New Release Radar – April 14, 2026
Gwendoline Riley has a new novel! Count us in.
This week, we’ve got some amazing translations, a graphic novel, some devastating memoirs, and short stories.
Here are a few of our recommendations. Head over to our Bookshop.org storefront for our full list.
The Palm House
Gwendoline Riley
From the author of My Phantoms and First Love, a droll and quietly evocative novel about work, friendship, family, and the path—so often muddled—toward finding one’s place in life.
In The Palm House, Laura’s long friendship with Edmund Putnam is tested when he resigns from Sequence magazine—one of the few places he has ever felt he belonged. Putnam repines. His sweet-natured father has recently died, which has not improved his mood. Meanwhile Laura’s relentlessly “outward-facing” mother is still at large and toting a new boyfriend as if he were a marotte. Laura, too, needs a new job, and a place to live that doesn’t have centipedes in the kitchen.
Gwendoline Riley’s seventh novel explores acceptance and affinity. Young people don’t drink anymore but Laura and Putnam are no longer young. Over wine and crisps the pair reflect on what has brought them to where they are. There are memories of childhood package holidays, teenage friendships and obsessions, peculiar love affairs, bad parties.
Life is fleeting. Sequence magazine means something, but what? Might Putnam plot a return? The Palm House looks at what it means to find, understand, and accept where one fits.
Big Chief: A Novel
Jon Hickey
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by The Washington Post, Debutiful, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and LitHub
Publishers Weekly Writer to Watch for Spring 2025
“Propulsive…a masterclass…a dazzling, fast-paced pressure-cooker journey about not letting others define who we are, but rather deciding that for ourselves.” —San Francisco Chronicle
A gripping literary debut about power and corruption, family, and facing the ghosts of the past.
Mitch Caddo, a young law school graduate and aspiring political fixer, is an outsider in the homeland of his Anishinaabe ancestors. But alongside Tribal President Mack Beck, his childhood friend, Mitch runs the government of the Passage Rouge Nation, and with it, the tribe’s Golden Eagle Casino and Hotel. On the eve of Mack’s reelection, their tenuous grip on power is threatened by a nationally known activist and politician, Gloria Hawkins, and her young aide, Layla Beck, none other than Mack’s estranged sister and Mitch’s former love. In their struggle for control over Passage Rouge, the campaigns resort to bare-knuckle political gamesmanship, testing the limits of how far they will go—and what they will sacrifice—to win it all.
But when an accident claims the life of Mitch’s mentor, a power broker in the reservation’s political scene, the election slides into chaos and pits Mitch against the only family he has. As relationships strain to their breaking points and a peaceful protest threatens to become an all-consuming riot, Mitch and Layla must work together to stop the reservation’s descent into violence.
Thrilling and timely, Big Chief is an “unexpected, disturbingly funny” (The New York Times) and unforgettable story about the search for belonging—to an ancestral and spiritual home, to a family, and to a sovereign people at a moment of great historical importance.
Lázár: A Novel
Nelio Biedermann, Jamie Bulloch (Translated by)
“Lázár is an exquisite and masterly pronouncement that a gifted young writer walks among us.” —Patti Smith
An “astonishing…disturbingly dreamlike” (Daniel Kehlmann, The Director) debut, inspired by the author’s own family story—a gothic, inter-generational family saga capturing the rise and fall of an aristocratic Hungarian family against the backdrop of the two world wars.
At the turn of the 20th century, the Lázárs welcome their newest member in their rural summer estate, surrounded by a menacingly dark, enchanting forest. Lajos von Lázár is a baby boy with translucent skin and light-blue eyes who looks nothing like the rest of his family. Sándor, the imposing patriarch, is ashamed of his son’s peculiarity. Ilona finds her baby brother quite ugly. Mária is terrified that her son’s uncanny resemblance to the stagehand who died a couple weeks earlier might spell disaster. While Imre, Sándor’s brother whose otherworldly foresight is often confused for insanity, is struck by visions of a great catastrophe.
Lajos’s birth is emblematic of the many secrets, affairs, and peculiar otherworldly happenings that plague the Lázárs. As the decades go by, they will continue to fall prey to their desires, leading grand lives, and experiencing even greater tragedies as they’re swept by the tides of war and revolution that befall their country. But time and again, in the lighter years, extraordinary love and hope shine through.
