1. Great Big Beautiful Life – Emily Henry

Publish Date: 22 April 2025

Why I’m excited for it: This past year I have sufficiently become an Emily Henry fan. After years of putting off reading any of her novels, I now cannot wait, like everyone else, for them to come out.

Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of a woman with more than a couple of plot twists up her sleeve in this dazzling and sweeping new novel from Emily Henry.

Alice Scott is an eternal optimist still dreaming of her big writing break. Hayden Anderson is a Pulitzer-prize winning human thundercloud. And they’re both on balmy Little Crescent Island for the same reason: To write the biography of a woman no one has seen in years–or at least to meet with the octogenarian who claims to be the Margaret Ives. Tragic heiress, former tabloid princess, and daughter of one of the most storied (and scandalous) families of the 20th Century.

When Margaret invites them both for a one-month trial period, after which she’ll choose the person who’ll tell her story, there are three things keeping Alice’s head in the game.

One: Alice genuinely likes people, which means people usually like Alice—and she has a whole month to win the legendary woman over.

Two: She’s ready for this job and the chance to impress her perennially unimpressed family with a Serious Publication

Three: Hayden Anderson, who should have no reason to be concerned about losing this book, is glowering at her in a shaken-to-the core way that suggests he sees her as competition.

But the problem is, Margaret is only giving each of them pieces of her story. Pieces they can’t swap to put together because of an ironclad NDA and an inconvenient yearning pulsing between them every time they’re in the same room.

And it’s becoming abundantly clear that their story—just like the tale Margaret’s spinning—could be a mystery, tragedy, or love ballad…depending on who’s telling it.

2. The Griffin Sisters’ Greatest Hits – Jennifer Weiner

Publish Date: 09 April 2025

Why I’m excited for it: Another author I have learned to love, I cannot wait for Jennifer Weiner’s new novel to come out – especially since it is about a Pop Duo. I am picturing it as the grown up version of The Daydreams meets Daisy Jones and the Six.

One of the most anticipated books of the year, from #1 New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Weiner, a glimmering novel set in the world of pop music about sisters, motherhood, young love, and the dreams we chase.

Sisters Cassie and Zoe Grossberg were born just a year apart but could not have been more different. Zoe, blessed with charm and beauty, yearned for fame from the moment she could sing into a hairbrush. Cassie was a musical prodigy who never felt at home in her own skin and preferred the safety of the shadows.

On the brink of adulthood in the early 2000s, destiny intervened, catapulting the sisters into the spotlight as the pop sensation the Griffin Sisters, hitting all the touchstones of early aughts fame—SNL, MTV, Rolling Stone magazine—along the way.

But after a whirlwind year in the public eye, the band abruptly broke up.

Two decades later, Zoe’s a housewife; Cassie’s off the grid. The sisters aren’t speaking, and the real reason for the Griffin Sisters’ breakup is still a mystery. Zoe’s teenage daughter, Cherry, who’s determined to be a star in spite of Zoe’s warnings, is on a quest to learn the truth about what happened to the band all those years ago.

As secrets emerge, all three women must face the consequences of their choices: the ones they made and the ones the music industry made for them. Can they forgive each other—and themselves? And will the Griffin Sisters ever make music again?

3. The Amalfi Curse – Sarah Penner

Publish Date: 29 April 2025

Why I’m excited for it: You know I love magical realism, but I also love pirates (I actually went through a phase were I dressed like exclusively dressed like a Disney-bound pirate when Dead Man’s Chest came out). Though I did not like The London Seance Society, I am willing to give Sarah Penner another chance with this one.

Powerful witchcraft. A hunt for sunken treasure. Forbidden love on the high seas. Beware the Amalfi Curse…

Haven Ambrose, a trailblazing nautical archaeologist, has come to the sun-soaked village of Positano to investigate the mysterious shipwrecks along the Amalfi Coast. But Haven is hoping to find more than old artifacts beneath the azure waters; she is secretly on a quest to locate a trove of priceless gemstones her late father spotted on his final dive. Upon Haven’s arrival, strange maelstroms and misfortunes start plaguing the town. Is it nature or something more sinister at work?

