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Readers' Most Anticipated New Spring Books
Spring is finally springing! And just in time, frankly. The past winter was a rough one. For book people, there’s no better way to celebrate the season of renewal than to grab a new book, find a warm spot, and sit for a while. We admit that we’re biased in this particular matter—but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
We’ve gathered below the 35 most anticipated books of spring, as determined by early reader reviews and what Goodreads regulars are adding to their Want to Read shelves. Each of these books has a U.S. release date between early March and the middle of June.
There’s plenty to like, and quite a bit to love: New fiction from Hernan Diaz, Jennifer Egan and Kate Quinn. New mysteries from Lisa Scottoline, Alex Segura, and debut author Grace D. Li. New speculative fiction from Holly Black, John Scalzi, and the inimitable Emily St. John Mandel. Plus the most anticipated spring titles in nonfiction, young adult, and romance. We’ve even added a new horror category in response to reader requests. Well, more like demands. But still.
Get outside! Get warm! Happy reading!
Devotees of historical fiction and World War II narratives will want to check out this one. Based on a true story (which is kind of amazing when you hear the story), Kate Quinn’s latest novel profiles Mila Pavlichenko, a quiet history student from Kiev who gets recruited to fight the Nazis—and becomes the Allies’ deadliest female sniper. You know what they say about truth, fiction, and strangeness.
Release date: March 29
Release date: March 29
Debut author Tara M. Stringfellow’s highly anticipated novel unfolds over the course of 70 years, tracing one matrilineal line through the Memphis neighborhood of Douglass. Told through multiple voices—and inspired by the author’s own family—the book thinks out loud about the values we pass to future generations, in our families and in our country.
Release date: April 5
Release date: April 5
From the Booker Prize–winning author of Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart’s sophomore novel, Young Mungo, chronicles the forbidden and dangerous love of two working-class men in Glasgow. Mungo comes from a Protestant family; James, from a Catholic one. Their bond is immediate, deep, and seemingly impossible to sustain under the present circumstances. Stuart’s lyrical novel is a sustained meditation on masculinity, sectarianism, and violence.
Release date: April 5
Release date: April 5
In this debut novel set during the years of the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act, a Chinese girl fights to claim her place in the 1880s American West. Named after a tragic heroine, Daiyu is kidnapped from her home and smuggled across the ocean to America. We follow her journey as she reinvents herself in order to survive.
Release date: April 5
Release date: April 5
This thinky sci-fi puzzler from Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jennifer Egan explores an intriguing idea: What if our memories could be extracted and externalized—bought, borrowed, traded, and sold? Told via multiple characters, The Candy House is a fiercely intellectual investigation of our current moment in time, in which the nature of reality itself seems up for grabs.
Release date: April 5
Release date: April 5
Let us be frank: Rich people are weird. Acclaimed author Hernan Diaz (In the Distance) brings readers back to the Roaring Twenties in this story of a flashy New York City couple with an immense fortune of suspect provenance. Diaz’s layered novel deploys multiple revelations to explore America’s foundational inequalities and how power and money dictate what we come to think of as history.
Release date: May 3
Release date: May 3
A stepdaughter's announcement that she's engaged to her pandemic boyfriend throws a woman's life into chaos. Weiner might just become the queen of the beach read, following up her recent books Big Summer and That Summer with...The Summer Place. Of course, you may also know Weiner from her long list of other novels, including Good in Bed and In Her Shoes.
Release date: May 10
Release date: May 10
Straub, author of All Adults Here and The Vacationers as well as owner of the beloved Books are Magic bookstore in New York, returns this spring with an intriguing premise: What if you could vacation in your past? On the eve of her 40th birthday, a woman gets a chance to travel back to her life as a 16 year old, and is reunited with her vibrant and charming father.
Release date: May 17
Release date: May 17
Kali Fajardo-Anstine, the author of the National Book Award finalist Sabrina & Corina, returns with this multigenerational western saga about a sprawling Indigenous Chicano family in Colorado. Luz "Little Light" Lopez must fend for herself after her brother is run off by a white mob. When Luz starts experiencing intense visions of her homeland and genetic history, she realizes that someone has to keep these family stories alive.
