New Releases - April 2026 Edition

Check out these highly anticipated new releases featuring fiction and nonfiction titles. Click on the title to request a copy or get your name on the waitlist. Don’t forget to watch for more featured releases next month!

FICTION

We Burned So Bright by TJ Klune
Don and Rodney have been together for 40 years, but their wedding vows never included "until the Earth is destroyed." They face that now, as a black hole will consume the planet in a month. Rodney and Don know that time is up, but they have one last promise to fulfill. It's one they have delayed but can no longer, and it is a race against time in their old RV to get from Maine to Washington State. For these two men, it is not just the journey but also the destination. Along the way, they encounter many others who are facing the end of the world--in denial, in heartbreak, in joy--and will wonder if the best that they gave through the decades was enough, even if no one will be left to know it. VERDICT Klune's (Somewhere Beyond the Sea) heart-wrenching plot and emotional prose are on full display in this wonderful queer apocalyptic story.--Kristi Chadwick.  Copyright 2026 Library Journal

Bumblebee Season by Eileen Garvin 
Garvin's (Crow Talk) new novel is told from the perspective of three very different Oregonians: Jake, a wheelchair-using beekeeper; Flaco, a teen who has recently migrated from Mexico; and entomology grad student Abigail, who studies endangered bumblebees. When a local lawman both calls for detaining immigrants and threatens the wilderness where honeybees and other creatures thrive, Jake, Abigail, and Flaco are each galvanized in different ways to resist. The characters' perspectives contrast sharply and shift in each chapter, making this a dynamic and engaging story. The writing is engaging and speeds along compellingly, further enhanced by well-divided chapters, though the somewhat-rushed ending might have added more meaning if it were longer and delved deeper. VERDICT Garvin's latest is akin to Emily Habeck's Shark Heart and Shelby Van Pelt's Remarkably Bright Creatures with their animal themes and focus on human bonds, while the novel's treatment of multiple perspectives recalls Fredrik Backman. For fans of a wide range of genres, including literary and historical fiction, as well as those interested in science, thanks to the fun bee facts scattered throughout the novel.  Copyright 2026 Library Journal

Transcription by Ben Lerner
In the beautiful and resonant latest from Lerner (The Topeka School), a middle-aged man constructs an elaborate farewell to his mentor. In the first of three sections, the unnamed narrator travels to Providence, R.I., to interview 90-year-old artist Thomas for a magazine article. The narrator plans to record their conversation on his iPhone, which he accidentally breaks just before the appointment. Unable to admit the problem to Thomas, he proceeds with the interview, and Thomas embarks on his characteristically stunning soliloquies on art, light, and sound ("There is always music playing that we cannot hear.... We are deaf to the bats singing in ultrasound, or the elephants conversing in their infrasound.... The air is alive with messages"). In the second section, set after Thomas's death, the narrator travels to Madrid for a symposium on Thomas's work, where he's questioned after saying that he had drawn some of the now published interview with Thomas from memory. The novel concludes with a dialogue between the narrator and Thomas's son, Max. The pair, who have been friends since college, grapple with their complex relationships with Thomas ("Maybe you were the real son, maybe I was the clone or robot or doppelgänger," Max tells the narrator), and new mysteries arise over the course of their conversation. Lerner's lyrical narrative brims with insights into how memories take and change shape, the nature of father figures, and the ways an artist's influence echoes through time. It's a knockout. Copyright 2026 Publishers Weekly

NONFICTION

Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class by Noam Scheiber 
This insightful investigation from New York Times reporter Scheiber (The Escape Artists) examines how a radical new cohort of young, college-educated workers at major American corporations powered a wave of unionizations and strikes in recent years. The "dismal economy" during and after the Great Recession led to many college graduates taking low-wage jobs in retail and customer service, or working for years for low pay within their profession. This widening "gap... between the expectations of many graduates and their actual prospects" fueled an upswing in labor activism. Scheiber tracks workers preparing to unionize at an Apple store in Towson, Md., and a Chicago Starbucks, along the way spotlighting other labor disputes and developments, such as the Writers Guild of America's 2023 strike and the United Auto Workers' election of president Shawn Fain by an insurgent collective of "fed-up autoworkers and... graduate students." Scheiber mixes nitty-gritty contract fights with poignant profiles of workers like Apple employee Chaya Barrett, who was "radicalized" by CEO Tim Cook's astronomical $750 million stock windfall ("I'm working my butt off for not even a full percent of what you just sold"), as well as glimpses of corporations' anti-union intimidation efforts, such as Starbucks establishing new benefits and wage increases only for non-union workers. It's a galvanizing look at a stymied white-collar generation with the "politics... of the proletariat." -Copyright 2026 Publishers Weekly

Lucky Devils: The True Story of Three Rebel Gamblers Who Beat the Odds and Changed the Game by Kit Chellel
In this absolute page-turner, Bloomberg reporter Chellel details the history of the tight, mostly secretive community of "advantage players," gamblers whose creative and unrelenting application of increasingly powerful computers has reaped unimagined financial rewards while upending the notion of casino gambling itself. Chellel focuses on three pivotal figures: Bill Benter, realizing that casinos barred card-counting because it worked, won $16 million in one evening betting on horses in Hong Kong; Bill Nelson, applied physics and mathematical models to predict where the ball would likely land on a roulette wheel; and Rob Reitzen, armed with a high-school diploma and a deceptively goofy persona, could crunch card combinations in his head with the skill of a math genius. Remarkably, casinos had trouble proving advantage play was illegal, since gamblers argued it was "un-American" for casinos to offer games based on skill, then bar those who played them skillfully. Even as casinos have embraced advantage play, the high-stakes, cat-and-mouse match between casinos and gamblers continues, as the author relates, if on a vastly larger stage.- Copyright 2026 Booklist

The Story of Birds: A New History from Their Dinosaur Origins to the Present by Steve Brusatte 
From the renowned paleontologist and bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, a sweeping evolutionary history of birds, from their dinosaur origins to the 10,000+ extraordinary species alive today. Tens of billions of birds share the planet with us, an astonishingly diverse array of species that are present nearly everywhere humans call home--and many places we do not. With their flamboyant plumage, joyous dawn serenades, extraordinary aerial feats, they have captivated human imagination for millennia. Undeniably delicate creatures with hollow bones and thin skin protected by downy feathers, how did such a seemingly fragile species break the bounds of Earth and begin to fly, how have they survived millennia, and how does their legacy shape our world? Hailed as "one of the stars of modern paleontology" (National Geographic), Steve Brusatte now tells the extraordinary story of the dinosaurs' living legacy: birds. He begins by exploring how dinosaurs gradually developed the trademark features of birds one-by-one--feathers, wings, beaks, big brains, keen senses, and warm-blooded metabolisms. He investigates why birds were the only dinosaurs to survive the cataclysmic asteroid impact 66 million years ago and chronicles how these survivors rapidly proliferated to produce the diversity of avian species we know today. Along the way, we meet a variety of remarkable - now extinct - species: 10-foot-tall terror birds with beaks that sliced flesh; elephant birds that lived on Madagascar and laid eggs the size of footballs; pelagornithid seabirds with 20-foot wingspans; a ferocious Jamaican ibis that used its wings as clubs to attack rivals Yet, Brusatte also urges us to appreciate the extraordinariness of birds alive today - penguins that literally fly underwater, parrots that can mimic human speech and crows that can make tools and are smarter than most mammals. A fascinating scientific history that unearths the origins of birds, The Story of Birds establishes the living legacy of this remarkable species. Copyright 2026  - provided by publisher.