It’s been a long, cold winter here in New York, and there hasn’t been much to laugh about. Fortunately, as we move into spring, publishers are helping to lighten the mood with a bunch of truly funny novels. Here are some that will hit bookstore shelves this April.
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (Knopf, April 7): Natalie is a tradwife influencer who seems to be living the perfect life, churning butter, baking bread, and raising her beautiful children on an Idaho farm alongside her adoring husband. The truth, however, is much darker. Our starred review says that “Burke has given us an absolutely riveting character—bitchy, narcissistic, and uncaring, yet also incongruously relatable and wickedly entertaining.…Deliciously funny.”
The Oyster Diaries by Nancy Lemann (New York Review Books, April 7): Lemann grew up in New Orleans, and she’s known for writing digressive comedies of manners set in her native city. Her latest finds a woman named Delery Anhalt heading home to deal with her elderly father’s health crisis, as well as “houseguests, in-laws, sarcastic children, the presidential helicopter, and a volunteer job monitoring justice in New Orleans’ criminal courts.” Our starred review says “this book is so funny that its poignant, elegiac side kind of sneaks up on you.”
Porcupines by Fran Fabriczki (Summit, April 14): In 2001, Sonia is a single mother in Los Angeles whose daughter is trying to trick her into revealing the identity of the girl’s father—but Sonia has many secrets. In 1989, Szonja is an 18-year-old who arrives in LA to spend the summer with her sister. In both timelines, our starred review says, she’s “deliciously vivid…her wry perspective revealing a character as spiky and vulnerable as the novel’s title suggests.…Tart, funny, and poignant; a tremendous debut.”
Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein (Doubleday, April 14): In real life, Lewinsky has turned out to be a smart and sympathetic woman, and Langbein turns her into an actual saint, “born in 1973 to a noble family of Jews living in the America Empire.” Saint Monica is guiding 45-year-old Jean Dornan as she comes to terms with an affair she had in 1998, the same year as Monica’s tryst with the most powerful man in the world. Our starred review calls the novel a “complex comic confection” and says “its bold, clever comedic lineaments [support] a serious and poignant examination of female desire and male power.”
Ms. Mebel Goes Back to the Chopping Block by Jesse Q. Sutanto (Berkley, April 28): Sutanto has written warmhearted novels in many genres—mysteries about a San Francisco teahouse owner named Vera Wong, dark comedies in the “four aunties” trilogy, a queer romance in Next Time Will Be Our Turn. Her latest creation is Mebel Tanadi, a 63-year-old in Jakarta whose wealthy husband leaves her for their 24-year-old chef. Mebel’s takeaway: She should learn to cook! She sets off for culinary school near Oxford, where she encounters a group of much younger fellow students and a hot George Clooney-esque chef. Our review says Sutanto “has created another unsinkable and unstintingly funny…character, and readers should derive much pleasure witnessing Mebel’s transformation from castoff wife into Chinese Indonesian Golden Girl.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
