We’re celebrating the best books of April with special guest Julia Alvarez.

Today’s podcast marks seven years—and 366 episodes—of Fully Booked. In celebration of this exciting milestone, we’ve got something special in store for the first podcast of April 2024: It’s our first Best Books of the Month episode, highlighting our editors’ top picks from among the hundreds of book recommendations in a given month.

Going forward, the first podcast of every month will be a Best Books episode, featuring special reading recommendations and a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what goes into making Kirkus’ book lists. At the top of this week’s episode, editors Laura Simeon, Mahnaz Dar, and Laurie Muchnick share their top picks in books for April. We also discuss our approach to ensuring that Kirkus’ monthly book lists feature something for every reader.

Then Julia Alvarez joins me to discuss one of the best books of April: The Cemetery of Untold Stories (Algonquin, April 2). Alvarez has built a career telling varied, vivid stories of the Dominican American experience. She is the author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and In the Time of Butterflies(1994), among many others; I had the pleasure of speaking with her about her exquisite novel Afterlife for a print feature in 2020.

The Cemetery of Untold Stories is about a novelist and professor named Alma Cruz. On the cusp of retirement, she inherits a property in her family’s homeland, the Dominican Republic, and uses it to build a cemetery for all her unfinished stories. “As those separate plots touch and interweave,” Kirkus writes in a starred review, “a rich and moving saga of Dominican history emerges, embodied in the lives of irresistible characters. Alvarez returns to many of her familiar subjects: family and especially the relationships among sisters, immigrants’ experiences, the empowerment of women. Her gifts for glowing prose and powerful narrative are still strong. Buried stories find their way to the light in this finely crafted novel.”

Alvarez and I begin with what’s going on with Alma Cruz at the beginning of The Cemetery of Untold Stories. We then ponder whether it is greater to be the storyteller or the listener. We talk about the questions authors receive from readers—the more-of-a-comment questions, the truly outlandish—and how varied reactions to one’s writing can be; the careful interweaving of stories to build up a narrative; the popularity of advice columns, and how we love to hear about the extremities of human experience; and how, in a small community, these stories are playing out right under one’s nose. Alvarez describes the cemetery Alma commissions and discloses whether she expresses herself in other artistic mediums. We discuss the surprising impact of sudden illness or injury on creative people, the fun of playing with idiom in multiple languages, and her relationship with longtime publisher Algonquin.

BEST BOOKS OF APRIL 2024:

Just Another Story: A Graphic Migration Account by Ernesto Saade (Graphic Universe)

Terrible Horses by Raymond Antrobus, illus. by Ken Wilson-Max (Candlewick)

Real Americans by Rachel Khong (Knopf)

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS:

Desperate Endeavor by G.W. Olson

Frame Story by Domenic Migliore

The Reluctant Conductor by Tim Turner & Moisey Gorbaty

Finally Quiet: Four Plays From Bucharest to Washington, D.C. by Cristina A. Bejan

The Kitchen and the Studio by Mallory M. & John A. O’Connor

Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.