April book preview: Frozen billionaires in space
My 10 most anticipated books of April 2025.
After three years of archival research, I finally finished writing my book, A Danger to the Minds of Young Girls, a few weeks ago, and my brain needed a break from words. Thus, a very late April preview.
I’ve also come to a bit of a crossroads with The Frontlist. I’m rethinking my current approach (monthly previews + behind-the-book interviews) to experiment with more kinds of coverage (like breaking news of big forthcoming books), but I haven’t quite landed on what works yet. In general, I think I need to spend more time sharing my own thoughts and experiences as a writer and a reader here. Thanks for your patience as I figure this out, and I’d love to hear from you, my esteemed audience, about what you’d like to see in The Frontlist as a beloved subscriber. (Just reply to this email or leave a comment on the web post. What do you care about most when it comes to new and upcoming books?)
My 10 most-anticipated books of April 2025
Where the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler (MCD, April 1)
Nayler’s debut novel The Mountain in the Sea is one of my favorite works of science fiction of the decade so far. Needless to say, I’m anxiously awaiting Where the Axe Is Buried, which sounds like a mix between Apple TV+’s Foundation and Slow Horses adaptations. In the not-too-distant future, the president of the Federation keeps downloading his mind into “a succession of new bodies,” the AI-driven government of Western Europe is working out about as poorly as today’s ChatGPT users would expect, and a team of crack spies and scientists is trying to fight back.
A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett (April 1, Del Rey)
RJB is one of the most consistent fantasy writers working today. He’s smart, makes bold narrative decisions, and I loved his two previous trilogies, Divine Cities and Founders. This book is the second in a duology, following up on The Tainted Cup — a fantasy detective story set in one of Bennett’s most interesting secondary worlds.
Our City That Year by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell (HarperVia, April 1)
Shree won the International Booker Prize for Tomb of Sand back in 2022, but Our City That Year is a new translation of a much earlier novel, first published in Hindi in 1998. It’s about a writer and two academics in an unnamed city in India that explodes with sectarian violence — “loosely based on the gathering violence that eventuated in the demolition of the Babri Mosque by religious extremists in 1992.”
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara (Pantheon, April 8)
Vara wrote one of my favorite novels of the decade so far, The Immortal King Rao, so I’m excited to see her tackle the most controversial technology of that very same decade—the advent of ChatGPT and other LLM-based AI—in a work of nonfiction. A few years ago, Vara asked GPT-3 to co-write stories with her about the death of her sister, and the results went viral. Searches is a book-length exploration of humankind’s relationship with technology at this particularly fraught moment in time.
Terrestrial History by Joe Mungo Reed (Norton, April 8)
As unlikely as it is in reality, I can’t resist science fiction novels about humanity leaving our celestial cradle for another planet. I also loved the short story Joe Mungo Reed published in Esquire a few years ago — “Islanders,” about the cost of immortality. In his new book, Terrestrial History, a scientist in Scotland meets a man who claims to be from the future: specifically, a future colony on Mars that he’s here to ensure happens.
Audition by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead Books, April 8)
Katie Kitamura only writes intense and fascinating novels. Her last two, Intimacies and A Separation, absolutely blew me away with how she uses voice, tone, and a careful attention to detail to build suspense. In Audition, the setup is fairly simple: a woman and a significantly younger man meet for lunch at a restaurant in New York. But figuring out who they really are—and discovering how Kitamura will structure their stories—will make this another addictive puzzle box.
Mỹ Documents by Kevin Nguyen (OneWorld, April 8)
I’ve been following Kevin’s writing since he was an editor at The Verge, and he’s always a compelling read. In his second novel, “a series of violent, senseless attacks across America creates a national panic, prompting a government policy that pushes Vietnamese Americans into internment camps.” I really enjoyed his conversation with
earlier this week at , and I can’t wait to read this book.Cold Eternity by S. A. Barnes (Tordotcom, April 8)
Barnes has been cornering the market in space horror thrillers over the last few years. I thought last year’s Ghost Station was a blast, and Cold Eternity is about a woman trapped on an interstellar barge filled with the bodies of cryogenically frozen billionaires — and something else. Here’s hoping she blows the whole thing up.
Big Chief by John Hickey (Simon & Schuster, April 8)
First of all, love this cover. Second, Big Chief sounds like Three Days of the Condor set on a Native American reservation in Wisconsin. I haven’t read a good political novel in years (because real-life politics is more than enough for me), but Hickey’s is getting rave reviews.
The Seers by Sulaiman Addonia (Coffee House Press, April 22)
I’ve never read a Coffee House Press book I didn’t like. This short novel is about Hannah, an Eritrean refugee in London who “grapples with her own agency in a strange country,” while “her sexual encounters become an unapologetic expression of self — a defiant cry against the endless bureaucracy of immigration.”
Forthcoming in The Frontlist
Behind the book with Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (Saga Press)
May book preview