. So what if Rhys’s cabin has no electricity or indoor plumbing, and the raccoons help themselves to the monthly grocery haul? He'll do whatever he needs to for these sweet kids.
But when the militia members show up and kidnap the children, Rhys realizes he'll have to re-enter the broken world. With the help of a bipolar retired detective and his caustic ex-girlfriend, Rhys reluctantly heads off on a madcap journey through the rubble of the life he left behind.
An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world.
Add two children. And a horse.
From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavour to make a mark on the world. In a time when western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data—something easily categorizable and predictable—Smith shows us why our humanity, our individual complexities, matter more than ever.
Isola a Novel By Allegra Goodman
Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian—an enigmatic and volatile man—spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. Isolated and afraid, Marguerite befriends her guardian’s servant and the two develop an intense attraction. But when their relationship is discovered, they are brutally punished and abandoned on a small island with no hope for rescue.
Once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she’d never before needed.
Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.
Every parent exists inside of two families simultaneously – the one she was born into, and the one she has made.
Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family’s verdant backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend, but her family life requires careful maintenance. Her mother can be as brittle and exacting as she is loving, and her father and brother assume familiar, if uncomfortable, models of masculinity. Then late one summer, everything changes. After a series of confusing transgressions, the simple pleasures of girlhood, slip away.
Twenty-five years later, Margaret hides under her parents’ bed, waiting for her young daughters to find her in a game of hide and seek. She’s newly divorced and navigating her life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of a new lover. But some part of her is still under the blackberry bush, punched out of time. Called upon to be a mother to her daughters, and a daughter to her mother, she must reckon with the echoes and refractions between the past and the present, what it means to keep a child safe, and how much of our lives are our own, alone.
Warm and generous, unflinchingly human, and ultimately joyful and empowering, SLEEP is about the cycles of motherhood and childhood, the cost of secrets and the burden of love, and what’s on the other side of the world, rich in possibility.
The bombshell A Novel By Darrow Farr
Corsica, 1993. As a sun-drenched Mediterranean summer heads into full swing, beautiful and brash seventeen-year-old Severine Guimard is counting down the days until graduation, dreaming of stardom while smoking cigarettes and seducing boys in her class to pass the time. The pampered French-American daughter of a politician, Severine knows she’s destined for bigger things.
That is, until one night, Severine is snatched off her bike by a militant trio fighting for Corsican independence and held for a large ransom. When the men fumble negotiating her release, the four become unlikely housemates deep in the island’s remote interior. Eager to gain the upper hand, Severine sets out to charm her captors, and soon, the handsome, intellectual leader, Bruno, the gentle university student, Tittu, and even the gruff, unflappable Petru grow to enjoy the company of their headstrong hostage.
As Severine is exposed to the group’s political philosophy, the ideas of Marx and Fanon begin to take root. With her flair for the spotlight and newfound beliefs, Severine becomes the face of a radical movement for a global TV audience. What follows is a summer of passion and terror, careening toward an inevitable, explosive conclusion, as Severine steps into the biggest role of her life.
The Bombshell is an electric novel filled with seduction and fervor as it explores the wonders and perils of youthful idealism, the combustibility of celebrity, and the sublime force of young love.
The Acid Queen The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary
Rosemary Woodruff Leary has been known only as the wife of Timothy Leary, the Harvard professor-turned-psychedelic high priest, whose jailbreak captivated the counterculture and whose life on the run with Rosemary inflamed the government. But Rosemary was more than a mere accessory. She was a beatnik, a psychonaut, and a true believer who tested the limits of her mind and the expectations for women of her time.
Long overlooked by those who have venerated her husband, Rosemary spent her life on the forefront of the counterculture, working with Leary on his books and speeches, sewing his clothing, and shaping—for better and for worse—the media’s narrative about LSD. Ultimately, Rosemary sacrificed everything for the safety of her fellow psychedelic pioneers and the preservation of her husband’s legacy.
Drawing from a wealth of interviews, diaries, archives, and unpublished sources, Susannah Cahalan writes the definitive portrait of Rosemary Woodruff Leary, reclaiming her narrative and her voice from those who dismissed her. Page-turning, revelatory, and utterly compelling, The Acid Queen shines an overdue spotlight on a pioneering psychedelic seeker.
Zeal a Novel By Morgan Jerkins
Harlem, 2019. Ardelia and Oliver are hosting their engagement party. As the guests get ready to leave, he hands her a love letter on a yellowing, crumbling piece of paper . . .
Natchez, 1865. Discharged from the Union Army as a free man after the war’s end, Harrison returns to Mississippi to reunite with the woman he loves, Tirzah. Upon his arrival at the Freedmen’s Bureau, though, he catches the eye of a woman working there, who’s determined to thwart his efforts to find his beloved. After tragedy strikes, Harrison resigns himself to a life with her.
Meanwhile in Louisiana, the newly free Tirzah is teaching at the Freedmen’s School, and discovers an advertisement in the local paper looking for her. Though she knows Harrison must have placed it, and longs to find him, the risks of fleeing are too great, and Tirzah chooses the life of seeming security right in front of her.
Spanning over a hundred and fifty years, Morgan Jerkins’s extraordinary novel intertwines the stories of these star-crossed lovers and their descendants. As Tirzah's family moves across the country during the Great Migration, they challenge authority with devastating consequences, while of the legacy of heartbreak and loss continues on in the lives of Harrison's progeny.
