What Book Clubs Are Reading in April

This month, Emma Roberts and Karah Preiss invite their club members to explore the role of technology in shaping human connection. In a book that Booklist calls “provocative, challenging, and concerning,” Pulitzer finalist Vauhini Vara unpacks how tech companies have both fulfilled and exploited our desire for understanding and belonging. Sign up today at Tertulia.com/Belletrist to have each monthly Belletrist book pick delivered to your mailbox, along with an intimate author conversation at the end of the month.

Family, fame, and ambition take center stage in The New York Times Book Review’s latest pick, a “dark, off-kilter bildungsroman” set in 1980s New York. The story follows “one overextended teenager trying to figure himself out while being failed, continually, by every adult around him.”

This April, Dakota Johnson’s pick for the TeaTime Book Club is the latest novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Karen Russell. The club describes it as “a gripping Dust Bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town” and promises, “You’ll never forget this book.”

Natalie Portman’s April selection is a deep dive into the rise of modern autocracies. Written by a leading voice on democracy, this urgent book reveals how authoritarian regimes work together to destabilize the democratic world. Portman calls it “a guide to understanding where autocracies come from, why they persist, and how the democratic world can defeat them.”

The Handmaid's Tale meets Minority Report in Roxane Gay’s April book club pick. Recently nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, this mind-bending novel follows a woman who arrives at LAX—only to be detained by agents due to a chilling prediction: a dream-surveillance algorithm has flagged her as a future threat to her husband. Confined to a retention center for "observation," she finds herself among other women imprisoned by their own dreams.

A gripping literary thriller takes the spotlight as Jenna Bush Hager’s April pick. “You will open this book and you will not stop reading,” she warns. When an experienced hiker vanishes in the Maine wilderness, a determined game warden and an unlikely armchair detective follow a trail of unsettling clues—was it a tragic accident or something far more sinister?

This month, Reese’s Book Club pick takes readers to England, where a young American woman navigates class, lies, and love amid London's jet-set elite. “All That Life Can Afford is about love, ambition, and the cost of belonging, and I cannot stop thinking about it,” says Reese Witherspoon.

Dua Lipa's latest pick is a novella about a grieving father and his sons who are visited by a mischievous crow that upends their world. “Max Porter ripped up the rule book of what a novel should do and instead presents us with something so wild, so mind-bending, and just so beautiful,” says Dua Lipa.

Each month, Columbia’s Jeffrey Sachs interviews leading authors on history, justice, and development. This month, historian Lauren Benton joins the eminent economist and political scholar to discuss how European empires from 1400 to 1900 used so-called "small wars"—border skirmishes and peacekeeping operations—to justify violence and maintain control, as explored in her groundbreaking history of imperial warfare.

For April, Kathryn Budig, writer and founder of The Inky Phoenix—a book club and Bindery Books imprint for lovers of story, magic, and transformation—has selected the latest nail-biter from the award-winning author NPR dubbed the "horror master." This chilling tale follows teenage girls at a secretive home for unwed mothers in 1970s Florida who discover a mysterious witchcraft book. "I’ve always loved Grady’s satirical spin on the horror genre," says Budig. "When I heard his latest was about witches, I was immediately sold."