Paperbacks to Look Out For in April 2026: Part Two

I’ve read just two from this second April paperback instalment beginning with Megan Hunter’s Days of Light which tells the story of Ivy, the daughter of a bohemian family, through six pivotal days in her life beginning with Easter Sunday in 1938 which ends in tragedy. At a funeral, two weeks later she finds solace with a man which will lead to marriage and children. Towards the end of the war, friendship ripens into a love that might fulfil her longing for meaning, hopes dashed ten years later on a day in which she experiences an epiphany. On the sixth day, Ivy remembers the many Easters she’s lived through and the course her life’s taken. Hunter’s writing is luminously beautiful at times and there’s an elegiac quality to the early part of the novel which lends it a gentle melancholy.

In Nell Stevens’s The Original, nine-year-old Grace is sent to Inderwick Hall when her parents are confined to an asylum. An unwelcome guest, her only ally is her cousin, Charles, who abruptly leaves after a row with his father. When a letter arrives from a man claiming to be Charles Inderwick, years later, the household hangers-on decry him as an impostor, but Grace’s aunt becomes convinced. Should he prove his case, he will inherit the estate but after the death of her father, it’s Grace who will become the heir. The Original‘s premise is a familiar one, both in fiction and history, but Stevens steers well clear of cliché, keeping us guessing.

I didn’t get around to Sophie Haydock’s The Flames about Egon Schiele’s muses, probably because I’m not very keen on his work, although that didn’t stop me enjoying Naomi Wood’s Mrs Hemingway. Madame Matisse does something similar with another artist, exploring the lives of Matisse’s daughter, his wife of nearly forty years and an orphan who fled Russia after the death of her mother. ‘Based on a true story, Madame Matisse is a stunning novel about drama and betrayal; emotion and sex; glamour and tragedy, all set in the hotbed of the 1930s art movement in France. In art, as in life, this a time when the rules were made to be broken…’ according to the blurb which makes me feel a little lukewarm but certainly interested enough to give it a try.

Katie Kitamura’s Booker Prize shortlisted Audition  sees two people meet for lunch at a Manhattan restaurant, one an accomplished actress, the other young enough to be her son. The question is what are these two to each other? ‘In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately’ according to the enthusiastic blurb. Kate wasn’t entirely convinced. You can read her review here. I read A Separation some time ago and found it quite unsettling but it’s stayed with me, which is more than I can say for many novels.

It’s the structure of Tony Tulathimutte’s National Book Award-longlisted Rejection that attracts me to it. Told through a cast of characters who pop in and out of each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, this novel-in-stories explores the effect of rejection, from the self-declared male feminist fed up with thirty years of being ignored to a disastrous mistake which scuppers a first relationship. ‘Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the thorniest problems of modern life: sex, relationships, identity and the internet’ says the blurb making me want to read it.

Four years ago, I reviewed Lydia Millet’s Dinosaurs having read nothing by her for nearly two decades, ending with a determination to seek out more of her work which, unsurprisingly, I failed to do. Atavists, her linked short story collection, follows a group of families, couples and loners through post-pandemic America in a variety of settings, from beauty salons to medieval role-playing festivals, college campuses to assisted living facilities which sounds very enticing to me.

That’s it for April. A click on a title will take you either to my review or to a more detailed synopsis should you want to know more, and if you’d like to catch up with part one it’s here. New fiction is here and here.