There are so many fantastic books emerging this spring, and this is only a small sampling of the crop! If you’re searching for your next read, be sure to check out the latest bestsellers online, or check the shelves of your local Half Price Books. There’s a little something there for everyone, so enjoy and let us know what you’re reading in the comments below.
Spring means warmer weather, cool breezes, flowers and sunshine. Thankfully for our bookloving friends, it also includes some seriously exciting new books. We’ll see the release of many books worthwhile to devour while sprawled out in the sunshine. If you’re looking forward to some spring reads, read on for 8 books to carry you from April showers to May flowers!
Daisy Jones & The Six – released 3/5/19
This New York Times bestseller has been a massive hit. This gripping novel centers on the whirlwind rise of an iconic 1970s rock group and their beautiful lead singer, revealing the mystery behind their infamous breakup at the height of popularity. The lead singer, Daisy, is a girl coming of age in Los Angeles in the late 60s, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock ’n’ roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.
Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant and, with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road. Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend. The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies. AuthorTaylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six, brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice.
Girl, Stop Apologizing— released 3/12/19
Rachel Hollis has seen it too often: women not living up to their full potential. They feel a tugging on their hearts for something more, but they’re afraid of embarrassment, of falling short of perfection, of not being enough. In Girl, Stop Apologizing, #1 New York Times bestselling author and founder of multimillion-dollar media company, The Hollis Company, Rachel Hollis sounds a wake-up call. She knows that many women have been taught to define themselves in light of other people—whether as wife, mother, daughter or employee—instead of learning how to own who they are and what they want. With a challenge to women everywhere to stop talking themselves out of their dreams, Hollis identifies the excuses to let go of, the behaviors to adopt and the skills to acquire on the path to growth, confidence and believing in yourself. This book is a follow up to her New York Times bestselling book Girl, Wash Your Face, where Hollis urges women to stop feeling self-conscious about their ambitions and to start pursuing their dreams with confidence.
Queenie— released 3/19/19
This disarmingly honest, boldly political, and truly inclusive novel will speak to anyone who has gone looking for love and found something very different in its place. Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper where she’s constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places, including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of affirming self-worth. As Queenie careens from one questionable decision to another, she finds herself wondering, “What are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who do you want to be?”—all of the questions today’s woman must face in a world trying to answer them for her. Queenie is a remarkably relatable exploration of what it means to be a modern woman searching for meaning in today’s world.
Boy Swallows Universe— released 4/2/19
An utterly wonderful debut novel of love, crime, magic, fate and a boy’s coming of age. Set in 1980s Australia Boy Swallows Universe is infused with the originality, charm, pathos and heart of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Eli Bell’s life is complicated. His father is lost, his mother is in jail and his stepdad is a heroin dealer. The most steadfast adult in Eli’s life is Slim—a notorious felon and national record-holder for successful prison escapes—who watches over Eli and August, his silent genius of an older brother.
Exiled far from the rest of the world in Darra, a seedy suburb populated by Polish and Vietnamese refugees, this twelve-year-old boy with an old soul and an adult mind is just trying to follow his heart, learn what it takes to be a good man and train for a glamorous career in journalism. Life, however, insists on throwing obstacles in Eli’s path—most notably Tytus Broz, Brisbane’s legendary drug dealer. But the real trouble lies ahead. Eli is about to fall in love, face off against truly bad guys, and fight to save his mother from a certain doom—all before starting high school.
A story of brotherhood, true love, family, and the most unlikely of friendships, Boy Swallows Universeis the tale of an adolescent boy on the cusp of discovering the man he will be. Powerful and kinetic, Trent Dalton’s debut is sure to be one of the most heartbreaking, joyous and exhilarating novels you will experience.
When We Left Cuba—on sale 4/9/19
In 1960s Florida, a young Cuban exile will risk her life—and heart—to take back her country in this exhilarating historical novel from the author of Next Year in Havana.
Beautiful. Daring. Deadly. The Cuban Revolution took everything from sugar heiress Beatriz Perez—her family, her people and her country. Recruited by the CIA to infiltrate Fidel Castro’s inner circle and pulled into the dangerous world of espionage, Beatriz is consumed by her quest for revenge and her desire to reclaim the life she lost. As the Cold War swells like a hurricane over the shores of the Florida Strait, Beatriz is caught between the clash of Cuban American politics and the perils of a forbidden affair with a powerful man driven by ambitions of his own.
When the ever-changing tides of history threaten everything she has fought for, she must make a choice between her past and future–but the wrong move could cost Beatriz everything–not just the island she loves, but also the man who has stolen her heart
Normal People—on sale 4/19/19
At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s the popular, well-adjusted, star of the school football team, while she is lonely, proud and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers—one they are determined to conceal.
A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. As she veers into self-destruction while he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other. Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.
Again, but Better—on sale 5/7/19
From one of the most followed booktubers today, comes Again, but Better, a story about second chances, discovering yourself and being brave enough to try again. Shane has been doing college all wrong. Pre-med, stellar grades and happy parent—sounds ideal—but Shane’s made zero friends, goes home every weekend, and romance…what’s that?
Her life has been dorm, dining hall, class, repeat. Time’s a ticking, and she needs a change—there’s nothing like moving to a new country to really mix things up, so Shane signs up for a semester abroad in London. She’s going to right all her college mistakes by making friends, pursuing boys and finding adventure! Of course, that’s easier said than done. She is soon faced with the complicated realities of living outside her bubble, and when self-doubt sneaks in, her new life starts to fall apart. Shane comes to find that with the right amount of courage and determination, one can conquer anything. Throw in some fate and a touch of magic—the possibilities are endless.
Light from Other Stars— on sale 5/7/19
This poignant, fantastical novel reflects on the electric combination of ambition and wonder that keeps us reaching toward the heavens. Eleven-year-old Nedda Papas is obsessed with becoming an astronaut. In 1986 in Easter, a small Florida Space Coast town, her dreams seem almost within reach—if she can just grow up fast enough. Theo, the scientist father she idolizes, is consumed by his own obsessions. Laid off from his job at NASA and still reeling from the loss of Nedda’s newborn brother several years before, Theo turns to the dangerous dream of extending his living daughter’s childhood just a little longer. The result is an invention that alters the fabric of time.
Amidst the chaos that erupts, Nedda must confront her father and his secrets, the ramifications of which will irrevocably change her life, her community and the entire world. But she finds an unexpected ally in Betheen, the mother she’s never quite understood, who surprises Nedda by seeing her more clearly than anyone else. Decades later, Nedda has achieved her long-held dream, and as she floats in antigravity, far from earth, she and her crewmates face a serious crisis. Nedda may hold the key to the solution, if she can come to terms with her past and the future that awaits her.
Light from Other Stars is about fathers and daughters, women and the forces that hold them back and the cost of meaningful work. It questions how our lives have changed, what progress looks like and what it really means to sacrifice for the greater good.