As the scent of pumpkin spice wafts our way, swap out those warped summer paperbacks for this season’s crisp offerings. There is plenty to leaf through this autumn, from genre-bending whodunits to the quiet meditation of a Danish time-loop septology. Historical dramas by Robert Harris and Ariel Lawhon reimagine the lives of the Roman Emperor Octavius and a 16th-century pirate queen, while Hernan Diaz and Emily St. John Mandel stake out dystopian futures. Other highly anticipated releases include novels by Barbara Kingsolver, Marlon James, Imbolo Mbue and Emma Cline, plus Min Jin Lee’s long-awaited return.
September
Literary Fiction
American Hagwon
by Min Jin Lee
Lee’s first novel since her best-selling “Pachinko” follows a family of five whose lives in Seoul are upended by the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which pushes them to seek their fortunes in Southern California.
Literary Fiction
The Disappearers
by Marlon James
The Booker Prize winner returns to his native Jamaica in this novel about a 1980s anti-L.G.B.T.Q. hate crime and the way a group of gay men — virtual strangers to each other until the attack — are left wrestling with its aftermath.
Dystopian Fiction
Exit Party
by Emily St. John Mandel
St. John Mandel imagines a battered Los Angeles shortly after the dissolution of the United States in 2031. It follows Ari, an art collector and state operative, as she investigates a man’s disappearance.
Literary Fiction
Hollywood, Ending
by John Green
Green’s first novel since “Turtles All the Way Down” marks his continued shift away from young adult fiction, as he weaves the tale of two young actors navigating early superstardom, where their increasingly public lives complicates their blossoming love.
thriller
The French Illusion
by John Grisham
The kidnapping of a couple honeymooning in the French countryside — the latest in a string of similar crimes — spirals into a dizzying cross-border investigation.
Fantasy
Dead Beat
by Leigh Bardugo
Bardugo’s Ninth House trilogy finally comes to a close. Having rescued her mentor from hell, the clairvoyant Yale student Alex Stern and her allies must now keep the underworld from waging all-out war on her New Haven campus.
Horror
Mazywood
by Tananarive Due
The trailblazing Black horror author sets her latest in golden-age Hollywood and the mountains outside of modern-day Los Angeles. In his actress grandmother’s alpine cabin, a filmmaker and his family finds themselves haunted, somewhat literally, by her legacy.
Mystery
Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel
by Lucy Foley
Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s famous spinster detective, is drawn to a murder at a luxury hotel in the Swiss Alps in Foley’s reboot of an all-time great mystery series.
Historical Fiction
The Pirate Queen
by Ariel Lawhon
Lawhon fictionalizes the life of Grace O’Malley, the genteel daughter of an Irish chieftain turned “pirate queen” who bucked both the patriarchy and the English monarchy.
Dystopian Fiction
Ply
by Hernan Diaz
In his third novel, Diaz trades in the historical setting of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Trust” for a dystopian future in which an orphan who siphons off and sells electricity to scrape by makes a potentially epochal scientific breakthrough.
Literary Fiction
The Radiance
by Ayad Akhtar
A hit-and-run on a country road sets in motion a dizzying sequence of events in this campus novel turned whodunit. As a writer attempts to recover after the accident, academic infighting, erotic obsession and family secrets all threaten the reality he once knew.
Literary Fiction
Switzy
by Emma Cline
A retired executive takes one last journey, visiting family and friends around the world before he’s scheduled to die in Zurich. As his mind begins to fail him, he returns to the comforts — and regrets — of a past that’s now more vivid than his present.
coming-of-age Novel
Taipei Story
by R.F. Kuang
Kuang follows up “Katabasis” with an autobiographical novel about a Chinese American college student who is devastated after learning of her grandfather’s death while summering abroad in Taipei.
literary fiction
We Never Called It Frisco
by Jed Perl
After the famed art critic Marcia Lang unexpectedly dies, her entire estate goes to her on-again-off-again lover, Burt. Among this inheritance is Marcia’s incomplete memoir, a definitive account of the postwar San Francisco intelligentsia, which Burt sets out to finish in her honor.
October
fiction
The Brightness
by Chad Harbach
Fifteen years after popping one into the bleachers with his best-selling debut, “The Art of Fielding,” Harbach returns with a sophomore effort that finds two Midwestern best friends reckoning with the messy realities of young adulthood.
Literary Fiction
Every Story is a Love Story
by Imbolo Mbue
Wolo’s life is upended when his pregnant wife dies in a car accident. Three years later, he finds unexpected solace in sharing his heartbreak with an unlikely companion: the driver who killed her.
Historical Fiction
The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford
by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
In 1920s Oklahoma, just as the Great Depression is about to crash down on an already struggling small town, an infamous moonshiner is killed. But what starts as a simple whodunit quickly morphs into an often humorous probe into the very nature of truth.
