From the expansive catalog of books due out this year, the LJ review editors select works publishing in the next several months, titles already read or marked for our infinite TBR lists. The choices include a luminous novel that features an example of an early text adventure game, the newest Anthony Horowitz meta mystery, Xochitl Gonzalez’s consideration of a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood, Suzanne Palmer’s postapocalyptic tale set in the New York Botanical Garden, reporter Jazmine Ulloa’s focus on El Paso, TX, and an 850-page Marcel Duchamp exhibition catalog.

Melissa DeWild  l  Reviews Director, LJ Reviews

Spring brings sequels to some romantasy favorites from last year: in Gods Beneath the Ice (Ace, Feb.) by Alexandra Kennington, Revna returns as queen after winning the Bloodshed Trials and must learn to control her new magic with help from Hellbringer, the man she swore to forget; The Wicked and the Damned (Saga, Feb.) by Rebecca Robinson promises more palace intrigue, high-stakes politics, and aching romance between Reid and magic-wielding Vaasa; and in Rites of the Starling (Entangled: Red Tower, Apr.) by Devney Perry, Princess Odessa is separated from her beloved husband as the kingdom faces a deadly monster migration. There are also several romantasy series launches and stand-alones to look forward to: A Curse of Beasts and Magic (Bramble, May) by Jeaniene Frost offers a twist on “Beauty and the Beast”; Strange Familiars (Ace, May) by Keshe Chow is an academic-rivals-to-lovers romance set at a magical veterinary school; The Winged Game (Del Rey, Jun.) by Sophie Kim pairs magical sports rivals in a fake-dating plot; Stay for a Spell (Ace, Apr.) by Amy Coombe features an appealing curse—the princess is trapped in a bookstore until she finds her heart’s desire; Thistlemarsh (Berkley, Apr.) by Moorea Corrigan finds a Faerie anthropologist trying to renovate a dilapidated manor in the English countryside with help from a mysterious Faerie; and Letters from the Last Apothecary (Hay House, Jun.) by Bita Behzadi is an epistolary story set at a magical shop in an alternate old Chicago. Two historical romances to anticipate are How To Fake It in Society (Bramble, Apr.) by KJ Charles, a gay Regency romance full of schemes and love, and A Lady for All Seasons (Vintage, Mar.) by TJ Alexander, a queer Regency romp with a gender-fluid lead. Turning to scary stories, there’s Wolf Worm (Tor Nightfire, Mar.) by T. Kingfisher, a creepy-crawly gothic tale featuring a scientific illustrator, and a riveting gothic story collection from Gwendolyn Kiste, The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own (Raw Dog Screaming, Apr.). Stand-out science fiction includes Suzanne Palmer’s Ode to the Half-Broken (DAW, Apr.), set in a postapocalyptic New York Botanical Garden, as a robot, a cyborg dog, and a human mechanic embark on a quest; Mike Chen’s The Photonic Effect (Saga, Apr.), a space opera in which a starship captain and her crew face galactic civil war; and John Chu’s debut, The Subtle Art of Folding Space (Tor, Apr.), featuring a multiverse and mouthwatering food descriptions.

Two nonfiction books provide inspiration and instruction on the craft of writing: Ramona Ausubel’s Unstuck: A Writer’s Guide (Tin House, Apr.), featuring strategies conveyed with humor and warmth; and Verb Your Enthusiasm: How To Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing (Penguin Pr., Apr.), an exploration of language, grammar, and style by Pulitzer Prize winner Sarah L. Kaufman. Readers can fit more cooking into their lives with The 29-Minute Vegan: Real Food, Real Vibes, Anytime (Abrams, Apr.) by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Eating at Home: The Nourishing Practice of Everyday Cooking (Ten Speed, Apr.) by Trinity Mouzon Wofford with Rebecca Firkser. Maia Kobabe’s popular (and frequently banned) graphic memoir Gender Queer (Oni, May) gets an annotated edition that offers insights, reflections, and anecdotes on comics creation and the queer experience, while award-winning Tillie Walden returns with the true story of a lesbian couple in 19th-century Vermont, Charity and Sylvia (Drawn & Quarterly, Jun.). Finally, get an insider perspective on the world of Formula One with Driven (Holt, Apr.), a memoir from former F1 driver Susie Wolff.

