9 of the best new books to read this spring

From Lena Dunham’s brutally honest new memoir Famesick, to Stephanie Wambugu’s debut novel about friendship and obsession, these are the hottest new releases to have on your radar

It’s finally that time of year again. Cherry blossoms are in bloom, white men are shirtless, and the sun is out. That could only mean one thing: it’s reading in the park season! The debate over whether reading in the park is actually fun and relaxing, or if it’s uncomfortable and we all pretend it isn’t because we’re desperate for vitamin D, is in full swing once again. Whether you actually enjoy reading outside or are pretending to, there are several new releases from new and established voices to accompany you during your sun worship. Here’s our round-up of the best new books to read this spring.

Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu

The other day, while talking to my therapist about my best friends, she described our relationship as ‘codependent’. I almost wanted to retort that if she wanted to witness a real codependent relationship, she should read Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu. Wambugu makes sharp observations about family, sexuality and love through this tale of two Black best friends, Ruth and Maria, in the NYC art scene in the 90s. I underlined more lines than I’d like to admit while reading this book – lines like: “I was afraid that relationships could be ruined just by being thought about. But then again, what did it say about the quality of a relationship if it fell apart under the mildest scrutiny?” It is a riveting story in which we follow Ruth in the depths of her obsession with Maria, an obsession that, as Philip Janowski writes in his review of the book, “both gives her life and threatens it”. Like Ruth with Maria, I found myself deeply obsessed and changed by this novel. (HJ)

Read our interview with Stephanie Wambugu here.

Famesick by Lena Dunham

I inhaled this book. I only finished it yesterday, and I’ve already had more than one animated discussion with friends who are frothing and cascading with opinions. I haven’t fully formed my own sense of the finer points of Dunham’s story yet – I was so involved in her tale and invested in her perspective that I don’t have much critical distance (but maybe that’s just a mark of truly engrossing storytelling). For me, the most fascinating aspect of the book was her intoxicating broken friendship with Girls co-writer and showrunner, Jenni Konner. We’ve all had a complicated female friendship like this that has felt as heady as a romance when it began and as devastating as any heartbreak when it sours. I could’ve read a whole book just about this one aspect of her story. As always, her writing is wincingly courageous, and I never felt like she was obfuscating the truth or not striving, however imperfectly, to be honest. Finishing Famesick, I felt like I’d really spent time with Dunham, for better or for worse. I was sad when it ended, and we had to go our separate ways. (ED)

The Beginning Comes After the End by Rebecca Solnit

There’s a widely shared David Hockney quote that goes: “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring.” Rebecca Solnit’s book, published in March, takes this a step further. Not only do brighter days come around with reassuring frequency, she suggests, but they do so because of a massive, sustained (and criminally-overlooked) effort, driven by activists and policymakers but also ‘regular people’ who might not even realise they’re part of a revolutionary shift. In a time of crisis, violence, and polarisation, the book-length essay reminds us of the gains we’ve made in the past – in terms of racial justice, women’s rights, and environmental protections – and shows us that progress hasn’t gone away via stories from the Indigenous-led Land Back movement. Yes, it acknowledges that we still live in a far-from-perfect world. But as spring rolls around once again, it offers a much-needed antidote to the ragebait and doomsaying of news headlines and social media posts. More than anything, it invites us to imagine a better future, which (speaking for the UK here) has all but vanished from our public imagination. “You do not have to picture the destination to reach it or at least draw closer to it,” Solnit writes, “you just need to choose a direction and keep on walking.” (TW)

John of John by Douglas Stuart

John of John follows John-Calum – better known as Cal – a 22-year-old who returns to his home on the remote Isle of Harris after a stint at an art school near Edinburgh. He’s come back at the insistence of his strict, Presbyterian father, John, who has told Cal that his maternal grandmother, Ella, is sick (her feet, he explains over the phone, are as purple as “calf’s liver”). Back on weather-beaten Harris, Cal struggles to reconcile his queer identity with his father’s rigid expectations and the oppressive, small-town environment – but gradually it becomes clear to Cal that the island community has its own secrets too. John of John grapples with all the usual themes of a Douglas Stuart novel – intergenerational trauma, substance abuse, religion, masculinity – but, in contrast to the bleakness of Young Mungo and Shuggie Bain, is shot through with tenderness, hope, and love. (SS)

