Your April/May Reading List is Ready: 6 New Fantasy & Sci-Fi Titles
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6 new fantasy & sci-fi titles for your reading pleasure
April is nearly over and, as always, there have been a pile of new book releases to add to your towering "to be read" pile or wishlist for May. This week, I'm focusing on new fantasy and sci-fi releases April 2026. I'll have some new historical fiction titles ready for you soon.
I've chosen these 6 new fantasy & sci-fi titles purely based on their covers, their descriptions, and my own reading tastes. I haven't read them... yet.
The Book Witch by Meg Shaffer
Release Date: April 7, Ballantine Books.
Genre: Action & adventure fantasy
Rainy March is a proud, third-generation Book Witch, sworn to defend works of fiction from all foes real and imaginary. With her magical umbrella and feline familiar, she jumps in and out of novels to fix malicious alterations and rogue heroes like a modern-day magical Nancy Drew.
Book Witches live by a strict code: Real people belong in the real word; fictional characters belong in works of fiction…. Do not eat, drink, or sleep inside a fictional world, lest you become part of the story. Falling in love with a fictional character? Don’t even think about it.
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
Release date: April 7, Knopf Doubleday
Genre: psychological thriller, spec fic
Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.
Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a ruthless reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.
Infinite Shores by Pascale Lacelle
Release Date: April 7, Margaret K. McElderry Books
Genre: fantasy (conclusion to the Drowned Gods Trilogy)
Fate cannot be broken—not even by the gods who serve it.
Emory refuses to lose Romie again. Her friend’s fate hangs in the balance as the monstrous Clover plans to use her as a sacrifice to steal power from the deity Atheia—and make himself into a proper god. To stop Clover, Emory needs the help of Atheia’s dark counterpart, Sidraeus. Yet this enigmatic deity cannot be trusted, and if Emory is to ally with him, she must invoke an ancient magic to keep him tethered to her side.
Meanwhile, in the divine workshop of the god of balance, Baz learns he has a role to play in the coming fight to save the crumbling worlds and their weakening magics. Yet all he can think of is Kai and the gruesome fate that awaits him at Clover’s side—a fate, the god tells him, that is beyond even his reach. But Baz is determined to save Kai, even if he has to rewrite time itself.
As chaos reigns and the tides of a corrupted magic threaten to consume all, Emory and Baz must contend with mercurial gods, vengeful deities, and those hell-bent on eradicating Eclipse magic to save the people they love—and write an ending to their stories that defies fate itself.
Check the author's website for trigger warnings
Year of the Mer by L. D. Lewis
Release Date: April 7, S&S/Saga Press.
Genre: Dark Fantasy
Ixia was once an idyllic nation, rich in its lore, its landscape shaped by the antics of adventurous and romantic old gods. But it has been transformed and modernized rapidly by war and the technology men wield is the new magic. Two generations after the union of a mermaid princess and a human prince, both kingdoms have paid heavy prices.
Yemaya Blackgate, their clever, angry granddaughter, is next in line to rule on land in a time when her kingdom’s people are questioning their continued need for a monarchy or a belief in the divine. Ennova Grey, Yemaya’s guardian and future wife struggles to be everything Yemaya needs when they are faced with a plot against the family and the looming death of the Queen. The sea witch Ursla, herself a discarded god, seems to lie in wait. When Yemi and Nova are forced into exile and Yemi chooses to seek out a deal with the sea witch, can their relationship survive the monster she is destined to become?
The Year of the Mer duology is a sapphic tragedy that examines generational trauma and identity in a shifting world. It asks what becomes of the beings we exalt and then discard? And does a sea witch ever truly bide her time?
Underlake by Erin L McCoy
Release date: April 21, Doubleday.
Genre: Sci Fi, Spec Fic
When a mother claims her missing daughter is alive beneath a lake in a flooded valley, a marine biologist descends into a hidden underwater settlement where those who refused to leave have built a sealed-off world--and where the consequences of that choice are beginning to surface.
Thirteen years ago, Otta escaped her small town, determined to become a marine biologist. Now she’s returned, carrying the guilt of a friend’s disappearance during a deep-sea dive and unsure she’ll ever be able to dive again. Then a stranger appears at her door.
This stranger, May, says that her daughter has run away, and insists that she’s under the nearby lake—alive.
To find the missing girl, Otta and May must travel deeper and deeper under the water, confronting webs of fear, control, and delusion borne of a rampant nostalgia for a purer world. Along the way, they will also push their bodies to the mortal limit.
