Can't-Wait Wednesday: Eat the Ones You Love by Sarah Maria Griffin, The Pretender by Jo Harkin, and The Golden Road by William Dalrymple

  

Can't-Wait is a weekly meme hosted by Wishful Endings that spotlights exciting upcoming releases that we can't wait to be released. 

Eat the Ones You Love by Sarah Maria Griffin
Publication: April 22nd, 2025
Tor Books
Hardcover. 288 pages.
Pre-order: Amazon | Bookshop.org

From Goodreads:
"A twisted, tangled story about workplace love-affairs, and plants with a taste for human flesh

During a grocery run to her local shopping center, Shell Pine sees a ‘HELP NEEDED’ sign in a flower shop window. She’s just left her fiancé, lost her job, and moved home to her parents’ house. She has to make a change and bring some good into her life, so she goes inside and takes a chance. Shell realizes right away that flowers are just the good thing she's been looking for, as is Neve, the beautiful florist who wrote the sign asking for help. The thing is, Neve needs help more than Shell could possibly imagine.

An orchid growing out of sight in the heart of the mall is watching them closely. His name is Baby, and the beautiful florist belongs to him. He’s young, he’s hungry, and he’ll do just about anything to make sure he can keep growing big and strong. Nothing he eats – nobody he eats – can satisfy him, except the thing he most desires. Neve. He adores her and wants to consume her, and will stop at nothing to eat the one he loves.

This is a story about possession, and monstrosity, and working retail. It is about hunger and desire, and other terrible things that grow."

This sounds delightfully weird and I'm totally here for it.

The Pretender by Jo Harkin

Publication: April 22nd, 2025

Knopf

Hardcover. 496 pages.

Pre-order: Amazon | Bookshop.org

From Goodreads:

"A sweeping historical novel in the vein of Hilary Mantel and Maggie O’Farrell set during the time of the Tudors’ ascent. The Pretender tells the story of Lambert Simnel, who was raised in obscurity as a peasant boy to protect his safety, believed to be the heir to the throne occupied by Richard III, and briefly crowned, at the age of ten, as King Edward the Sixth, one of the last of the Plantagenets.

In 1480 John Collan’s greatest anxiety is how to circumvent the village’s devil goat on the way to collect water. But the arrival of a well-dressed stranger from London upends his life forever: John is not John Collan, not the son of Will Collan, but the son of the long-deceased Duke of Clarence, hidden in the countryside after a brotherly rift over the crown, and because Richard III has a habit of disappearing his nephews. Removed from his humble origins, sent to Oxford to be educated in a manner befitting the throne’s rightful heir, John is put into play by his masters, learning the rules of etiquette in Burgundy and the machinations of the court in Ireland, where he encounters the intractable Joan, the delightfully strong-willed and manipulative daughter of his Irish patrons, a girl imbued with both extraordinary political savvy and occasional murderous tendencies. Joan has two paths available her—marry, or become a nun. Lambert’s choices are similarly stark: he will either become King, or die in battle. Together they form an alliance that will change the fate of the English monarchy.

Inspired by a footnote to history—the true story of the little known Simnel, who was a figurehead of the 1487 Yorkist rebellion and ended up working as a spy in the court of King Henry VII— The Pretender is historical fiction at its finest, a gripping, exuberant, rollicking portrait of British monarchy and life within the court, with a cast of unforgettable heroes and villains drawn from 15th century England. A masterful new work from a major new author."

I have been craving a "sweeping historical novel" so this sounds absolutely perfect. There's something special about sinking into a compelling historical fiction story, so hopefully this one is as good as it sounds. 

The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Darymple

Publication: April 29th, 2025

Bloomsbury

Hardcover. 432 pages.

Pre-order: Amazon | Bookshop.org

From Goodreads:

"The internationally bestselling author of The Anarchy returns with a sparkling, soaring history of ideas, tracing South Asia's under-recognized role in producing the world as we know it.

For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.

In The Golden Road, William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world – and our world today as we know it."

I am always up for some more history, and this sounds like it will be fascinating!

Can't-Wait Wendesday: Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata, The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig, & Medicine River by Mary Annette Pember

 

Can't-Wait is a weekly meme hosted by Wishful Endings that spotlights exciting upcoming releases that we can't wait to be released! 

Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata
Publication: April 15th, 2025
Grove Press
Hardcover. 240 pages.
Pre-order: Amazon | Bookshop.org

From Goodreads:
"From the author of the bestselling literary sensations Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings comes a surprising and highly imaginative story set in a version of Japan where sex between married couples has vanished and all children are born by artificial insemination.

Sayaka Murata has proven herself to be one of the most exciting chroniclers of the strangeness of society, x-raying our contemporary world to bizarre and troubling effect. Her depictions of a happily unmarried retail worker in Convenience Store Woman and a young woman convinced she is an alien in Earthlings have endeared her to millions of readers worldwide. Vanishing World takes Murata’s universe to a bold new level, imagining an alternative Japan where attitudes to sex and procreation are wildly different to our own.

As a girl, Amane realizes with horror that her parents “copulated” in order to bring her into the world, rather than using artificial insemination, which became the norm in the mid-twentieth century. Amane strives to get away from what she considers an indoctrination in this strange “system” by her mother, but her infatuations with both anime characters and real people have a sexual force that is undeniable.

As an adult in an appropriately sexless marriage—sex between married couples is now considered as taboo as incest—Amane and her husband Saku decide to go and live in a mysterious new town called Experiment City or Paradise-Eden, where all children are raised communally, and every person is considered a Mother to all children. Men are beginning to become pregnant using artificial wombs that sit outside of their bodies like balloons, and children are nameless, called only “Kodomo-chan.” Is this the new world that will purify Amane of her strangeness once and for all?"

I love books that play with and explore weird ideas like this, so I'm really keen to see what Sayaka Murata does with this premise.

The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig
Publication: April 29th, 2025
Del Rey
Hardcover. 400 pages.
Pre-order: Amazon | Bookshop.org

From Goodreads:
"A group of friends investigates the mystery of a strange staircase in the woods in this mesmerizing horror novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Accidents.

Five high school friends are bonded by an oath to protect one another no matter what.

Then, on a camping trip in the middle of the forest, they find something a mysterious staircase to nowhere.

One friend walks up—and never comes back down. Then the staircase disappears.

Twenty years later, the staircase has reappeared. Now the group returns to find the lost boy—and what lies beyond the staircase in the woods. . ."

I'm always up for some new horror from Chuck Wendig! Nobody tells horror tales quite like Wendig, and I'm loving this idea of a random staircase in the woods and what may lay beyond it... I have an ARC of this one that I can't wait to get into.

Medicine River: A Story of Survival and the Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools by Mary Annette Pember
Publication: April 22nd, 2025
Pantheon
Hardcover. 304 pages.
Pre-order: Amazon | Bookshop.org

From Goodreads:
"A sweeping and trenchant exploration of the history of Native American boarding schools in the U.S., and the legacy of abuse wrought by systemic attempts to use education as a tool through which to destroy Native culture.

From the mid-19th century to the late 1930s, tens of thousands of Native children were pulled from their families to attend boarding schools that claimed to help create opportunity for these children to pursue professions outside their communities and otherwise "assimilate" into American life. In reality, these boarding schools—sponsored by the US Government but often run by various religious orders with little to no regulation—were an insidious attempt to destroy tribes, break up families, and stamp out the traditions of generations of Native people.  Children were beaten for speaking their native languages, forced to complete menial tasks in terrible conditions, and utterly deprived of love and affection.

Ojibwe journalist Mary Pember's mother was forced to attend one of these institutions—a seminary in Wisconsin, and the impacts of her experience have cast a pall over Mary's own childhood, and her relationship with her mother. Highlighting both her mother's experience and the experiences of countless other students at such schools, their families, and their children, Medicine River paints a stark portrait of communities still reckoning with the legacy of acculturation that has affected generations of Native communities. Through searing interviews and assiduous historical reporting, Pember traces the evolution and continued rebirth of a culture whose country has been seemingly intent upon destroying it."

This is a topic that always needs more attention brought to it, and this book sounds like it'll be a very thorough--if difficult--read to learn more about the horrific history Native American boarding schools in the U.S.