Tantalizing Tales — April 2026 — Part Four

April is almost over, dear readers, and we have so many delicious books to look forward to as the weather warms here in the Northern Hemisphere! First up is a globe-trotting delight, as the prolific Jesse Q Sutanto takes a break from her usual mysteries to explore what it feels like to start over again in your sixties.

The title protagonist of Ms Mebel Goes Back To The Chopping Block is looking forward to her husband’s retirement. Now they can spend their happy golden years lazing on the beaches of Santorini, or careening down the sand dunes of Dubai if they’re looking for something a little more exciting. All her plans are thrown into disarray, however, when her husband tells her that he’s leaving her for their personal chef.

Despite her dismay — good personal chefs are hard to find! — Mebel has a plan to win her husband back. If he wants a wife who can cook, then she can learn how to do that. She enrolls herself in what she thinks is a cooking school located in Paris, the most romantic city in the world. Unfortunately for her, she’s actually booked herself into a program located in a small village outside of Oxford. A further disappointment is the less than warm welcome she receives from several of her much younger classmates.

Mebel, however, hasn’t gotten as far as she has in life on looks alone. She befriends Gemma, the breakout star of the program, and slowly begins to learn not only how to cook, but how to imagine a life as more than just a pampered wife whose only aim is to accommodate her successful husband. Maybe, just maybe, Mebel can learn to be a success in her own right, too.

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Next up is a powerful compilation of testimonies collected by Francesca Albanese, the first woman to serve as United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Translated from the original Italian by Gregory Conti, When The World Sleeps: Stories, Words And Wounds Of Palestine raises critical questions regarding the past, present and future of the currently beleaguered Palestine.

Ms Albanese gained fame worldwide for being a staunch critic of Israel’s apartheid policies in Gaza and the West Bank, particularly in the wake of October 7 2023 and Israel’s retaliatory war. As a renowned Italian jurist, she has been unwavering in her defense of human rights and in depicting the truth of the genocidal actions against Palestinians.

In this volume, she pays tribute to ten people “whose profoundly affecting stories opened her eyes, from Hind Rajab, a young Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces, to the remarkable Jewish scholars who acted as Albanese’s mentors: forensic architect Eyal Weizman, trauma expert Gabor Maté, and Holocaust historian Alon Confino.” She also reflects in these pages on her years living in Jerusalem, and on her own personal and professional journey to understanding the plight and struggle of the Palestinian people, while making sure to highlight their resilience and humanity.

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Our second non-fiction selection this week is Mary Cain’s This Is Not About Running, a brutally honest memoir about the hidden cost of modern elite sports by one of the fastest runners of her generation, one of the few women who could run 800 meters in under two minutes.

At the age of 12, Mary Cain emerged as a running phenom who soon had the athletic world taking note of her talents. Only five years later, she would become the youngest athlete to represent the United States of America at the Track and Field World Championships. As a pre-teen, she was a straight-A student obsessed with Greco-Roman myths. Running fast felt like freedom, a feeling that almost made putting up with the punishing training sessions and bullying from her coaches and teammates seem worthwhile.

When (the now-disgraced) Antonio Salazar invited her to join the famed Nike Oregon Project when she was just 16, she was overjoyed. Coach Salazar assured her that she was poised to transform the sport, so long as she did exactly what he told her to. Eager to stay in his good graces, she did as he ordered, losing weight to get to the 114 lbs she was told she needed to be (at 5’7″!!!) and pushing through injury and pain. Soon, she was outperforming older, more established runners and setting records. The Olympics were in her sights.

But off the track, she was crumbling, sneaking granola bars at midnight and falling into a depression at her seemingly endless string of injuries. Telling herself that she just needed a break, she left the Oregon Project. Soon tho, people were asking, “Whatever happened to Mary Cain?”

Now that her lawsuit against Nike is behind her, she’s finally ready to answer that question with this book, drawing from her personal diaries during that time. She brings a much-needed spotlight to the damage done by the “win at all costs” culture that has pervaded youth sports in recent years, and presents an impassioned plea for prioritizing mental health, and not just in teenagers and athletes.

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I wish I’d been able to squeeze Travis Mulhauser’s latest novel Fair Chase into my regular review schedule, especially as I really enjoyed its predecessor, The Trouble Up North. This sequel finds Lucy, Buckner and Jewell Sawbrook united once again against seemingly overwhelming forces, as they seek to protect their land, a wolf and the teenage boy who claims to have an uncanny connection with it.

Grey wolves haven’t been seen in Michigan’s lower peninsula in over a century. When one apparently settles on the Sawbrook’s vast acreage, their community is up in arms following attacks on local livestock. Everyone has an opinion, as the grey wolf’s emergence raises concerns regarding safety, as well as local business and development.

The Sawbrooks welcome the return of the endangered species, viewing it as a victory in their battle to preserve the natural wildlife of northern Michigan. They’re prepared to stand their ground against the state officials who want the creature moved, and the farmers and land developers who want it killed outright. But when a fourteen year-old named Delos Harris shows up on their land, claiming not only to be a second cousin of theirs but to know the exact location of the wolf, the Sawbrooks find themselves plunged into a desperate battle to protect not only their visitors but also each other from a poacher hired to permanently solve this “problem.”

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Looking forward to May, we have a work of historical fiction about the final days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Mark Frost’s The Yankee Sphinx. The co-creator of Twin Peaks has drawn from his own family history, including the diaries of the real Will Hassett himself, to write this engaging, elegant tale.

In 1934, Will Hassett is a journalist who receives an unexpected phone call from a friend who’s started working at the White House. Will shows up expecting to catch up with an old buddy. Instead, he’s ushered straight into the Oval Office for a meeting with the president. FDR offers Will a job helping to write his speeches, a position that Will accepts on the spot. And for the next twelve years — through the Depression, three reelection campaigns and World War II — Will stays by FDR’s side, helping him shape the words necessary to persuasively communicate to the public at home and abroad what the office of the President must do for the greater good.

Perhaps nowhere is this more crucial than with the onset of WWII. With war raging in Europe, FDR’s good friend Winston Churchill begs for American aid. But America isn’t ready… at least not until the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Soon, FDR is managing the war effort on multiple fronts while parrying shots from isolationist politicians at home, even as his health goes into decline. Will and FDR’s daughter Anna will have to plot an intervention involving a new-fangled branch of medicine called cardiology in order to help keep the president strong enough to see through the war.

Told from Will’s empathetic perspective, this is a valuable look at life in wartime Washington DC, back when we had responsible and competent people in the White House.

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Finally, we have Portia Elan’s debut novel Homebound, a dazzling speculative fiction adventure that follows a lonely teenager, a brilliant biologist, a flinty sea captain and a sentient automaton across six centuries, as they each go in search of the things that hold us together even when we feel like the world is falling apart.

Nineteen year-old Becks cannot wait to get the hell out of Cincinnati. Her uncle, the only person who even came close to understanding her, is dead. While she’s half in denial about his passing, she’s also determined to carry on the legacy that he left for her, in the form of a half-finished game on a floppy disk. Little does she know that her choices here in 1983 will echo down the centuries, resonating through time in ways that she could never have imagined, as her life and the lives of four others searching for love and connection are bound together by a time traveler on a mysterious mission.

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All of these books are available for pre-order now, so let me know if you’re able to get to them before I do, dear readers! I’d love to hear your opinions, and see if that will spur me to push any of them higher up the mountain range that is my To Be Read pile.

And, as always, you can check out the list of my favorite books in my Bookshop storefront linked below!