April’s Best New Fiction

Circe, by Madeline Miller
Miller’s much buzzed-about followup to 2011’s The Song of Achilles is narrated by the dazzling, captivating, vengeful Circe, daughter of Helios, who is banished by Zeus after turning her ex’s new love into a sea monster. Dismissed as useless when she was a girl (when your dad is the sun god, there’s a lot to live up to), Circe’s true skills are her penchant for herbs and spellcasting. Circe’s infatuation with mortals is her biggest strength and greatest weakness, and you’ll breathlessly follow her witchy, thousands-of-years-in-the-making adventures.

The Female Persuasion, by Meg Wolitzer
Wolitzer’s fascinating, timely new book combines elements of her previous bestsellers The Interestings (with its theme of youthful expectation versus the realities of middle age) and The Wife (a dark tale of subverted female ambition). The central relationship of Persuasion is that of Greer Kadetsky, a young, shy, liberal arts–educated woman and her mentor, Faith Frank, a 60-something pioneering member of the feminist movement. Greer’s childhood sweetheart and best friend have their own compelling narratives as well. The quartet of fully realized characters will pull you in to their lives even as their respective connections with each other are potentially torn asunder.

Varina, by Charlies Frazier
As with his stunning, National Book Award–winning Cold Mountain (also a film starring Nicole Kidman and Jude Law), Varina is set during the Civil War. The novel is narrated as an oral memoir by the titular heroine, Jefferson Davis’s much-younger wife, whose views of the conflict did not necessarily match those of the Confederate President. Little has been written about the First Lady of the Confederacy, and the story depicted here is full of rich and often unexpected details about the antebellum south as well as Varina’s post–Civil War life in New York.

Nantucket Wedding, by Nancy Thayer
Widowed Alison didn’t expect to remarry, especially now that she’s a grandmother to toddlers, but when she meets David, sparks fly, and the two soon find themselves engaged. How will their adult children handle the news? Will the four new siblings find common ground with each other, or become common enemies? Most importantly, will the Nantucket wedding itself go off without a hitch or fall apart before the newly blended family has a chance to bond? Fun and fast-paced with plenty of location envy to make you drool, Wedding promises to be a perfect spring break/early summer read.

You Think It, I’ll Say It: Stories, by Curtis Sittenfeld
In her first collection of short stories, bestselling novelist Sittenfeld’s talent for lifting the curtain on the apparent successes of others is on full display. Protagonists irritated by social media perfection and chipper volunteers (not to mention the politics of the day) are fully relatable and lovable in their snarkiness. If you enjoyed “The Prairie Wife” (first published in the New Yorker last year), in which a wife and mother considers upending the perfect social media empire of a former love, you’ll adore the nine additional stories waiting for you here.

Noir, by Christopher Moore
Part satire and part homage to Raymond Chandler– and Dashiell Hammett–style gumshoe fiction, Moore’s novel sends his readers to the hardboiled, foggy mean streets of 1940s San Francisco, where bartender Sammy Tiffin falls fast for a dame whose disappearance seems to involve all manner of conspiracy. Whether he’s being interrogated or chased, Sammy keeps the wisecracks flowing. And then there’s the mysterious, possibly extraterrestrial Roswell connection…

The Only Story, by Julian Barnes
Nineteen-year-old Paul falls in love with forty-eight-year-old Susan at a tennis club outside London in 1963. Despite (or perhaps because of) societal and parental censure, they move in together and embark on an eventually public affair. Five decades later, older but not necessarily wiser, Paul looks back on their exhilarating and painful story, parsing it for meaning and pushing on the bruise of the “the only story” of his life he has deemed worth telling. This looks to be a heartbreaking, transformative read from the acclaimed author of The Sense of an Ending, for which he won the Man Booker Prize.

First Person, by Richard Flanagan
Kif, a young writer frantic for cash to support his family, accepts an assignment that will test his writing chops and his sanity. If he succeeds in finishing the criminal memoir of Siegfried Heidl in six agonizing weeks, only then will he see a payday. But Heidl, an embezzler who’s been convicted of stealing $700 million from the Australian banking industry, doesn’t wish to be known, so he refuses to provide pertinent information to his ghost writer. Instead, Heidl has a penchant for turning the spotlight around and infiltrating Kif’s life. Readers are in excellent meta-fictional hands: Flanagan won the Man Booker for The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Paris by the Book, by Liam Callanan
When her troubled husband Robert, who writes book for young people, disappears, left-behind Leah becomes the protagonist of her own mystery (and perhaps a romance). With her two daughters beside her, Leah follows the clues Robert left in his wake, which include plane tickets to Paris and a half-written manuscript. The manuscript, in turn, leads them to a bookshop in dire need of new owners. But will Leah’s unexpected, charmed new life in France fill the spaces where Robert used to be?

Miss Julia Raises the Roof, by Ann B. Ross
In Miss Julia’s nineteenth adventure, a light mystery set in small-town North Carolina, the outspoken, warm-hearted heroine is in top form as she seeks to uncover the truth about a planned group home for teenage boys, to be situated next door to her friend Hazel’s place. In theory, the project sounds good, but Julia’s hunch that something is seriously amiss proves well-founded. (“They Lord!” indeed.)