Beach reads season may be waning, but there are still plenty of delights to distract you from the fact that the sun will soon be setting before 6 p.m. With the arrival of autumn comes a long awaited noir from Thomas Pynchon, newly discovered work by Harper Lee and a Nicholas Sparks x M. Night Shyamalan collaboration you didn’t know you needed. Also: butterfly-inducing romance, stomach-churning horror, edgy spy fiction, a new Dan Brown novel, historical epics and literary fiction that touches on everything from coming-of-age and the immigrant experience to marriage, friendship and X-Men.
ROMANCE
Sweet Heat
by Bolu Babalola
Babalola’s follow-up to 2022’s “Honey & Spice” brings back Kiki Banjo, now a 28-year-old podcaster and professional relationship guru, as she throws herself into maid of honor duty for her best friend’s wedding. The only problem: Her ex-boyfriend Malakai, an on-the-rise filmmaker, is the best man.
Morrow, Sept. 2
ROAD-TRIP NOVEL
Hot Wax
by M.L. Rio
Rio’s latest is a brooding highway thriller split in two: “A Side” follows Suzanne, the 10-year-old daughter of a rock star, as she witnesses a life-altering act of violence in 1989. “B Side” skips ahead 30 years as Suzanne road-trips across the country to pick up some of her late father’s possessions, her vindictive husband in pursuit.
Simon & Schuster, Sept. 9
conspiracy thriller
The Secret of Secrets
by Dan Brown
The latest entry in Brown’s Robert Langdon universe sends the symbology professor — made famous by “The Da Vinci Code” — on the hunt for his missing girlfriend, a scientist on the brink of publishing a controversial book about human consciousness.
Doubleday, Sept. 9
SPY NOVEL
Clown Town
by Mick Herron
In this darkly comic thriller — the ninth in Herron’s Slough House series — the MI5 deputy director-general Diana Taverner gets caught up in a blackmail scandal and assassination plot against a former member of Parliament, forcing Jackson Lamb and his misfit band of spies to step in and set things straight.
Soho Crime, Sept. 9
Fantasy
The Summer War
by Naomi Novik
Novik spins a coming-of-age tale of magic, forbidden love and political maneuvering in which Celia, a young witch, seeks to reunite two war-torn lands. To do so, she must enlist her eldest brother, whom she unwittingly cursed to a life of solitude.
Del Rey, Sept. 16
literary fiction
The Wilderness
by Angela Flournoy
Five Black women navigate early adulthood, marriage, motherhood and careers in New York and Los Angeles. Their 20-year friendship is narrated episodically, through different perspectives, as they grapple with the shifting world around them.
Mariner, Sept. 16
historical fiction
Circle of Days
by Ken Follett
Follett, the popular Welsh novelist, imagines the origins of Stonehenge in this sweeping 700-page novel, charting its conception and construction amid growing tensions and the threat of war.
Grand Central, Sept. 23
Mystery
The Killer Question
by Janice Hallett
This whodunit centers on a rural English pub and the locals who populate its Monday trivia night. As a team of outsiders begins to dominate the weekly game, cheating allegations rise to the surface — and so does a dead body in the nearby river.
Atria, Sept. 23
literary fiction
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
by Kiran Desai
Nearly two decades after her Booker Prize-winning novel, “The Inheritance of Loss,” Desai returns with an epic family saga about Sunny, a journalist in New York, and Sonia, an aspiring novelist in Vermont. The couple embark on what Desai called “an endlessly unresolved romance,” navigating competing forces of tradition and modernity, love and duty, East and West.
Hogarth, Sept. 23
dystopian fiction
What We Can Know
by Ian McEwan
In 2119, when a nuclear accident and climate change have reshaped society, a humanities professor becomes obsessed with a literary mystery: a famous poem — recited at a dinner party in 2014 — that has been lost. In a tale spanning multiple narrators and a full century, the professor chases down the poem’s origin, the dark secret that cast it into obscurity and the slippery nature of knowledge itself.
Knopf, Sept. 23
Literary fiction
Will There Ever Be Another You
by Patricia Lockwood
Lockwood’s novel, a fun-house mirror of sorts, follows a young writer who (like Lockwood herself) contracts a bizarre illness — presumably Covid-19 — that fogs her brain and conditions her relationships with her family, her husband and herself. “The soul is a floor,” she reflects as she picks up the pieces. “It is there to bear us up and keep us standing, not merely to be clean.”
Riverhead, Sept. 23
literary fiction
Your Name Here
by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff
A writer named Helen DeWitt cobbles together a novel peppered with references to Hunter S. Thompson, the X-Men and “Habermasian ideal speech situations” out of emails written by Ilya Gridneff. That’s the heady premise of this sprawling metatextual collaboration between DeWitt, the author of “The Last Samurai,” and Gridneff, a correspondent for The Financial Times.
Dalkey Archive Press, Sept. 23
Spy novel
The Persian
by David McCloskey
Taking the form of a forced confession, this thriller traces the rise and downfall of Kamran Esfahani, an Iranian Jew caught in the shadow war between Israel and Iran — and the secret he’s trying to take to his grave.
