From a tale of love and revenge spanning six continents to a Star Wars visual encyclopedia, the books hitting shelves this month hail from a diverse group of genres. We’ve rounded up the 12 books we’re most excited to read, including six novels, four nonfiction titles, a short story collection and a poetry anthology.
Check out our picks below, then leave a comment describing the books you’re dying to read this month!
1. Poems That Make Grown Men Cry by Anthony Holden & Ben Holden
Release Date: April 1st from Simon & Schuster
Why You’ll Love It: Whether you eat, sleep and breathe poetry or you haven’t read a sonnet since high school, you’ll adore this collection. Curl up in an armchair and discover 100 eclectic poems that make the likes of James Earl Jones and Patrick Stewart weep.
Description Grown men don’t cry. But in this fascinating anthology, 100 men—distinguished in literature and film, science and architecture, theater and human rights—confess to being moved to tears by poems that continue to haunt them. Representing 20 nationalities and ranging in age from their early 20s to their late 80s, the majority are public figures not prone to crying. Here they admit to breaking down when ambushed by great art, often in words as powerful as the poems themselves.
From J.J. Abrams to John le Carré, Salman Rushdie to Jonathan Franzen, Daniel Radcliffe to Nick Cave, Billy Collins to Stephen Fry, Stanley Tucci to Colin Firth, this collection delivers private insight into the souls of men whose writing, acting and thinking are admired around the world.
2. American Warlord: A True Story by Johnny Dwyer
Release Date: April 7 from Knopf
Why You’ll Love it: American Warlord doesn’t promise to be a light read—in fact, it’s anything but. This well-reported book chronicles the tale of Chucky Taylor, a child torn between the U.S. and Liberia by his ruthless father. The journey leads to horrific accounts of torture—and tells a powerful tale about the dark side of power.
Description: Chucky Taylor is the American son of the infamous African dictator Charles Taylor. Raised by his mother in the Florida suburbs, at the age of 17 he followed his father to Liberia, where he ended up leading a murderous militia. Chucky is now in a federal penitentiary, the only American ever convicted of torture. This shocking and essential work of reportage tells his tragic and terrifying story for the first time.
3. The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly by Matt McCarthy
Release Date: April 7 from Crown Publishing
Why You’ll Love it: Ever wanted to experience the insanity of becoming a doctor—from a safe distance without drowning beneath mounds of student loans? The pick up Matt McCarthy’s memoir following his journey from med school to the examination room. For starry-eyed med students, McCarthy’s book is worth a read for the harsh—and sometimes glorious—realities alone.
Description: This funny, candid memoir of McCarthy’s intern year at a New York hospital provides a scorchingly frank look at how doctors are made, taking readers into patients’ rooms and doctors’ conferences to witness a physician’s journey from ineptitude to competence. McCarthy’s one stroke of luck paired him with a brilliant second-year adviser he called “Baio” (owing to his resemblance to the Charles in Charge star), who proved to be a remarkable teacher with a wicked sense of humor. McCarthy would learn even more from the people he cared for, including a man named Benny, who was living in the hospital for months at a time awaiting a heart transplant. But no teacher could help McCarthy when an accident put his own health at risk, and showed him all too painfully the thin line between doctor and patient.
4. Blood on Snow by Jo Nesbø
Release Date: April 7th from Knopf
Why You’ll Love It: This beautifully intense novel from Norwegian author Jo Nesbø will tear your heart into a million, tiny pieces. But believe us, it’s worth it.
Description This is the story of Olav: an extremely talented “fixer” for one of Oslo’s most powerful crime bosses. But Olav is also an unusually complicated fixer. He has a capacity for love that is as far-reaching as is his gift for murder. He is our straightforward, calm-in-the-face-of-crisis narrator with a storyteller’s hypnotic knack for fantasy. He has an “innate talent for subordination,” but running through his veins is a “virus” born of the power over life and death. And while his latest job puts him at the pinnacle of his trade, it may be mutating into his greatest mistake.
5. House of Echoes by Brendan Duffy
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9. The Affinities by Robert Charles Wilson
10. Lords of the Sith by Paul S. Kemp 
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