Release date: June 7
Release date: June 7
Shea Collins, the author of the true-crime website the Book of Cold Cases, has caught a break. She’s been offered a chance to interview the prime suspect from the infamous 1977 Lady Killer murders. The tricky part: It will require spending time in a mysterious mansion where stuff moves around and a spooky little girl keeps looking in the window. Expect twisted, twisty fun from the author of The Sun Down Motel.
Release date: March 15
Release date: March 15
Recommended for those who like their fiction pulpy and their crime stories hard-boiled, Secret Identity is an old-school noir thriller set in the 1970s comic book industry. Rookie writer Carmen Valdez gets tangled in a murder mystery when her pioneering female superhero, the Lethal Lynx, turns out to attract the wrong kind of admirers. Bonus trivia: Author Alex Segura is an old industry veteran himself.
Release date: March 15
Release date: March 15
Legal thriller veteran Lisa Scottoline is back with another professional-grade page-turner concerning the dark side of the criminal justice system. This time around, a suburban family is forced into a witness-protection program—a program built to protect criminal informants, not families in crisis. Bonus trivia: Author Scottoline hosts an annual Big Book Club Party for more than 1,000 readers at her Pennsylvania farm.
Release date: March 29
Release date: March 29
Heist stories are always fun, and this one looks like a doozy: Harvard art history student Will Chen makes a highly dubious decision when he agrees to steal back a batch of priceless artifacts looted from China centuries ago. Grace D. Li’s buzzy debut novel threads real-world issues of art theft and colonialism into a thrilling story of righting a historical wrong the most dangerous way possible.
Release date: April 5
Release date: April 5
Those who suffer from it can tell you: Insomnia is the worst. For attorney Emma Averall, it’s even scarier: Emma’s mother suffered from severe mental problems that manifested at age 40—the same age Emma is now. Is this worsening insomnia the first sign of trouble? And why can’t she remember yesterday morning? Twisty and complex, Insomnia is the latest state-of-the-art thriller from the author of Behind Her Eyes.
Release date: April 12
Release date: April 12
The latest exercise in lateral thinking from John Scalzi (The Interdependency series), The Kaiju Preservation Society imagines an alternate dimension ecosystem where dinosaur-size creatures roam free. It’s a wild new riff on the kaiju concept—and a sideways commentary on animal-rights issues—aimed at those of us who love all species, colossal nightmare monsters included.
Release date: March 15
Release date: March 15
An intriguing dark fantasy crossed with gothic-style mystery elements, Sara A. Mueller’s The Bone Orchard tells the story of the imprisoned witch Charm and her five children—Shame, Justice, Desire, Pride, and Pain. When Charm is tasked with solving the murder of the dying Emperor, she finally sees her chance at sweet, sweet revenge. As a bonus, the book’s cover art is seven kinds of awesome.
Release date: March 22
Release date: March 22
The author of Station Eleven—recently adapted into a hugely popular HBO Plus series—delivers another startling vision of the future. With Sea of Tranquility, the formidable Emily St. John Mandel brings her sophisticated conjecture to a kind of time-travel story with stops in 1912 Vancouver, the free city of Los Angeles circa 2203, and a lunar space station about 400 years from now. Pretty good, right?
Release date: April 5
Release date: April 5
Accomplished YA author Holly Black makes her first foray into adult dark fantasy with Book of Night, in which bartender/con artist Charlie gets into the treacherous world of shadow trading. Among the book’s many spooky delights: doppelgangers, sinister millionaires, and the very concept of shadow magic, in which mistakes can cost you hours or days of your life. It’s a tricky line of work.
Release date: May 3
Release date: May 3
Some horrors are fictional and some horrors are real. And some horrors are both. Alma Katsu, author of The Hunger and The Deep, specializes in just this kind of scary story. Her new book is set among the Japanese American internment camps of World War II, where the real-world horrors of xenophobia and violence are further darkened with concepts straight out of Japanese mythology—the jorogumo spider demon, say.
