9 Books I’m Excited to Read This Spring

• Release date: April 7

Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel is ricocheting across the internet, and with good reason. In this book, Burke, the host of culture and politics podcast Diabolical Lies, takes on momfluencer/tradwife culture and modern consumerism. Here, she chronicles Natalie Heller Mills (the equivalent of Ballerina Farm’s Hannah Neeleman) who has a perfectly curated farmhouse life with her six children and ranch-hand-turned-politician husband. Natalie spends her days surrounded by nannies and producers, creating an empire for her 8 million followers and blocking out the jealous, coastal Ivy League haters. Until one morning, when she wakes up in the year 1805. All the grit of a “traditional” lifestyle, none of the glam. Everyone is losing it over the ending’s crazy twist and I can’t wait to see what all the buzz is about.

• Release date: June 11, 2024

Margo’s Got Money Troubles was a nominee for Goodreads Readers’ Favorite Fiction award in 2024, and though it’s not a new spring title, the recently-premiered AppleTV+ series starring Elle Fanning has me moving it to the top of my list. The plot follows the eponymous character who has an affair with her community college English professor. She ends up pregnant and decides to keep the baby. But soon, Margo finds herself with a newborn, freshly laid off from her waitressing job and with minimal support from her parents—ex-pro-wrestler dad, Jinx, and former Hooters waitress mom, Shyanne. With limited options for working outside the home, Margo turns to OnlyFans and ends up a runaway success.

• Release date: April 21

Xochitl Gonzalez is one of my favorite authors, and she returns with her third novel, Last Night In Brooklyn, following 2024’s Anita de Monte Laughs Last. In this new offering, the native New Yorker throws her readers into the flush months leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, following 26-year-old Alicia Canales Forten who yearns for something more than her pre-determined future as the wife of a doctor. One night, she heads out in Brooklyn, and her life is changed forever as she’s drawn into the orbit of her finance bro cousin and an up-and-coming fashion designer whose house parties are the stuff of legend. Alicia admires—and wants—their fearlessness; she’s tempted by all the things their money can buy. The only question is, at what price?

• Release date: June 2

Fresh off Hamnet’s spectacular run as an Oscar-nominated film, the acclaimed Irish-British novelist returns with Land. The novel is set in the years following the Great Hunger, also known as the Irish Potato Famine, which lasted from 1845 to 1852 and killed over 1 million people. At the center of the story is Tomás and his son Liam. They work for the Ordnance Survey, which aims to map all of Ireland. The British soldiers soon arrive expecting the work to be complete, but all is thrown up into the air when father and son discover a corpse. The finding unleashes a torrent of consequences that will see Liam, just 10, struggle to get his changed father home.

• Release date: May 5

After years of revisiting characters from her earlier works, The Pulitzer Prize winner is back with a new cast of characters and a story that meditates on loneliness, friendship and parenthood. At the heart of the novel is Artie Dam, an 11th-grade history teacher who by all appearances is living a charmed life. But eventually, he uncovers a secret that unravels his whole world, forcing him to contend with his own isolation and the relationships with those closest to him.

• Release date: May 19

I’m a total nerd for the classics (I even host a dedicated book club for the genre), so this forthcoming non-fiction tome was on my TBR as soon as I saw it. Naomi Kanakia is a YA novelist, poet, essayist and the voice behind the popular newsletter, Woman of Letters. Said newsletter explores the classics and offers insights as to what they offer in today’s culture. What’s So Great About the Great Books? continues that conversation, looking at literary tradition and history while attempting to address the objections that “Great Books” by authors like Plato, Tolstoy and Proust are “too problematic, reactionary and irrelevant.”

• Release date: April 14

This was pitched to me as Yellowface meets The Substance, and I was immediately on board. The Take is YA novelist Kelly Yang’s first foray into adult fiction and centers on Maggie Wang, a young and broke writer looking for a lifeline. Her path crosses with that of veteran Hollywood producer Ingrid Parker, who finds her career hanging in the balance. Ingrid offers Maggie a mind-boggling $3 million for ten experimental medical sessions that supposedly restore one’s youth. It seems like a good deal for both sides, until their lives become impossibly intertwined and they must confront the realities of race, age and success.

• Release date: May 5

One of the most powerful moments in my literary life was the year I read The Sympathizer. It was the first time I had read about a global conflict from a non-Western perspective. That’s why The Young Will Remember jumped out at me—it takes a look at the Korean War through the lens of a 28-year-old Chinese-American journalist, Ellie, and the North Korean woman, Emma, who saves her after Ellie’s plane is shot down. As Ellie and Emma make their treacherous way towards the southern border searching for safety and Emma’s daughter, their lives and fates are sealed to each other.

Release date: June 2

Ann Patchett’s 11th work of fiction follows Daphne Fuller, whose life is turned upside down in a chance meeting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She and her husband run into Eddie Triplett, to whom Daphne’s mother was briefly married when Daphne was 9. Patchett explores the power of connection, memory, agency as the 53-year-old Daphne and elderly Eddie reacquaint themselves and see the meaningfulness of love that endures.