7 Books for April
April is a month of renewal, and what better way to embrace the changing season than with a stack of fresh reads that challenge, move, and expand our understanding of the world? This month’s picks are a beautifully eclectic mix — from surreal speculative fiction and quietly powerful love stories, to blistering feminist commentary and intimate personal reckonings. Whether you’re drawn to the otherworldly observations of Beautyland, the poetic hauntings of Absence, or the necessary fire of CTRL HATE DELETE, these seven books are thoughtful, fierce, and deeply human. Pour yourself a coffee, find a sun-drenched corner, and dive into the books we’re loving this April.
A Room Above a Shop
Out Now
AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT NOVELIST OF 2025
When two quiet men form a tentative connection neither knows where it might lead. M has inherited his family's ironmongery business and B is younger by eleven years and can see no future in the place where he has grown up, but when M offers him a job and lodgings, he accepts. As the two men work side by side in the shop, they also begin a life together in their one shared room above - the kind of life they never imagined possible and that risks everything if their public performance were to slip.
Unfolding in South Wales against the backdrop of Section 28, the age of consent debate and the HIV and AIDS crisis, this is a tender and resonant love story, and a powerful debut.
CTRL HATE DELETE
Out Now
How did Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s divorce become the centre of the anti-#MeToo backlash? Why have so many teen boys fallen under the thrall of Andrew Tate, a failed reality show contestant? And why are a growing number of influencers like #tradwives dressing up like 1950s housewives and preaching total subservience to men?
In the years since #MeToo – the largest social media facilitated feminist campaign in history – Roe v. Wade has been overturned in the United States, there have been attacks on reproductive rights in multiple countries and female political leaders have withdrawn from the world stage citing the level of abuse they get as a reason.
CTRL HATE DELETE takes a deep dive into how a collection of misogynists and their allies have turned male supremacist ideology from a niche set of beliefs into a mainstream movement.
With interviews from experts, influencers and activists, it outlines how to fight the rising tide of online misogyny and make online spaces more equal and inclusive.
Beautyland
Out Now
Meet Adina: a woman who has never felt at home on Earth
Born at the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space, Adina is a baby of unusual perception. Tiny and jaundiced, she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognises she is different, not least because of her strange knowledge of a faraway planet. Then a fax machine arrives at home. Her mission is clear: she must report on the oddities of humankind.
As Adina grows up, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and delights of human existence. But then she starts to wonder. Is there a chance there are others like her out there?
Adina sees our world differently. And her gentle, perceptive – and funny – observations offer a quietly joyful new view of life on Earth, the challenge of knowing ourselves and the miracle of finding our people in this vast universe.
Intimacy
Released: 05/06/2025
From the initial spark of attraction when your eyes first meet, to spontaneously dancing together in the kitchen and falling asleep side by side - how do we create those intimate moments of connection?
How we see sex and intimacy portrayed on screen has profound effects on how we learn to love each other, but before Ita O'Brien, no-one was thinking about it. After a lifetime of working in film and TV and seeing its abuses first-hand, Ita decided to change how we portray intimacy for good.
Now, as Intimacy Coordinator on productions including Normal People, Sex Education and I May Destroy You, Ita has transformed the way we see and talk about sex in pop-culture. Here, Ita guides us through how she helps actors create authentic sex scenes, and how we can use those techniques to rebuild a deeper and healthier connection with our bodies, create a safe space for exploration, and rethink how we navigate sex and intimacy in our own lives - at home, in our closest relationships - and in society as a whole.
Full of behind-the-scenes stories from her work on set, Intimacy is a call for us to rethink how we navigate ourselves and each other, not just through our words, but through our bodies and actions, too.
I Will Crash
Out Now
It wasn’t just the being hurt, it was the endlessness of it, us misfiring without break without end without rest, unable to peacefully be in the same place.
It’s been six years since Rosa stopped talking to her brother. And now it’s too late: too late to forgive, too late to make amends. But her brother had tried, hadn’t he? With him gone, Rosa must look back at the years of silence, at everything she has long held as true. As she gathers together the pieces her brother left behind, their shared history curves into a question mark. Who was her brother? What was the other side of the story?
Absence
Released: 08/05/2025
An elusive narrator is beguiled by a poem that returns to him in mysterious ways, echoing across the years. He recounts memories and impressions as they float fleetingly to the surface of his mind: an eccentric and beloved schoolteacher leaves behind a dark secret after his death; a woman lays the table for a son she knows will never return home; a young man, the pariah of his family, finds solidarity and the distant call of freedom in the letters of an estranged Aunt; a black and white photograph tells of another family, afflicted with generations of tragedy.
These are some of the people and stories that haunt the pages of Absence. This hypnotic novel is a stirring evocation of the limitless depth of the present – a symphony subtly constructed out of the murmurs, memories and phantoms that add up to an ordinary human life.
A Beautiful Lack of Consequence
Out Now
Across thirty striking tales, Monika Radojevic weaves together the surreal with the everyday, confronting the experiences of contemporary womanhood with a tender ferocity shot through with humour.
A woman walks into a bar, and nobody notices. A newly married couple are punished for their childlessness with an unsettling nocturnal invasion. A girl trades her vocal cords for a chance at freedom. A door-to-door salesperson offers the antidote to women’s fear – but it comes at a high price.
Bubbling with an urgent rage that occasionally tips over into vengeance, Radojevic deftly charts the moments that make a life: from the warmth of first love to the recognition of anger, and the possibilities that take shape as we find or lose our ability to speak. A Beautiful Lack of Consequence explores the ways in which the world bends and breaks women with the pressure it puts on them – and what happens when those women snap back.
Moving and irreverent, dark and otherworldly, A Beautiful Lack of Consequence is a blazing debut collection from the winner of the #Merky Books New Writers’ Prize.