Liz French  l  Senior Editor, LJ Reviews

Killer women are springing up everywhere in crime fiction, and this season brings a crop of them, including Leah Rowan’s Marion (St. Martin’s, Jun.). This debut rewrites the Psycho shower scene: Marion survives, dispatches her would-be killer Norman, and embarks on a spree of reckoning and retribution. Another creative retelling is Emma Glass’s Mrs. Jekyll (Union Square & Co., Apr.), a feminist take on the Robert Louis Stevenson gothic. Sally Hepworth’s Mad Mabel (St. Martin’s, Apr.) features 81-year-old antiheroine Elsie, formerly known as Mabel, who was convicted of murder at age three and now faces police scrutiny after her neighbor/enemy dies. Rounding out the assassins roster is Kang Jiyoung’s self-explanatory Mrs. Shim Is a Killer (Harper Perennial, Apr.; tr. from Korean by Paige Morris), in which the title character wields her knife skills for a sinister PI firm.

Not all the women of this spring’s novels are so dangerous. Several of them live in New York City, where they conduct messy but less murderous lives. Maria Semple’s Go Gentle (Putnam, Apr.) features Stoic philosopher and Upper West Side resident Adora, whose placid life gets all shook up after she meets a handsome stranger at the ballet. In Last Night in Brooklyn (Flatiron, Apr.), Xochitl Gonzalez’s protagonist Alicia witnesses the changes in a gentrifying neighborhood in the early 2000s. Tiffany L. Warren invites readers to A Harlem Wedding (Morrow, May) of uptown royalty: the 1928 nuptials of Yolande Du Bois (the vivacious, defiant daughter of civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois) and poet Countee Cullen. Spoiler alert: it didn’t work out!

Finally, happy birthday to the United States! The word “semiquincentennial” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but no doubt it will be ringing throughout 2026, especially around July. Historian Thomas Richards Jr. gets an early start celebrating the nation’s 250th birthday with February’s The Unfinished Business of 1776: Why the American Revolution Never Ended (The New Pr.). In this inclusive, informed account, Richards profiles lesser-known historical figures who fought for justice, equality, and independence long after the 1776 Declaration of Independence and the 1788 ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

Sarah Hashimoto  l  Editor, LJ Reviews

Immigration narratives and the stories of people displaced by war, political instability, or hope for a better life come to the forefront this spring. In El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory (Dutton, Mar.), New York Times reporter Jazmine Ulloa shines a light on the Texas border town where she grew up. She draws on research and interviews to tell the story of El Paso through the lens of five families with deep roots in the community. Bestselling Reyna Grande’s memoir in essays, Migrant Heart: Essays About Things I Can’t Forget (Atria: Primero Sueño, May), explores the challenge of healing from trauma wrought by migration and family separation. Lisa Lee debuts with the novel American Han (Algonquin, May), about Korean American siblings who reveal the fallacies of the model-minority myth as they forge unexpected paths. Vincent Delecroix’s first novel to be translated into English, Small Boat (Mariner, Apr.; tr. from French by Helen Stevenson), examines a tragic incident in 2021 when distress calls from migrants drowning in the English Channel were ignored, resulting in the deaths of 27 people. Delecroix’s fictionalized first-person account takes readers into the mind of the French navy officer who took the migrants’ calls. NBC News anchor Morgan Radford makes her fiction debut with Now Then (Amistad, May), a dual-timeline story tracing the experiences of Cuban American Lily Soto Walker and her mother, Marisol, whose letters to her daughter reveal the corrosive nature of secrets and misunderstandings, as well as the transformative power of the past.

