New Release Radar – April 21, 2026
Read ahead for our weekly round-up.
Here are a few of our recommendations. Head over to our Bookshop.org storefront for our full list.
Don’t Stop
Bonnie Friedman
“Friedman writes with the female fury of Ferrante.”—Lauren Yu-Ting Bo, On the Seawall
A daring, erotically charged novel about ambition, desire, and the dangerous pursuit of self-knowledge.
Ina is a 41-year-old literary scholar on the cusp of professional success. With a coveted university job, a kind husband, and a book on Eugene O’Neill due in months, her life appears enviably stable. But when an impulsive kiss with a stranger shatters her self-control, Ina finds herself plunged into an erotic and emotional freefall.
She tells herself it’s research—a brief detour before returning to real life. But what begins as a flirtation becomes a reckoning with everything Ina thought she wanted: marriage, intellect, control. As she navigates the ecstatic confusion of newfound desire, she risks upending her work, her relationship, and her understanding of who she is.
Set in Brooklyn and Manhattan at the turn of the millennium, Don’t Stop is a bold, immersive debut that explores what happens when a woman dares to want more—of the world, of her body, of herself. Bonnie Friedman delivers a novel of transgression, transformation, and unapologetic longing.
“A moving, laser-eyed story about love, desire, betrayal, and destiny, which manages, mysteriously, to be simultaneously funny and profound.”—Michael Cunningham
“Luminous, evocative, and original.”—Christina Baker Kline
The Scoop
Erin Van Der Meer
A piercing satire about a journalist working the night shift at a tabloid and the explosive consequences of her “harmless” clickbait.
Washed-up New York journalist Frankie Miller is getting desperate. Since the twenty-nine-year-old lost her dream job at a glossy magazine three months ago, her days have been filled with overdue bills, cereal for dinner, and a flood of rejection emails (not to mention her ex has a new girlfriend). So when she’s offered a job at The Scoop, a tabloid website run by tyrannical editor-in-chief David Brown, she can’t exactly afford to say no—even if it means swallowing her pride for clicks. Besides, for Frankie, it’s just a paycheck, a temporary detour. It’s not forever.
But the deeper she’s pulled into the breakneck world of tabloid journalism, the blurrier the line between ambition and morality becomes—until she crosses it. When her reporting humiliates a beloved pop star and dredges up grief over her late mother, Frankie sets off a chain reaction that spirals beyond her control. In an industry where reputation is currency and outrage sells, how far is Frankie willing to go—and how much is she willing to lose—to win at this ruthless game?
Sharp, witty, and unflinchingly bold, The Scoop is a searing exploration of ambition, exploitation, and the human toll of the 24/7 news cycle.
Somewhere Soft to Land
kai alonté
In this crackling portrayal of friendship in peril, a young woman’s world is upended when a tragedy in her best friend’s life tests the boundaries of their sisterhood—a sharp and compelling debut novel from a Ghanaian-American writer.
Dzifa has always felt a bit off. Maybe it’s the family baggage, or maybe it’s just how she’s wired. Depleted by cycles of burnout, she lives her life in a perpetual state of bracing: for another lost job, another lost home, another piece of evidence she isn’t doing being right. If it weren’t for the encouragement—and occasional overstepping—of her magnetic best friend, Tatiana, Dzifa doesn’t know if she’d have made it as far as she has. Despite their differences, the two women share a desire to be their authentic selves, and to shed the grip of the respectability politics they’ve been taught should govern their lives.
Just as each begins to find her way, the sudden passing of Tatiana’s child upends everything. Dzifa rushes to Tatiana’s hometown to help her friend prepare for the funeral. But when she arrives, Dzifa is immersed in an unsettling conflict between two diametrically opposed families, one of whom seems intent on seeding doubt about Tatiana’s capacity as a mother. When Tatiana asks her for the ultimate favor, Dzifa must choose between loyalty at the expense of her own well-being and authenticity at the expense of her most valued friendship.
A riveting exploration of sisterhood, what it means to mother and be mothered, and what it means to be well, Somewhere Soft to Land reckons with the sometimes funny, sometimes fraught, friendship between women with divergent ideologies, aspirations, personalities, and paths.
Small Boat: A Novel
Vincent Delecroix, Helen Stevenson (Translated by)
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize
“A gut-punch of a novel…Small Boat explores the power of the individual and asks us to consider the havoc we may cause others, the extent to which our complacency makes us complicit – and whether we could all do better.”
—The 2025 Booker judges
A singular, gut-punching parable for our times about complicity in the face of tragedy, based on the true story of a French navy officer who ignored distress calls from migrants drowning in the English Channel.
In November 2021, an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the UK capsized in the English Channel, causing the deaths of 27 people on board.
Despite receiving numerous calls for help, the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and had to call the British authorities for help. By the time rescue vessels arrived on the scene, nearly three hours later, all but two of the migrants had died, the worst single loss of life ever to occur in the Channel.
Vincent Delecroix’s acclaimed Small Boat is a fictional first-person account of the French navy officer who took the migrants’ calls—and her attempts to justify the indefensible. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster, than the crises behind these tragedies. What unfolds is a gripping, thought-provoking examination of the darkest threat to our humanity.
Powerful, forceful, and haunting, Small Boat confronts the most difficult but important moral questions of our time: to what extent are we all complicit?
“This book challenged me profoundly. It moved me, and stayed with me. It’s not an easy read – but as our politics descend into hate-mongering and point-scoring, it’s an essential story that needs to be told.”— Dua Lipa
Last Night in Brooklyn
Xochitl Gonzalez
New York Times bestselling author Xochitl Gonzalez delivers a captivating story about a young woman whose life becomes ensnared in her glamorous neighbor’s secret past
SPRING, 2007
At twenty-six, Alicia Canales Forten feels smothered by her future. She’s in a long-distance relationship, living at home with her mother’s beliefs, saving up for her wedding to a future doctor. But after Alicia ventures out one night in the neighborhood of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, she finds herself lured by the siren song of youth and possibility that the striving crowd of creatives holds, and moves in.
No one embodies this more than La Garza, a larger-than-life, up-and-coming fashion designer whose epic house parties fuel neighborhood lore. La Garza’s life, observed by Alicia from her apartment across the street, seems to hold the allure and fearlessness Alicia has never dared to imagine for herself.
But when Alicia’s wealthy banker cousin moves to the neighborhood, she finds herself increasingly drawn into both his and La Garza’s precarious lives.
Against the backdrop of a potentially life-changing presidential election and a looming once-in-a-generation fiscal crisis, Last Night in Brooklyn explores the dark compromise of the American Dream for people of color living, unknowingly, in the twilight of a cultural moment. It is a story about everything money can buy–and the destruction of what it can’t
