5 Sensational New Books for April 2025
Coming in April we have a fantastic short story collection by Lydia Millett and the latest novel by the fabulous Sayaka Murata. Enjoy 5 Sensational New Books for April 2025.
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5 Sensational New Books for April 2025
Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata
In our near-future world, children are solely conceived by artificial insemination. Even sex between married couples is viewed as taboo.
Amane’s family is irregular. Her parents copulated to create her and hope that she too will find love and have a child with the person she marries. But Amane falls in line with society’s way of thinking and wants a regular ‘clean’ marriage. Then she hears of a place that is the subject of a social experiment. Everyone in Paradise-Eden will act as one big family. Could this be the perfect third way?
The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig
Five high school friends, bonded by an oath to protect each other no matter what.
On a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something extraordinary: a mysterious staircase to nowhere
One friend walks up – but never comes back down.
Now twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared, and the friends return to find the lost boy – and what lies beyond the staircase in the woods…
Don’t Sleep with the Dead by Nghi Vo
Nick Carraway―paper soldier and novelist―has found a life and a living watching the mad magical spectacle of New York high society in the late thirties. He’s good at watching, and he’s even better at pretending: pretending to be straight, pretending to be human, pretending he’s forgotten the events of that summer in 1922.
On the eve of the second World War, however, Nick learns that someone’s been watching him pretend and that memory goes both ways. When he sees a familiar face one very dark night, it quickly becomes clear that dead or not, damned or not, Jay Gatsby isn’t done with him.
In all paper there is memory, and Nick’s ghost has come home.
Atavists: Stories by Lydia Millet
Atavists follows a group of families, couples and loners in their collisions, confessions and conflicts in a post-pandemic America of artificially lush lawns, beauty salons, tech-bro mansions, assisted-living facilities, big-box stores, gastropubs, college campuses and medieval role-playing festivals.
The various “-ists” who people these linked stories—from futurists to insurrectionists to cosmetologists—include a professor who’s morbidly fixated on an old friend’s Instagram account; a woman convinced that her bright young son-in-law is watching geriatric porn; a bodybuilder who lives an incel’s fantasy life; a couple who surveil the neighbours after finding obscene notes in their mailbox; a pretentious academic accused of plagiarism; and a suburban ex-marathoner father obsessed with hosting refugees in a tiny house in his garden
Audition by Katie Kitamura
One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilising novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love
Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young – young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.
If you enjoyed 5 Sensational New Books for April 2025, check out our Book of the Month for March 2025, Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd.