Kevin Howell  l  Assistant Editor, LJ Reviews

One of the most anticipated titles of the season is a new biography of Audrey Hepburn. Although she has been the subject of numerous books, Intimate Audrey: An Authorized Biography (Grand Central, Apr.) offers a real insider’s view, as it is written by her eldest son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer (who penned the text for the bestselling photobook Audrey Hepburn, an Elegant Spirit), and novelist Wendy Holden (The Teacher of Auschwitz). Ferrer was seven years old in 1967, the year his mother put aside her celebrated career to raise him and his brother. She returned to the screen nine years later, and in 1981 she and Ferrer both appeared in Peter Bogdanovich’s romantic comedy They All Laughed.

This spring will also bring the first full-length biography of Roddy McDowall, who, along with his best friend Elizabeth Taylor, was a Hollywood rarity: an actor who successfully transitioned from child star to adult star. Besides his acting credits (including the “Planet of the Apes” films), he published five acclaimed books of his own photography. An out gay man in Hollywood, he was a confidant to an enormous circle of notables, including Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson, Natalie Wood, Mike Nichols, Judy Garland, and Ava Gardner. Samuel Garza Bernstein’s Roddy McDowall: An Actor’s Life—From How Green Was My Valley to Lassie to Planet of the Apes (Citadel, May) should be illuminating.

Desi Arnaz wrote his bestselling memoir A Book in 1976, and this February Running Press is reissuing an expanded edition to mark its 50th anniversary. This new 400-page version will include controversial text excised by the original publisher, brand-new material from Arnaz’s unpublished second memoir, and commentary by his daughter Lucie Arnaz.

Mystery lovers are rejoicing that April will bring A Deadly Episode (Harper), the sixth book in Anthony Horowitz’s delightful “A Hawthorne and Horowitz Mystery” series, featuring a fictionalized version of the author playing Watson to former detective inspector Daniel Hawthorne. The book’s premise is that the first mystery novel written by Hawthorne and Horowitz (featuring their own exploits) is being made into a movie. However, the film’s leading man has just been stabbed to death on set. Suspects include the director he was fighting with, the screenwriter he was sleeping with, the costar he humiliated, and the agent he dropped. Fans of meta mysteries will be scrambling to place their holds.

Sarah Wolberg  l  Managing Editor, LJ & SLJ

This spring brings a wave of literary biographies of women. Timed to capitalize on the upcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation, Deborah Lutz’s This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, a Life (Norton, May) draws on newly accessible sources to reveal the woman behind the iconic gothic
novel. Fiona Sampson—biographer of Mary Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning—offers Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand (Norton, Jun.), in which she shows how Sand reshaped 19th-century society. For those more interested in YA classics, Mark Oppenheimer’s Judy Blume: A Life (Putnam, Mar.) is the definitive biography, based on interviews with Blume and access to her friends, family, and papers. There’s also Gail Crowther’s Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe (Gallery, May), which pages through the star’s personal library.

Public servants get their time in the spotlight too, with two forthcoming memoirs that pull back the curtain on urban infrastructure. A 20-year veteran of Montreal’s sanitation department, Simon Pare-Poupart exposes the hard work, danger, and humor of a career in waste collection in Trash!: A Garbageman’s Story (Melville House, Jun.; tr. from French by Pablo Strauss); the French edition was a Canadian bestseller. In Railroaded: A Motorman’s Story of the New York City Subway (Rutgers Univ., Apr.), train driver turned historian Fred S. Naiden captures the life of a public transit worker during New York’s wild 1980s.

Finally, the Museum of Modern Art’s Marcel Duchamp exhibition (the Dadaist’s first American retrospective in 50 years) will be paired in March with a comprehensive catalog edited by Susanne Pfeffer; the 850-page volume is illustrated with over 400 works and written for a broad audience.