Release date: April 26
Release date: April 26
What is the malevolent presence haunting Hacienda San Isidro? That’s the central question in this supernatural thriller from author Isabel Cañas, which is being described as a cross between Mexican Gothic and Daphne du Maurier’s classic suspense novel Rebecca. New bride Beatriz Solórzano has just moved into her new home, a remote countryside estate with a sinister past. It’s not quite what she was hoping for.
Release date: May 10
Release date: May 10
Maeve hasn’t seen her cousin Andrea in years, not since that night when they escaped the cult in which they were raised. When Andrea shows up again, Maeve is happy to have an old friend in New York City. But the cousins’ shared history begins to dredge up memories of childhood terror. Anne Heltzel (Charlie, Presumed Dead) returns with a fresh new nightmare.
Release date: May 17
Release date: May 17
As horror story premises go, it’s clearly a winner. A young woman called Mack is one of 14 contestants in a bizarre contest: Spend a week in a derelict amusement park without getting caught. When her fellow contestants start disappearing, one by one, Mack realizes that the childhood game of hide-and-seek is actually quite terrifying. Bonus trivia: Kiersten White is also the author of the excellently named Paranormalcy series.
Release date: May 24
Release date: May 24
This in-depth study of the American bald eagle—Haliaeetus leucocephalus to friends—features stories from Native American mythology, through colonial times, and all the way to contemporary conservation concerns. Author and historian Jack Emerson Davis (The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea) sifts the myths from the facts but writes about both anyway.
Release date: March 1
Release date: March 1
For her debut book, author Maud Newton digs into her own family history via DNA labs, genealogical software, and old-fashioned census-data sleuthing. The revelations are wild. It seems that Grandpa was married 13 times (and was shot by at least one of his wives). Another ancestor was an accused witch. Newton’s quixotic quest opens new ways of seeing ourselves, our families, and our psychological heritage.
Release date: March 29
Release date: March 29
Expanding on her viral New Yorker essay published in the summer of 2020, Elizabeth Alexander examines the various ways in which art and culture intersect with America’s deep racial dilemmas. Poet, essayist, playwright, and professor, Alexander considers the experiences and cultural expressions of what she refers to as the Trayvon Generation—and how young people and their art can move us forward.
Release date: April 5
Release date: April 5
Pulitzer Prize finalist and philosophy professor Chloé Cooper Jones’ memoir is a long and thoughtful reflection on her experiences living with the painful congenital condition known as sacral agenesis. Looking back, Jones examines issues surrounding access, standards of beauty, motherhood, disability, and desirability—all while globetrotting from Rome to California, Milan to Cambodia.
Release date: April 5
Release date: April 5
Criminal profiler and detective Paul Holes was in the headlines a few years back when he cracked the decades-old cold case of the Golden State Killer. In this tough and deeply personal memoir, Holes examines his own compulsion to chase monsters and provide closure for victims’ families. He also walks us through a lifetime of brutal investigations and the toll they’ve taken.
Release date: April 26
Release date: April 26
Recommended for fans of Caraval and The Night Circus, Emily J. Taylor’s Hotel Magnifique has an inarguably cool premise: The legendary Hotel Magnifique exists in the Elsewhere and appears in a different destination each morning. The inn offers all sorts of magical diversions for guests who can afford it. It also has a terrible and deadly secret, one that threatens all who encounter the place. And teenage Jani just got hired.
Release date: April 5
Release date: April 5
Five Feet Apart coauthor Rachael Lippincott and debut writer Alyson Derrick team up for this lesbian romantic comedy from the Opposites Attract shelf. Alex Blackwood is headstrong and flirty. Molly Parker is awkward and shy. A kind of mentorship bargain is struck, in which each young woman will help the other target their respective objects of attraction. Wouldn’t it be crazy if they fell for each other instead?
