The Best New Book Releases Out April 8, 2025

I’ve been a Vo devotee since I read The Empress of Salt and Fortune, the first novella in her Singing Hills Cycle series. With Don’t Sleep with the Dead, in addition to some pretty sound advice, Vo is giving us a companion novella to The Chosen and the Beautiful, her 2021 retelling of The Great Gatsby. This time, instead of following the queer Asian tennis player Jordan Baker, we’re focused on paper soldier and novelist Nick Carraway. Nick has become adept at watching the spectacle that is New York high society in the late ’30s, but what he doesn’t realize is that as he watches, something also watches him. His pretending to be straight—and even human—hasn’t gone unnoticed. What’s more, the events—and the people who may or may not have died—of that summer in 1922 aren’t quite done with him.

Here’s what I said about it before: Through Nikki, who has returned to North Carolina at the request of her estranged grandmother, we learn about past queens of Appalachia. During the visit, Mother Rita tells Nikki about her great-great-great-grandmother, Queen Luella, who lived on the very land they stand on. There was a kingdom called Happy Land, where formerly enslaved people made memories of African kingdoms flesh. Now, it’s up to Nikki to reclaim what they established, lest it be taken from her family like everything else.

In this follow-up to the bestselling The Cat Who Saved Books, we’re let into the world of 13-year-old Nanami, whose asthma prevents her from playing sports or hanging outside with friends. So, naturally, she reads. One day, she notices that some of her favorite books—many classics among them—have gone missing from the library. When she tells the librarians, they dismiss her, but then she sees a suspicious man in a gray suit and follows him. Her pursuit of him is thwarted by her asthma, and by the time she catches her breath, he’s gone. Enter Tiger, the talking tabby cat from the first book in the series who saves books. Books are being burned, and it’s up to Nanamin and Tiger to save them.

Here, an accomplished actress and an attractive younger man meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. Who they are to each other is a question that Kitamura’s narrative unfurls, except it extends the question to all relationships. It looks at the dynamics—or roles—we have with different people in our lives, showing how we’re constantly auditioning, even with people who think they know us best.

Mitch Caddo is a young law school graduate who, despite being an outsider in the land of his Anishinaabe ancestors, runs the government of the Passage Rouge Nation and the nation’s Golden Eagle Casino and Hotel with his childhood friend, Tribal President Mack Beck. Then Mack is up for reelection, and the people opposing him are the well-known activist and politician Gloria Hawkins and her young aide Layla Beck, who happens to be Mack’s estranged sister and Mitch’s former boo. As you might imagine, with politics—and family, and former lovers—things get heated. So much so that Mitch and Layla have to come together to stop the reservation from sliding into outright violent chaos, especially after Mitch’s mentor dies.

Trust me when I say y’all aren’t ready for Linda. At first glance, she appears to be average and normal—which is by design. She earns a modest living through a social media management job during the day, then takes the bus home to a windowless garage she rents in San Francisco. Her real interest, though? Taking a round-trip flight to a regional hub every Friday. But it’s during the flight that she’s really living—the power and grandeur of each new plane she’s in makes her…all hot and bothered, let’s say. Yes, she is attracted to planes and thinks her destiny is to be united with one in eternity through a plane crash. But then she gets the chance to possibly make this happen. The question is: is she ready to give up the last vestiges of the “normal” life she’s constructed? And, can she handle her life spinning out of control as a result?