Historical fiction
Music Against the Night
by Yiyun Li
Spanning two centuries and multiple empires, this Künstlerroman follows two piano prodigies as they chase their ambitions, survive the cutthroat world of classical music and, eventually, fall in love with each other.
thriller
Mystery Play
by Elizabeth Kostova
After Jay Turner inherits a medieval book — originally owned by Vlad Țepeș or, as you probably know him, Dracula — he finds himself being hunted by dark forces.
Historical Fiction
Queen of Lombard Street
by Lisa Kleypas
In Victorian England, a pioneering economist sets out to open the first-ever bank for women. But as if breaking glass ceilings in the financial sector isn’t hard enough, she’s soon swept up in a corruption case that threatens to destabilize the entire British economy.
Horror
Other Worlds Than These
by Stephen King and Peter Straub
The long-awaited finale to King and Straub’s Talisman trilogy finds Jack Sawyer still straddling two parallel worlds torn by strife. But these days, his company is dwindling — and the stakes are higher than ever.
Literary fiction
Partita
by Barbara Kingsolver
One woman’s modest but comfortable life in her rural hometown is turned upside down when an old lover unexpectedly reaches out. As she weighs whether or not to reunite with him, she must face painful memories from her childhood and from the years she spent as an obsessive music conservatory student.
Science Fiction
Victorious
by V.E. Schwab
The last installment of Schwab’s Villains series brings the final showdown between Victor and Eli, arch nemeses with extraordinary powers and an unquenchable thirst for revenge. But it seems that there’s an unexpected enemy pulling the strings behind their confrontation.
Fiction
Peck & Peck
by Bonnie Garmus
Garmus follows up her smash hit “Lessons in Chemistry” by turning from Los Angeles in the 1960s to New York in the 1980s, where a troubled young man eagerly joins the staff of the most celebrated — and chaotic — poetry journal of his day.
Gothic Fiction
Rottenheart
by Kat Dunn
The more-than-platonic love between two childhood friends, Odette and Cecilia, is tested when Odette’s mother suddenly dies. In this creative adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” love, grief, madness, family secrets and a vengeful ghost collide in a tale that is part romance, part gothic horror.
Literary fiction
The Red Dress
by Frank Huyler
A yacht captain and his 7-year-old daughter relocate to a private island to work for an ultrarich family. It’s almost a paid vacation, but it comes with a catch: They must wear high-tech glasses that obscure their employers’ identities.
Crime Novel
Truth to Power
by S.A. Cosby
In the latest installment of Cosby’s Luke Cage Marvel Crime series, Cage is hired to investigate a factory manufacturing medical devices in rural Virginia — a seemingly routine assignment that turns sinister when his cousin, who scouted the plant for him, is found dead.
Dystopian Fiction
The Sixth Faction
by Veronica Roth
Roth’s latest novel, set in the world of her Divergent series, follows Beatrice Prior, a young woman who makes the life-threatening decision to leave her family and their “faction” of Abnegation — one of five existing societies — to join the bold world of Dauntless.
thriller
Unspeakable Things
by Elizabeth Hand
Set in the English countryside during the 1920s, Hand’s novel follows two young women, Tamsin and Olivia, whose clandestine romance is abruptly interrupted when an unexpected visitor and a sudden death forces them on the run.
Romance
Dina Gets Lucky
by Uzma Jalaluddin
Dina, a Toronto-based lawyer, is secretly reeling from a broken marriage when she arrives at her sister’s wedding. Suddenly, a second chance at love emerges when she encounters Luqman “Lucky” Latif, her law school crush, who spurned her six years prior — or did he?
November
speculative fiction
On the Calculation of Volume, Book V
by Solvej Balle; translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell
Balle’s septology continues apace: Tara Selter is still living the same November day with a group of fellow time-trapped individuals. Not much seems to have changed — that is, except for their shifting relationship to their routines, to each other and, ultimately, to themselves.
Romance
Peculiar Stars
by Rebecca Yarros
Yarros, the author of the Empyrean romantasy series, offers a castaway romance following Callista, whose life is upended after a cyclone strands her on a deserted island with her fiancé’s cousin, an ex–army medic, and forces her to make a pivotal life decision.
Literary fiction
Stations
by Louise Kennedy
As two disaffected teens in 1980s Ireland, Róisín and Red bond fiercely over their tenuous relationship to home and their decision to start a new life in London. As years pass, they drift apart and Róisín can’t quite stop yearning for Red, even as his life takes a disturbing turn.
December
SPY NOVEL
The Swiss Agent
by Anna Pitoniak
In Pitoniak’s latest espionage thriller, Amanda Cole, CIA station chief in Rome, recruits Kath Frost, a semiretired intelligence savant, to help her unravel a web of corruption involving the Kremlin after a body washes up onshore in Capri. The only problem: Kath herself may be compromised.
Romance
Villain Edit
by Rosie Danan
Gabriel Hargrave, a vampire prince, is on a sensitive diplomatic assignment in a SoCal retirement community. Though he is meant to lay low, the TV producer next door offers him an irresistible opportunity: to become the first supernatural lead of a popular dating show.
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