Release date: April 5
Release date: April 5
Inspired by both Shakespeare and Chinese mythology, this star-crossed fantasy romance takes its shape from the immortal story of Romeo and Juliet. But author Emily X.R. Pan likes to scribble outside the lines. For instance, our young lovers Hunter Yee and Luna Chang are being helped along by a supernatural wind. And there’s an impossible giant chasm forming under the town of Fairbridge. And a storm of fireflies has just descended.
Release date: April 12
Release date: April 12
From the author of Red, White & Royal Blue, this new YA romance follows aspiring valedictorian Chloe Green and her senior year adventures at the puritanical Willowgrove Christian Academy. Chloe’s plans go haywire when she kisses the principal’s daughter, prom queen Shara Wheeler. But things get really weird when Shara suddenly vanishes.
Release date: May 3
Release date: May 3
Mia Sosa, author of The Worst Best Man, returns with another offbeat romantic comedy featuring good people improvising madly. Solange is just helping out her wedding-planner cousin when she makes a startling discovery. Now her mission in life is to derail the ceremony at hand. The funny part? She’s absolutely doing the right thing. Bonus trivia: Author Sosa is a former First Amendment attorney.
Release date: April 5
Release date: April 5
What do ER doctors, grilled-cheese sandwiches, and baby goats have in common? They’re all part of the curious love affair documented in this latest contemporary romance from Abby Jimenez, author of The Friend Zone series. Featuring a sophisticated city girl and a hot country boy, Part of Your World is recommended for fans of Casey McQuiston and Emily Henry.
Release date: April 19
Release date: April 19
Speaking of the estimable Ms. Henry, the longtime romance author herself is back with this story of smoldering love between a cutthroat literary agent and a brooding book editor. Doesn’t seem promising, does it? But the vibe changes when the lovers ditch the big city for the rolling meadows of North Carolina. Location, location, location!
Release date: May 3
Release date: May 3
National Book Award finalist Akwaeke Emezi (The Death of Vivek Oji) shifts gears a bit with this literary romance set in the world of high-end art exhibits and world-famous chefs. Feyi Adekola lost the love of her life five years ago. Now she’s met someone who understands her pain—someone who would be most definitely off-limits in normal circumstances. But life’s circumstances are so seldom normal.
Release date: May 24
Release date: May 24
Which books are you most excited to read this season? Let us know in the comments!
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Check out more recent articles, including:
Explore 48 Fascinating Lives in These New and Upcoming Memoirs
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45 New Books About Books for Bibliophiles Everywhere
Comments Showing 1-50 of 95 (95 new)
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Elise (Taylor’s version)
(new)
Mar 14, 2022 12:21AM
I need to read I kissed Shara Wheeler right now omg but sadly I have to wait
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I'm looking forward to Anne Tylers new book, French Braid, out next week.
Thank you so much for putting a horror section!
Family of Liars by E. Lockhart. The prequel to We Were Liars!
So much reading to look forward to. Such amazing books ! Cannot wait for The Book of Cold Cases, Young Mungo & Portrait of a ThiefHave a great summer everyone !!
Claudine wrote: "Family of Liars by E. Lockhart. The prequel to We Were Liars!"I didn't know there was a prequel! Do you know where it starts off/ what is covers?
i am excited for war of two queens, Happy release day! But i didn't pre order cause its only available on american amazon for 30 euro and thats what i did for crown of gilded bones. but with shadow in the ember i didn't buy it straight away and it came out on uk amazon for a reasonable price like 14 euro. i think it was a week after release date. i'm gonna be a big girl and wait it out wish me look, i know no one gives a shit bout this dilemma but my family is sick of me stressing bout it so where else to i go to?!
Thank you for mentioning romance!Excited for these:
Elise (Taylor’s version) wrote: "I need to read I kissed Shara Wheeler right now omg but sadly I have to wait"i'm currently reading it and omlll it's so good! trust me the wait is worth it
"The Bone Orchard" is something I need right now, it sounds like my cup of tea!