Masterfully written and deeply haunting, Lázár is a magisterial novel that presents the sweeping history of a nation through the lives of one extraordinary family.
Go Gentle
Maria Semple
“Maria Semple is a treasure.” —Los Angeles Times
The New York Times bestselling author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette returns to form in her most exuberant and life-affirming novel yet with the story of one woman’s cheerful determination to live a life of the mind only to have the heart force its way in.
Adora Hazzard has it all figured out. A Stoic philosopher and divorcée, she lives a contented life on New York City’s Upper West Side. Having discovered that the secret to happiness is to desire only what you have, she’s applied this insight to blissful effect: relishing her teenage daughter, the freedom of being solo, and her job as a moral tutor for the twin boys of an old-money family. She’s even assembled a “coven”—like-minded women who live on the same floor in the legendary Ansonia—and is making active efforts to grow its membership. Adora’s carefully curated life is humming along brilliantly until a chance meeting with a handsome stranger.
Soon, her ordered world is upended by black-market art deals, secret rendezvous, and international intrigue . . . and her past—which she has worked so hard to bury—lands like a bomb in her present. Inflamed by unquenchable desire, Adora finds herself a woman wanting more: and she’ll risk everything to get it.
Adora Hazzard’s journey of self-discovery will grip you from the start. Romantic, hilarious, intelligent, and bursting with the stuff of life, Go Gentle is a thrilling story of one woman’s mid-life transformation, cementing Maria Semple in the pantheon of our most exciting and important contemporary writers.
The Road to Tender Hearts: A Novel
Annie Hartnett
“A miraculous novel—an actual and spiritual road trip you won’t forget.”—John Irving
At sixty-three years old, million-dollar lottery winner PJ Halliday would be the luckiest man in Pondville, Massachusetts, if it weren’t for the tragedies of his life: the sudden death of his eldest daughter and the way his marriage fell apart after that. Since then, PJ spends both his money and his time at the bar, and he probably doesn’t have much time left—he’s had three heart attacks already.
But when PJ reads the obituary of his old romantic rival, he realizes his high school sweetheart, Michelle Cobb, is finally single again. Filled with a new enthusiasm for life, PJ decides he’s going to drive across the country to the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona to win Michelle back.
Before PJ can hit the road, tragedy strikes Pondville, leaving PJ the sudden guardian of his estranged brother’s grandchildren. Anyone else would be deterred from the planned trip, but PJ figures the orphaned kids might benefit from getting out of town. PJ also thinks he can ask Sophie, his adult daughter who’s adrift in her twenties, to come along to babysit. And there’s one more surprise addition to the roster: Pancakes, a former nursing home therapy cat with a knack of predicting death, who recently turned up outside PJ’s home.
This could be the second chance PJ has long hoped for—a fresh shot at love and parenting—but does he have the strength to do both those things again? It’s very possible his heart can’t take it.
Most Grievous Fault
Meg Todd
A startling story of a young mother desperate to deny her complicity in intergenerational trauma.
Twenty-nine-year-old Crystal Constantine is a single parent who cannot see beyond the piles of bills, the threat of eviction, the weight of her past and the relentless needs of her teenage daughter Becky. How can she not drink? How can she not hit?
After fourteen-year-old Becky, who is suspected of having fetal alcohol syndrome, takes off her clothes for a group of boys at school, Crystal is pressured into sending her to a traditional Catholic school. Suddenly, the apartment echoes with bible verses and Hail Marys, and Crystal is dropped into a world of virtue and innocence completely foreign to all she’s ever known. When Crystal meets Tim, a man of strict religious morals, she is equal parts afraid and elated. He interprets her frigidity as chastity, and Crystal sees no option but to deny that Becky, the result of rape, is her daughter. She sends Becky to live with her alcoholic grandmother, the same abusive, neglectful woman Crystal blames for her own troubles. Despite an acute ache for the well-being of her daughter, Crystal believes that, finally, happiness is within reach. She sees freedom, a wedding, a big house, money! But when Becky comes home distraught and uncommunicative, and arranges a secret and disastrous meeting with the man she believes is her father, Crystal is forced to acknowledge her own role in the perpetuation of trauma.
Through unflinching and unsentimental prose, Meg Todd delivers a story about being inescapably marginalized and the complexities of the social welfare system.