As Haven searches for her father’s sunken treasure, she begins to unearth a centuries-old tale of ancient sorcery and one woman’s quest to save her lover and her village by using the legendary art of stregheria, a magical ability to harness the ocean. Could this magic be behind Positano’s latest calamities? Haven must unravel the Amalfi Curse before the region is destroyed forever…

Against the dazzling backdrop of the Amalfi Coast, this bewitching novel shimmers with mystery, romance and the untamed magic of the sea.

4. The Staircase in the Woods – Chuck Wendig

Publish Date: 29 April 2025

Why I’m excited for it: This is giving me if The Lost Story was a horror novel – and I am obsessed with that idea. Though Chuck Wendig has an impressive catalog, I have yet to read any of his work.

A group of friends investigates the mystery of a strange staircase in the woods in this mesmerizing horror novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Accidents.

Five high school friends are bonded by an oath to protect one another no matter what.

Then, on a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something a mysterious staircase to nowhere.

One friend walks up—and never comes back down. Then the staircase disappears.

Twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared. Now the group returns to find the lost boy—and what lies beyond the staircase in the woods. . . .

5. The French Honeymoon – Anne-Sophie Jouhanneau

Publish Date: 15 April 2025

Why I’m excited for it: The Paris Apartment: Loved. A Simple Favor: Loved. With a description like this, there is no way I could stay away from The French Honeymoon. Looking at Jouhanneau’s catalog, The French Honeymoon is their debut adult novel, and appears to be their first Mystery Thriller. Previously, her work consisted of Teen Romance novels. With that large of a genre hop, it must be a good one.

The Paris Apartment meets A Simple Favor in an unputdownable thriller about a honeymoon gone horribly wrong.

Sometimes, Paris is a terrible idea.

This is not how she imagined it, any of it. Taylor Quinn arrives at her honeymoon suite in the City of Love alone, sans suitcase, but with wads of stolen cash. When she catches a glimpse of newlyweds Cassie and Olivier enjoying their happily ever, she can’t tear her eyes away. And Cassie makes their antics easy to follow as she reveals every detail of their picture-perfect trip on social media. Taylor’s obsession builds as she tracks their every move. This was the kind of life she was supposed to be living, this was the marriage she should have had, this was the honeymoon she dreamed of.

The illusion is shattered when she overhears a heated argument between Cassie and Olivier, which reveals that they’re not the lovestruck couple they pretend to be. But Cassie and Olivier have agendas of their own and Taylor can’t see the danger in getting in the middle of this until it’s too late. And now, no one will get out of Paris unscathed.

When We Were Real – Daryl Gregory

Publish Date: 01 April 2025

From multiple award-winning author Daryl Gregory comes a madcap adventure following two friends on a cross-country bus tour through the mind-boggling glitches in their simulated world as they grapple with love, family, secrets, and the very nature of reality in a simulation.

JP and Dulin have been the best of friends for decades. When JP finds out his cancer has aggressively returned, Dulin decides it’s the perfect time for one last adventure: a week-long bus tour of North America’s Impossibles, the physics-defying glitches and geographic miracles that started cropping up seven years earlier—right after the Announcement that revealed our world to be merely a digital simulacrum. The outing, courtesy of Canterbury Trails Tours, promises the trip of a (not completely real) lifetime in a (not completely deluxe) coach.

Their fellow passengers are 21st-century pilgrims, each of them on the tour for their own reasons. There’s a nun hunting for an absent God, a pregnant influencer determined to make her child too famous to be deleted, a crew of horny octogenarians living each day like it’s their last, and a professor on the run from leather-clad sociopaths who take The Matrix as scripture. Each stop on this trip is stranger than the last—a Tunnel outside of time, a zero gravity Geyser, the compound of motivational-speaking avatar—with everyone barreling toward the tour’s iconic final stop Ghost City, where unbeknownst to our travelers the answer to who is running the simulation may await.

When We Were Real is a tour-de-force and exploration of what really matters, even in an artificial world.

The Sirens – Emilia Hart

Publish Date: 01 April 2025

A spellbinding novel about sisters separated by centuries, but bound together by the sea, from the author of the runaway New York Times bestseller Weyward

2019: Lucy awakens from a dream to find her hands around her ex-lover’s throat. Horrified, she flees to her older sister’s house on the Australian coast, hoping she can help explain the strangely vivid nightmare that preceded the attack—but Jess is nowhere to be found.