Look At What You Made Me Do by John Lanchester

Boomer Kate has spent 30 happy years in a perfect marriage with her husband Jack; millennial Phoebe is a rising screenwriter behind the breakout TV hit Cheating. After Jack dies, Kate tunes in to Cheating one night and is immediately unsettled. Scenes from the show feel uncannily personal – as if they’ve literally been lifted from her life. How, Kate wonders, could anyone know such intimate details about her marriage to Jack? Then it dawns on her: did he have an affair? A biting satire about resentment and power, Look What You Made Me Do follows Kate and Phoebe as their lives become uncomfortably intertwined. (SS)

I Want You To Be Happy by Jem Calder

Chuck, 35, has abandoned his dreams of becoming a novelist and has resigned himself to churning out copy at an ad agency; Joey, 23, lives hand-to-mouth on her meagre barista wages while aspiring to become a poet. After meeting in a bar and hitting it off, the pair head back to Chuck’s lavish flat – and soon enough, Joey finds herself fantasising about building a future with him. But does Chuck – still fresh out of a long-term relationship – feel the same? I Want You to Be Happy is a sharp, shrewd story of two people “searching for meaning and connection in modern times”. (SS)

Rasputin: And the Downfall of the Romanovs by Antony Beevor

I’ve recently been causing controversy around dinner tables and in the office kitchen by sharing my firm belief that I would not have been taken in by Rasputin. The barely literate peasant from Siberia who bewitched Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra, with devastating consequences for the Romanov dynasty, seems to have possessed an almost supernatural charisma. His followers were so enamoured with him that they would sew his fingernail clippings into their clothes and wear his discarded, half-eaten food in lockets around their necks.

These are just some of the fun facts you learn about the infamous “mad monk,” who lived a strange life and died an even stranger death, in Antony Beevor’s new biography Rasputin: And the Downfall of the Romanovs. A great read for anyone who, like me, is fascinated by cult-like figures, aristocratic decadence, corruption, and the spectacular downfalls of the powerful. (AP)

Prairie Oyster by Sophie Robinson

There has been no shortage of books on the destructive, dizzying nature of unrequited longing. Like, we get it! Some faceless loser does not want you! Get up, girl. But British poet Sophie Robinson somehow makes this trope feel exhilarating in her debut novel Prairie Oyster. The story follows a brittle thirty-something artist on the brink of a nervous breakdown, who meets one of her creative heroes: a cult lesbian filmmaker called Mitch Meyer. The two begin an obsessive love affair, which quickly descends into a seedy, hellish nightmare. Robinson’s feverish prose makes this mess of lust, substance addiction and creative fixation feel disturbingly real – you can’t look away, as much as you want to. In the words of Eileen Myles, Prairie Oyster is so intense, it may even “out-jar The Bell Jar.” (DS)

Discipline by Larissa Pham

Brooklyn writer Larissa Pham is such a sharp, cool writer – she seems to see through people like an X-ray – and this book is stuffed with wisdom about the way we relate to and experience each other. Discipline tells the story of a writer called Christine, who is touring a “revenge” novel based on a relationship she had with her professor a decade earlier. She thinks he’s forgotten her, that her version of the affair has hardened into fact, but then she starts receiving a series of strange emails from him. Discipline is best in its quieter, more reflective moments, when it picks apart how two people can live through the same relationship in completely different ways – and how unsettling it can be to realise your story is never just yours. (DS)

Text by Halima Jibril , Emily Dinsdale , Serena Smith , Thom Waite , Alex Peters