Neal Wyatt  l  Executive Editor, Book Review & Features, LJ & SLJ

Portia Elan’s literary fiction/SFF debut, Homebound (Scribner, May), begins slowly, scattered across characters, time, and events, but as it starts to cohere, it offers not just an interesting story that earned a buzzy preempt but a lovely sense of being a reader; stories—their meaning, types, manner, process, and legacy, and the act of making them one’s own—are essential to Elan’s novel. Amal El-Mohtar (author of The River Has Roots and coauthor of This Is How You Lose the Time War) also experiments with the way stories can be told in Seasons of Glass and Iron: Stories (Tor.com, Mar.), a collection of short fiction that uses different forms to tell its tales. Naomi Ishiguro, who once worked as a bibliotherapist, also knows what moves a reader to turn pages. Her novel The Rainshadow Orphans (Saga, May) covers only the briefest period of time but spans 640 pages. That alone makes it fascinating, but adding hacker-spycraft and dragons pushes it over the top. Readers seeking fantasy with interesting plots and characters might also turn to Cheri Radke’s An Accident of Dragons (Erewhon, Apr.), which has pirates, tea, and, of course, dragons; Meg Shaffer’s The Book Witch (Ballantine, Apr.), a spritely mystery quest through books; and An Arcane Study of Stars (Redhook, Apr.), a historical dark-academia romance by Sydney J. Shields, author of The Honey Witch.

A key pleasure of being a reader is rereading, though not everyone finds these revisitations rewarding. For the latter group, series books provide the comfort of reencountering favorite characters and worlds but with new plotlines. Four titles do this across a range of genre fiction this spring. Historical romance readers will delight in Game of Rogues (Avon, Jun.), book nine of Julie Anne Long’s swoony, observant, and finely plotted “The Palace of Rogues” series. Colleen Cambridge returns with In the Spirit of French Murder (Kensington, Apr.), her fourth cozy historical “An American in Paris Mystery.” Dani Francis’s “Silver Elite” romantasy series, perhaps one of the best read-alikes for Rebecca Yarros’s “Empyrean” books, adds a second installment, Broken Dove (Del Rey, May). This seething, battle-filled, dystopian tale centers on an intriguing pairof friends-to-enemies-to-lovers. Rebecca Thorne starts a new series with the cozy and creative sci-fi romance Moss’d in Space (Bramble, Jul.), featuring a highly opinionated, super-intelligent sentient moss colony and a funny, embracing tone.

Spring is also developing into an interesting season for culinary works. Sana Javeri Kadri and Asha Loupy’s The Diaspora Spice Co. Cookbook: Seasonal Home Cooking from South Asia’s Best Spice Farms (Harvest) arrives in March, packed with pages of spice blends and so much more. Ham El-Waylly (cohost, with his wife Sohla, of the YouTube series Mystery Menu) offers myriad get-dinner-on-the-table suggestions in Hello, Home Cooking: Do-Able Dishes for Every Day (Clarkson Potter, Mar.). For those who would rather read about cooking, there is Brigid Washington’s Salt, Sweat & Steam: The Fiery Education of an Accidental Chef (St. Martin’s, Apr.), an insider’s account of training at the Culinary Institute of America.

For readers who find joy in gardening, this season bursts with varied books about flowers, starting with Sarah Raven’s A Year of Cut Flowers: Color and Joy for All Seasons (Bloomsbury, Apr.). Also look for Graeme Corbett’s Life in Bloom: Grow, Gather & Arrange Seasonal Flowers (Frances Lincoln, Apr.) and Chloé Roy’s Floramama: From Garden to Bouquet, Growing Flowers for Market (New Society, Jun.). Lastly, Monty Don publishes British Gardens (BBC Books, Feb.), in which audiences who dreamily followed his explorations of gardens across Italy, France, Japan, Turkey, Morocco, Spain, India, and Greece, can wander with him through the extraordinary gardens of the UK.