Can't WAIT to read Anne Hillerman's latest; love the fact that she can carry on her dad's legacy by continuing the adventures of Chee and Leaphorn!!!!
I can't wait for The Good Left Undone by Adriana Trigiani!Out in April
So many great reads for spring!! Can’t wait to read Hotel Magnifique!!
All the fantasy and sci-fi sound great! The TBR pile grows..
I have read a few of these as ARCs. Young Mungo and Portrait of a Thief are both excellent
Sue wrote: "I'm looking forward to Anne Tylers new book, French Braid, out next week."Reading a galley now. It's quite good.
Can't wait for "Ancestor Trouble" and "Young Mungo" 😊
What category would you put J R Wards, Black Dagger Brotherhood books? I know I am looking forward to Lover Arisen in April.
Once again, heavy on the novels/mystery/sci-fi/romance.... and only five non-fiction! More, please! I read to learn, not escape!
Lauren wrote: "Claudine wrote: "Family of Liars by E. Lockhart. The prequel to We Were Liars!"I didn't know there was a prequel! Do you know where it starts off/ what is covers?"
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It covers the previous generation (aunts) and the original Sinclair family. I think it is meant to give background on maybe how things got to be so messed up within the family. I am reading it now!
Maeve wrote: "i am excited for war of two queens, Happy release day! But i didn't pre order cause its only available on american amazon for 30 euro and thats what i did for crown of gilded bones. but with shadow..."
Does your town have a local library?
Does your town have a local library?
As a fan of The Night Circus, i'm really interested in seeing how similar Hotel Magnifique is.
Why isn't Alifair Burke's book "Find Me" a choice to read? I read it an wanted to post it to my challenge but it is not a book you can select.
I'm looking forward to "Hide" "Arrow to the Moon" AND "The Candy House"
Looking forward to Bonnie Garmus novel "Lessons in Chemistry" out April 22
The Diamond Eye, what a strangely actual topic! Almost creepy.
I didn't and don't anticipate any of the books listed.
Allen Anis wrote: "Excited for book lovers!!"me too!!
Looking forward to Mary Kay Andrews' Homewreckers. I'm sure I'm not the only one!
John Sandford...The investigator. A year without a book. Well, ya all got your horror and it's in a sad state.
No scifi or fantasy? I don't believe it.
I'm looking forward to these! The Book of Cold Cases I Kissed Shara Wheeler She Gets the Girl The Hacienda
The cover for I Kissed Shara Wheeler is giving me 80s/90s illustration vibes and I am HERE FOR IT! Please let this be a new trend.
Carolyn wrote: "Once again, heavy on the novels/mystery/sci-fi/romance.... and only five non-fiction! More, please! I read to learn, not escape!"Yes, Please more nonfiction!
Janie wrote: "Can't WAIT to read Anne Hillerman's latest; love the fact that she can carry on her dad's legacy by continuing the adventures of Chee and Leaphorn!!!!"I completely agree, Janie! She has done a magnificent job of continuing story of Jim Chee, Joe Leaphorn and Bernie Manuelito. I have loved every title she has written. These characters are among my favorites in all of literature, and I have gained a real appreciation of the the Navajo people. Her father would be so proud.
You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, by Akwaeke Emezi
There are a number of books I look forward to reading. Thanks for this list of upcoming novels
Allen Anis wrote: "Excited for book lovers!!"Ikr! Emily Henry is my fav!
Carolyn wrote: "Once again, heavy on the novels/mystery/sci-fi/romance.... and only five non-fiction! More, please! I read to learn, not escape!"Please try Carbon Queen by Maia Weinstock: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...
Carolyn wrote: "Once again, heavy on the novels/mystery/sci-fi/romance.... and only five non-fiction! More, please! I read to learn, not escape!"I hear you! I am still reading to learn and I'm 78 this year. There seem to be so few people who are still curious about fascinating subjects of which there still seems to be no end. Ha! Ha! from Candy W., Calgary, Alberta.
