7 New Books to Watch for in April

Julia Alvarez’s first new novel in 14 years, an overview of conservative thought, “Notes From an Apocalypse” and more. It’s been 14 years since Alvarez, the author of “In the Time of the Butterflies,” “How the García Girls Lost Their Accents” and other books, published a new novel. Now she returns with the story of Antonia Vega, a retired professor mourning her husband and puzzling over the sudden disappearance of a sister who is “always in crisis. ” Antonia’s relationships, with her siblings and with an undocumented teenager she befriends, fuel the story.

This collection, an overview of 20th-century conservative thought, offers a variety of perspectives on the importance of free markets, the resistance to government expansion and other subjects. Selections include essays by Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley Jr. , Joan Didion and Reinhold Niebuhr.

“Taken collectively, these essays do not comprise anything approximating a seamless whole,” Andrew J. Bacevich writes in the introduction. “Conservatism is more akin to an ethos or a disposition than to a fixed ideology. So the thinkers featured in these pages frequently disagree with one another — much as do progressives, not to mention Marxists, socialists, fascists, anarchists, libertarians and distributists.

Intellectuals tend to be a quarrelsome lot. ” After the killings of the civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. , James Baldwin became a far more political writer, grappling with the legacy and reality of racism in the United States.

“In “Begin Again,” Glaude, the chair of the African-American Studies department at Princeton, explores the parallels between that period and our current moment, blending biography, memoir and cultural criticism.”

Mieko Kawakami, whose work deals with what is expected of women in patriarchal society, is one of Japan’s most acclaimed contemporary novelists. “Breasts and Eggs” won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize. It follows three women — Natsu, her sister and her niece — as they undergo a series of transformations. Natsu’s sister is consumed with a wish for breast implants, which alienates her from her teenage daughter, who is struggling with puberty.