7 New & Notable Books Coming in April 2026

Eighth-grade Jimmy Perrini lives in suburban New Jersey in the 1970s when tragedy strikes. His friends can’t help. His family makes his grief worse. Instead, he finds himself drifting towards two unlikely lifelines. 

One is an older burnout with a fast car and an endless supply of weed. The other is an older girl with an Ouija board. But can finding a ghost really heal his aching heart? 

Narrated by Jimmy as an adult, he reveals that ghosts will always be with us when we aren’t brave enough to face them when it matters.

Dahee Shin and her favorite cousin, Channing, made a promise when they were nine years old. Now, just over two decades later, Dahee lives in a New England beach town when Channing begs for her help. Channing finds herself trapped between two men. 

She’s in love with Minjae Oh. But the powerful and manipulative Kent Cho covets her. Dahee realizes the only way to save her cousin and her beloved is on her. But can she save them from a tragic fate? 

Or was Channing always destined to tragedy like Chunyung and Mongryong, Korea’s parallel to Romeo & Juliet, the story that has haunted her entire life?

Adora Hazzard has figured out the secret to happiness. She’s adopted the lessons of Stoicism, relishing in gratitude for all that she has and ignoring what she doesn’t. Her philosophy has even gained her a little “coven” of like-minded women. 

Everything is perfect. Until she meets a handsome stranger. Suddenly, her ordered life is upended, and her past threatens to unbury itself. 

Even worse is the desire for more that begins to consume her. And the reality of just how far she’ll go to get everything she wants.

The Adirondacks in the 80s offer Carol Girard and her husband an ordinary life. Navigating the waters of becoming new parents, everything is perfect. But when a flickering light in the sky ends up becoming communication from alien life, nothing will ever be the same. 

Decades later, the Girard family each learns and grows with this impossible new reality as part of their lives. Across five decades, they struggle with the knowledge that humanity isn’t alone and how that shapes their desire to live a life that means something.

Thomas is many things to our unnamed narrator: the father of his friend, Max, his mentor, and a massive success in the arts. When Thomas agrees to an interview, his final published, the narrator travels to his home in Providence, Rhode Island. 

But the morning of the interview, he drops his phone in the sink, ruining his sole means of recording the conversation. Unwilling to admit his mistake, what follows is a conversation that explores how technologies that serve to connect us might keep us apart. 

And how the things we use to remember might simply work to help us forget.

Despite being only twenty-six, Alicia Canales feels smothered. She lives at home under her mother’s rules and beliefs while she saves enough to move and marry the man she loves. She’s convinced herself she’s fine until her neighbor, an up-and-coming fashion designer, moves in. 

His parties are epic, drawing creatives full of energetic ambition. They are filled with the kind of unabashed confidence and ambition Alicia struggles to see in herself. 

And when her wealthy cousin moves into the neighborhood, Alicia is drawn further into the wild and precarious lives of those who dare to go after what they want rather than play it safe.

It isn’t enough that Ellie’s mother is in a coma. Or that her sister believes Ellie isn’t Chinese enough. Or that a group of engineers wants to destroy the technology that is keeping her mother alive. The thing that is keeping the entire universe intact. 

Facing her mother’s legacy and confronting the generational trauma is the only way to preserve life as Ellie and everyone else know it. But to do that, she has to reconcile with the secrets in her family’s past. 

And if she does that, she’ll have to decide whether to save her family or the universe, because it may not be possible to save both.