New Book Releases: April 28, 2020

Each week, I’ll catalog the biggest and most exciting adult and YA fiction — and the occasional nonfiction — coming out that Tuesday.

THE KNOCKOUT QUEEN, Rufi Thorpe. Hands-down, my favorite book of the past year. Two teenaged outcasts become best friends, until a tragic act of violence leaves them both transformed. “In Thorpe’s Technicolor world, everyone is an innocent and everyone is culpable and no one is absolved, and the result is a novel both nauseatingly brutal and radically kind,” writes Kirkus. Read my review here. Find it on two lists in my Bookshop: Absolute, Number One All Time Faves, and Great Novels of California. Aggregated critical reviews, Bookshop.

MEADOWLARK, Melanie Abrams. Two childhood friends reconnect years later when one of them, a photojournalist, visits the other, who now leads a cult-like community in the Nevada desert. Bookshop.

TAKE ME APART, Sara Sligar. A riveting debut about a New Yorker who, after her career crumbles, moves to Marin County in the Bay Area to sort the personal effects of a famous female artist who died in a mysterious shooting. This was one of my most anticipated books of early 2020! Bookshop.