As Lucy awaits her return, the rumors surrounding Jess’s strange small town start to emerge. Numerous men have gone missing at sea, spread over decades. A tiny baby was found hidden in a cave. And sailors tell of hearing women’s voices on the waves. Desperate for answers, Lucy finds and begins to read her sister’s adolescent diary.

1999: Jess is a lonely sixteen-year-old in a rural town in the middle of the continent. Diagnosed with a rare allergy to water, she has always felt different, until her young, charming art teacher takes an interest in her drawings, seeing a power and maturity in them—and in her—that no one else has.

1800: Twin sisters Mary and Eliza have been torn from their loving father in Ireland and forced onto a convict ship bound for Australia. For their entire lives, they’ve feared the ocean, as their mother tragically drowned when they were just girls. Yet as the boat bears them further and further from all they know, they begin to notice changes in their bodies that they can’t explain, and they feel the sea beginning to call to them…

A breathtaking tale of female resilience and the bonds of sisterhood across time and space, The Sirens captures the power of dreams, and the mystery and magic of the sea.

Fun for the Whole Family – Jennifer E. Smith

Publish Date: 08 April 2025

A breathtaking, joy-filled novel about the people we love, the secrets we keep, and the enduring power of family, from the bestselling author of The Unsinkable Greta James.

“A glorious novel of love in all its forms—familial, romantic, lost, and found. Jennifer E. Smith is a ray of literary sunshine.”—Jenny Jackson, author of Pineapple Street

The four Endicott siblings—Gemma, Connor, Roddy, and Jude—were once inseparable, a bond created by the absence of their dazzling, mercurial mother, who would return for a few weeks each summer to whisk them off on sprawling road trips around the country.

Decades later, the unthinkable has happened: the Endicotts haven’t spoken in years . . . until an out-of-the-blue text arrives from Jude, now a famous actress, summoning them to a small town in North Dakota. They’re each at a crossroads: Gemma, who put her own ambitions aside to raise the others, now isn’t sure if she wants to be a mother herself; Connor, a celebrated novelist, is floundering after his recent divorce and suffering from an epic case of writer’s block; and Roddy, at the tail end of a professional soccer career, is dangerously close to losing his future husband for the chance at one last season.

Jude is the only Endicott who seems to have it all together—but appearances can be deceiving. As the weekend unfolds, and the siblings wrestle with their shared past and uncertain futures, they’ll discover that Jude has been keeping three secrets . . . each of which could change everything.

A captivating journey and an ode to forgiveness that takes readers across all fifty states, Fun for the Whole Family brims with heart and resonates long after the final page.

When the Harvest Comes – Denne Michele Norris

Publish Date: 15 April 2025

In this heart-wrenching debut novel, a young Black gay man, estranged from his father, must confront his painful past—and his deepest desires around gender, love, and sex.

“Epic, intimate, brutal, and tender, Denne Michele Norris has written a breathtaking testimony about the boundlessness of love.”—Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

“When the Harvest Comes is a book to sink into, to luxuriate within. . . . It’s only when you’re finished that you realize that you’ve never before read a story quite like this one.”—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

“I got tired of running away from what I should’ve been running toward.”

The venerated Reverend Doctor John Freeman did not raise his son, Davis, to be touched by any man, let alone a white man. He did not raise his son to whisper that man’s name with tenderness.

But on the eve of his wedding, all Davis can think about is how beautiful he wants to look when he meets his beloved Everett at the altar. Never mind that his mother, who died decades before, and his father, whose anger drove Davis to flee their home in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, for a freer life in New York City, won’t be there to walk him down the aisle. All Davis needs to be happy in this life is Everett, his new family, and his burgeoning career as an acclaimed violist.

When Davis learns during the wedding reception that his father has been in a terrible car accident, years of childhood trauma and unspoken emotion resurface. Davis must revisit everything that went wrong between them, risking his fledgling marriage along the way. 

In resplendent prose, Denne Michele Norris’s When the Harvest Comes reveals the pain of inheritance and the heroic power of love, reminding us that, in the end, we are more than the men who came before us.