I recently returned to the Metropolitan Opera to see The Hours, based on Michael Cunningham’s novel. It was wonderful to be back in the glittering hall, after three long pandemic years, listening to Renee Fleming, Joyce DiDonato, and Kelli O’Hara bring Virginia Woolf and Cunningham’s other characters to life. That experience sent me looking for novels about music, and I was thrilled to see that Brendan Slocumb has a new one coming out only a year after his bestselling debut, The Violin Conspiracy. In Symphony of Secrets (Anchor, April 18), Bern Hendricks, a musicology professor, is asked to authenticate the manuscript of a long-lost opera by Frederick Delaney, the composer he’s devoted his career to studying. But when he delves into the score, he discovers that Delaney, who was White, may have been working with a Black woman named Josephine Reed, who wrote jazz as well as classical music.

Delaney’s descendants, of course, are not happy. Our starred review says Slocumb seems to be “having much more fun” with this novel than with The Violin Conspiracy, “writing with a refreshing looseness and well-earned confidence. This is a superb novel that will appeal to any thriller fan, not just readers with an ear for classical music.” The kicker: “Sophomore novels don’t get much better than this.”

There’s so much other promising fiction out this month. I’m excited to read The Wishing Pool and Other Stories by Tananarive Due (Akashic, April 18)—but I might have to wait for a sunny day at the beach, since our starred review says these stories “might scare even the most dauntless horror fans to death.” Due’s book nods to Octavia Butler, Stephen King, and even The Twilight Zone, according to our reviewer, who says that Due’s “command of the Black horror aesthetic rivals Jordan Peele’s in originality and sheer bravado.” 

Korean novelist Han Kang is best known for The Vegetarian; her latest book, Greek Lessons, translated by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won (Hogarth, April 18), made me think of José Saramago’s brilliant 1998 novel, Blindness. Here, the unnamed protagonist is teaching a literature class when she suddenly finds herself unable to speak, lacking all language. She begins taking a class in ancient Greek, hoping it will help; her teacher, whose story we also learn, has slowly been losing his eyesight for decades. “A stunning exploration of language, memory, and beauty,” says our starred review.

A.B. Yehoshua died last year, but he left behind an unusual novel, The Only Daughter, translated by Stuart Schoffman (HarperVia, April 11), set in northern Italy rather than his native Israel. Like Han’s protagonist, 12-year-old Rachele Luzzatto is taking language lessons, hers in Hebrew with a rabbi her parents imported for the purpose. As her bat mitzvah approaches and she’s asked to play the Virgin Mary in a school play, she grapples with her identity as a Jewish girl with Catholic grandparents—her mother converted—in a country where her Jewish grandfather had to disguise himself as a priest to survive WWII. Our starred review calls this “a wise, masterfully understated work by one of Israel’s towering literary figures.”

The narrator of Joe Milan Jr.’s The All-American (Norton, April 4) is also a teenager struggling with his identity and language. Bucky’s parents were born in South Korea, but his mother is dead, and his father deserted him and his White stepmother in rural Washington state, where Bucky is one of only three Asian Americans in his school. Then it turns out that Bucky’s father bungled his immigration paperwork, and Bucky finds himself deported to South Korea, a country where he’s never been and doesn’t speak the language. “It’s dark stuff,” says our starred review, “but Milan sustains in his narrator an amusingly bewildered, blundering, bumptious voice along with a leavening sense of absurdity [with] echoes of Heller’s Yossarian.”

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.