When Ardelia meets Oliver, she finds his family’s history is as full of secrets and omissions as her own. Could their connection be a cosmic reconciliation satisfying the unfulfilled desires of their ancestors, or will the weight of the past, present and future tear them apart?
Sweeping, textured, and meticulously researched, Zeal is both a story of how one generation’s choices reverberate through the years and an indelible portrait of an enduring love.
Playworld a Novel By Adam Ross
A big and big-hearted novel—one enthralling, transformative year in the life of a child actor coming of age in a bygone Manhattan, from the critically acclaimed author of Mr. Peanut (“A brilliant, powerful, and memorable book” —The New York Times)
“In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.”
Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the pressure of high school at New York's elite Boyd Prep—along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach—he's teetering on the edge of collapse.
Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin’s senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink—whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi’s Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm.
A sweeping historical novel in the vein of Hilary Mantel and Maggie O’Farrell set during the time of the Tudors’ ascent. The Pretender tells the story of Lambert Simnel, who was raised in obscurity as a peasant boy to protect his safety, believed to be the heir to the throne occupied by Richard III, and briefly crowned, at the age of ten, as King Edward the Sixth, one of the last of the Plantagenets.
In 1480 John Collan’s greatest anxiety is how to circumvent the village’s devil goat on the way to collect water. But the arrival of a well-dressed stranger from London upends his life forever: John is not John Collan, not the son of Will Collan, but the son of the long-deceased Duke of Clarence, hidden in the countryside after a brotherly rift over the crown, and because Richard III has a habit of disappearing his nephews. Removed from his humble origins, sent to Oxford to be educated in a manner befitting the throne’s rightful heir, John is put into play by his masters, learning the rules of etiquette in Burgundy and the machinations of the court in Ireland, where he encounters the intractable Joan, the delightfully strong-willed and manipulative daughter of his Irish patrons, a girl imbued with both extraordinary political savvy and occasional murderous tendencies. Joan has two paths available her—marry, or become a nun. Lambert’s choices are similarly stark: he will either become King, or die in battle. Together they form an alliance that will change the fate of the English monarchy.
Inspired by a footnote to history—the true story of the little known Simnel, who was a figurehead of the 1487 Yorkist rebellion and ended up working as a spy in the court of King Henry VII— The Pretender is historical fiction at its finest, a gripping, exuberant, rollicking portrait of British monarchy and life within the court, with a cast of unforgettable heroes and villains drawn from 15th century England. A masterful new work from a major new author.
The old-money Wieland family has it all—wealth, status, power. They’re also famously cursed. Clara and her brother Teddy grew up on a small island in Maine in the shadow of their parents’ tragic deaths, haunted by rumors and paparazzi. Fourteen years later they’ve mostly put their turbulent past to rest. Teddy has married Clara’s best friend, Jess, and the three of them have moved back home to take over the sprawling, remote family mansion known as Vantage Point. Then Teddy decides to run for the Senate—an unnerving prospect made much worse when intimate videos of Clara are leaked online. The most frightening part is that she doesn't remember filming any of them. Are the videos real? Or are they deepfakes? Is someone trying to take down the Wielands once and for all?
Everyone thinks Clara is losing her grip on reality, but she knows the videos are only the beginning. Years ago the curse destroyed her parents. Now it’s coming for her. Brimming with palpable tension, Vantage Point reveals a twisted web of family secrets and political ambition that raises questions about the blurred lines between public and private personas and the nature of truth in the digital age.
Naema, an elderly princess dedicated to her pet causes, is in a struck by a malady that maroons her in Montreux, she’s unable to host an exclusive gala dinner in Berlin to honor the author Masud al-Huzeil for his lifetime achievement in Arabic literature. Not only is she unable to attend, RSVPs have been slow to materialize, and she’s reduced to begging the ancient award-winner to find some attendees at the last minute. Masud invites his old friend Demian, a native Berliner, who in turn invites his two best the troubled innocent Livia, and an American publisher, Toto, who will do anything for a free meal.
But Toto doesn’t come alone. In tow are his much younger internet date—she’s stood him up often enough to be nicknamed “the Flake”—and Demian’s 15-year-old daughter, Nicole. Not to mention the cop who’s been trailing Nicole since she left the red-light district. Presiding over the affair is Naema's infinitely rich, endlessly disaffected grandson, Prince Radi, whose catastrophic pass at Nicole culminates in an epic midnight food run that changes all their lives.
With sophistication and tenderness, Nell Zink weaves a vividly colored tapestry of a milieu at odds with itself, taking her trademark ambiguity, daring and humor to new heights.
Sometimes friendship can be its own love story.
Victor and Zoey are getting old, well old-er, and it’s beginning to be a real problem.
Best friends for a decade, they have seen each other through bad dates and office drama, late nights and hungover brunches, during their years together in New York City.
As their wild twenties come to a close, though, the dynamic between the two is shifting. Coming off a tough breakup, Victor dedicates his energies toward building a career writing celebrity profiles for one of the last glossy magazines left, while Zoey navigates the terrain at her nascent fashion startup, questioning her future with her fiancé. The friends and acquaintances in their orbit—authors, influencers, “It girls”—are also searching for a sense of belonging, amidst anxieties and self-doubt.