Spring at last... Read on to bring some sunshine into your reading life with exciting pre-publication extracts to download, our favourite eBooks of the Month and an easy way you can help an author you might know...

Start reading books published next month!

Get ahead of the game by starting to read some great May books - before they are published. Some of them have also been reviewed by our Reader Review panel. So find out what they thought of them, along with our own Lovereading experts.

Fundamental Film and Fiction

The acclaimed novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, centring on the life of a young Pakistani professor pre and post 9/11, has been made into a film due for release in the UK on 10 May. Also worth a look is interesting debut The Taliban Cricket Club by Timeri Murari, a page-turner that's full of hope and tenderness and shows that love can overcome and outwit those that reign terror over a country. Sarah Broadhurst said of the book 'It starts off pretty dark, strong and grim, but finishes light, compulsive and highly satisfactory. I loved it'.

Free to enter Book Prize Draws not to miss

This month, as always, we have some amazing free to enter Prize Draws to win armfuls of book goodies. Signed CD's from Bryan Ferry that inspired the soundtrack to The Great Gatsby Film, 25^th anniversary editions of the life-changing Alchemist by Paulo Coelho and books from star authors Jodi Picoult and Charles Cumming. Visit the Free Prize Draws category to see, and enter, them all.

Interacting April! ... eBooks of the Month

Our aim, with offering so many eBook formats is to make buying them as easy as ABC. See? We have thousands of eBooks on the website but this month we especially love....

Great Scott! - F. Scott Fitzgerald

With the movie release of Baz Luhrmann's adaption of The Great Gatsby, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and opening Cannes this year, we've decided to make a feature of the classic writing of the literary giant F. Scott Fitzgerald with these stunning new editions from Alma Classics; featuring Art-Deco illustrations, pictures and a wealth of extra material. Alessandro Gallenzi, Managing Director of Alma Classics, said of these books 'They are a publisher's and a fan's tribute to one of the greatest masters of world literature.' We're also giving you the chance to win one of 3 sets of the Alma Classics editions together with a DVD of the TV adaptation of The Great Gatsby and some signed CD's of Bryan Ferry's album The Jazz Age ... so visit the special category today.

Delightfully delicious, unmissable Debuts

Two debuts have really caught our eye this month and we really don't want you to miss them, both of them have been loved by our Reader Review panel as well. The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion is an absolute gem of a book that weirdly sits somewhere between One Day by David Nicholls and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time from Mark Haddon. A review panel member said 'What a brilliant book... Please read it, he [the protagonist] will change your life'. A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea by Dina Nayeri describes the spellbinding story of an Iranian girl who is separated from her mother and twin sister during the turmoil following the revolution. One of our panel members said 'Great story, extremely memorable...I couldn't put it down till the end and will definitely be recommending it to others.'

If You Like You'll love

Discover great reads from new authors. Fans of John le Carré should definitely check out Charles Cumming and his latest book A Foreign Country. His complex, realistic spy thrillers are rewarding reads and we have a competition to win a set of his earlier spy novels. Rosamunde Pilcher is a genre-defining author and we think her fans will love the author Liz Fenwick with her Cornwall inspired books. The Cornish House is out now and her second, A Cornish Affair, is out at the end of May - and we have an exclusive extract you can read today.  

Help an Author Make Better Social Introductions

At Lovereading we love authors most of all, as they create the brilliant books that we get to tell all of you book lovers about. So, to help them share more of their thoughts with their readers we have built a uniquely useful new system that shows their latest Facebook posts and Tweets on their Lovereading author and book pages. But we can only show the posts and tweets if we have the correct information - So, why not help any authors you know, or follow, by checking their author page on Lovereading to see whether the Facebook posts and Tweets are appearing. There are handy buttons to let the author know what is missing and what you can do about it - simples.

Before we sign off for April, lovers of a great Romantic Read shouldn't miss this year's best reads as judged by the Romantic Novelists' Association. We have all the individual category winners in our Book Awards section and the overall winner will be crowned at a special Summer Party in May. P.S. Don't miss More Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops by Jen Campbell - yet more tales from the antiquarian bookshop where Jen works, and includes a selection of 'Weird Things...' sent in from other booksellers across the world. It is full of laugh-out-loud anecdotes.