We’ve had a busy start to April with Easter, but now we can relax and enjoy hopefully some more sunshine.
Some of us will be jetting off on holidays soon, so we’re here to give you some poolside options or some sheltering from the rain in Ireland reads.
Here are seven books to read in April…
Japanese Gothic – Kylie Lee Baker
In 2026, Lee Turner doesn’t remember how or why he killed his college roommate. The details are blurred and bloody. All he knows is he has to flee New York and go to the one place that might offer refuge—his father’s new home in Japan, a house hidden by sword ferns and wild ginger. But something is terribly wrong with the house: no animals will come near it, the bedroom window isn’t always a window, and a woman with a sword appears in the yard when night falls.
In 1877, Sen is a young samurai in exile, hiding from the imperial soldiers in a house behind the sword ferns. A monster came home from war wearing her father’s face, but Sen would do anything to please him, even turn her sword on her own mother. She knows the soldiers will soon slaughter her whole family when she sees a terrible omen: a young foreign man who appears outside her window.
One of these people is a ghost, and one of these stories is a lie. Something is hiding beneath the house of sword ferns, and Lee and Sen will soon wish they had never unburied it.
Out April 14th
Hungry – Katriona O’Sullivan
Raised in a home marked by poverty, addiction and abuse, Katriona defied the odds: from teenage motherhood struggling with her own addictions to becoming a university professor and successful author. But beneath the achievements lay a more private struggle – with her body, her worth, and the unrelenting drive to be enough.
In this fiercely honest memoir, she interrogates how trauma, class and gender shape the way women see themselves – and how society teaches them to measure their value.
Told with stunning courage and vulnerability, Hungry is both a personal reckoning and a powerful reclaiming of body, voice and self. It is one woman’s story – and a rallying cry for every woman who has ever felt she had to shrink to survive.
Out April 23rd
The Name Game – Beth O’Leary
A fresh start is waiting for Charlie Jones. But another Charlie Jones wants it too… The Isle of Ormer: population 500, soon to be 501.
Charlie Jones has landed on the island to embark on her brand new life. As the manager at Ormer’s only farm shop, this job will be her perfect next chapter. Good riddance to the mainland, this is it – fresh air, and a clean slate. Except there is one small issue.
Charlie Jones has also just arrived on the Isle of Ormer, to embark on his brand new life. His job at the farm shop feels like fate, and could not have come at a better moment.
On Ormer, Charlie has promised himself he’ll escape old friends, bad habits and heartbreak. This second chance is the best thing that could have happened to Charlie…and Charlie. That is, until they are introduced!
Out Now
Into the Wreck – Susannah Dickey
Three siblings – Anna, Gemma and Matthew – will have to work that out quickly. Monday is the day of their gentle, but distant, father’s funeral, and for the first time in a long while they are under one roof with their mother, imperious Yvonne, awaiting the arrival of their aunt Amy, an award-winning poet.
Yet, as the funeral looms, their everyday concerns refuse to will newly sex-obsessed Gemma work out what she wants from life, beyond her mother’s expectations? Can Anna maintain the fine balance between desire and nonchalance with the sort-of, not-quite-exclusive boyfriend, back in London? Will Amy’s past explode the relationships of the present? And, crucially, will Yvonne pull off her grand, post-funeral family dinner, the solution to what she fears may be an unsolvable problem?
Told from five different perspectives, into the wreck worries at the knotty complexities of one family’s bonds.
Out Now
Whatever Happened to Madeline Stone? – Louise O’Neill
In 2002, twin sisters Madeline and Chelsea Stone are joint stars of the AtomicKids sitcom Double Trouble, but everyone knows it’s Maddie who shines most brightly. Until Chelsea beats her sister out for the role of a lifetime and is catapulted into the spotlight. And just as Chelsea’s star reaches impossible new heights, Maddie disappears.
Fast forward to 2025, Chelsea Stone has retired from acting after her sister’s disappearance – but living life under the radar is easier said than done when you’re the most famous woman of your generation.
When a storage locker is found containing heart-breaking truths about the year Maddie went missing, Chelsea feels a flicker of hope for the first time in twenty years. This is her chance to discover what really happened to her twin, but to follow the trail she’ll have to face the past and step back into the spotlight…
Out Now
Yesteryear – Caro Claire Burke
Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the Republican equivalent of a Kennedy?
What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.
Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.
Out Now
Famesick – Lena Dunham
For the last decade, as she’s spent countless hours in doctor’s waiting rooms searching for diagnoses, treatments, and relief, being the owner and operator of Lena Dunham’s body has felt, as she puts it, ‘like towing a wrecked car across town at midnight.’ It’s not easy dragging a wrecked car anywhere, much less to the Met Gala while sewn into a gold lamé corset.
Or to the set of the hit show that you – as a twenty-five-year-old – are writing, directing, producing, and starring in. Or to the White House, the Golden Globes, or your publicist’s office to discuss the latest internet disaster. But Dunham does it – even if it means interminable hospital stays, vomiting in the bathroom when she’s meant to be meeting Oprah, or terrifying those closest to her – because she can no longer tell the difference between fighting to do what she loves and being a servant to her own ambition.
All the while, she is holding out for a love that can withstand her personal and public challenges and, more than anything, yearning to feel like herself again – if only she could remember who that self was.
Out April 14th