Norton, Sept. 30
literary fiction
Pick a Color
Souvankham Thammavongsa
In her 2020 story collection, “How to Pronounce Knife,” Thammavongsa, a Canadian Laotian poet and the daughter of refugees, sought to expand how the immigrant experience is portrayed in literature. Her novel does the same through the story of a retired boxer whose grinding job at a nail salon belies a rich and profound interior life.
Little, Brown, Sept. 30
literary fiction
What a Time to Be Alive
by Jade Chang
Lola Treasure Gold is teetering dangerously close to rock bottom — broke, unemployed, crashing in her childhood home — when a viral video skyrockets her to fame as, of all things, a self-help guru. She fumbles her way through her newfound influence, never quite sure if she’s a scammer or a savant.
Ecco, Sept. 30
literary fiction
Shadow Ticket
by Thomas Pynchon
Pynchon’s first book in more than a decade contains all the hallmarks of his personal canon, including espionage, paranoia and bumbling characters in over their heads. In this case, it’s Hicks McTaggart, a private eye tasked with tracking down a runaway Wisconsin cheese heiress. The assignment goes awry when he lands in Hungary alongside Nazis, Soviet spooks, British counterspies and a host of other chaos agents who are reshaping McTaggart’s mission — actually, the entire world order — in ways he never could have predicted.
Penguin Press, Oct. 7
SUPERNATURAL love story
Remain
by Nicholas Sparks with M. Night Shyamalan
Tate Donovan, rattled by his sister’s unsettling deathbed confession, is living on sunny Cape Cod when he meets Wren, a mysterious and alluring young woman who upends his life. (The film version, written and directed by Shyamalan and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, is slated for 2026.)
Random House, Oct. 14
historical fiction
The Wayfinder
by Adam Johnson
Johnson’s epic, set during the expansion of the Tu’i Tonga empire, immerses readers in a world of outrigger canoes and delicate ecosystems as it follows a young Tongan girl on a perilous seafaring expedition across Polynesia to save her island from starvation.
MCD, Oct. 14
Literary fiction
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye
by Claire-Louise Bennett
While adjusting to a new life in the countryside, a woman revisits memories of the people she left behind: an ex-lover, former professors and other acquaintances who have left indelible marks on her psyche. She probes these marks obsessively — a sort of intimacy post-mortem — trying to pin down the very essence of human connection.
Riverhead, Oct. 21
Horror
King Sorrow
by Joe Hill
Arthur Oakes and five friends make a Faustian bargain to get Arthur out of a miserable predicament by conjuring a dragon — the titular King Sorrow — who promises to devour Arthur’s tormentors by Easter. As decades pass, the friends must complete a new human sacrifice to King Sorrow every year, lest they become his next victims.
Morrow, Oct. 21
stories
The Land of Sweet Forever: Stories and Essays
by Harper Lee
This collection gathers stories that Lee stashed before she set off to work on “To Kill A Mockingbird.” Coupled with later essays, they offer a window into her fixation on the themes — small-town gossip, race relations and father-daughter relationships — that would become the hallmarks of her classic novel.
Harper, Oct. 21
LEGAL thriller
The Proving Ground
by Michael Connelly
Readers first met Mickey Haller, the defense attorney and half brother of the maverick L.A.P.D. detective Harry Bosch, in “The Lincoln Lawyer.” Here he files a lawsuit against a nefarious artificial intelligence company implicated in the murder of a teenager.
Little, Brown, Oct. 21
Literary fiction
This Is the Only Kingdom
by Jaquira Díaz
Díaz evokes the sweltering caseríos and hustle of life in Puerto Rico in this novel following Maricarmen, a waitress and housekeeper, and her daughter, Nena, as they grapple with the aftermath of a murder that took place years earlier.
Algonquin, Oct. 21
Western epic
Tom’s Crossing
by Mark Z. Danielewski
Set in small-town Utah in the 1980s, Danielewski’s eclectic 1,200-page adventure story follows two boys on their quest to save a pair of horses from the slaughterhouse.
Pantheon, Oct. 28
Family saga
Cursed Daughters
by Oyinkan Braithwaite
In this multigenerational saga, Eniiyi — like the long line of Nigerian women before her — finds herself caught between the desire for self-determination and the weight of superstition, namely, the family curse.
Doubleday, Nov. 4
Psychological thriller
Other People’s Fun
by Harriet Lane
Ruth’s daughter is moving out, her marriage is kaput and her career is sputtering. So when Sookie, a popular girl who spurned her in their teens, reaches out with an olive branch, a budding friendship forms. That is, until Ruth makes an unnerving discovery.
Little, Brown, Nov. 4
literary fiction
The White Hot
by Quiara Alegría Hudes
Overwhelmed by family friction, April Soto abandons her daughter and leaves Philadelphia in search of a spiritual self-awakening that nearly kills her. Her explanation, offered to her daughter 10 years later, propels this anguished and heartfelt epistolary novel.
One World, Nov. 11
Other novels out this fall
“Buckeye,” by Patrick Ryan; “Bog Queen,” by Anna North; “Minor Black Figures,” by Brandon Taylor; “Venetian Vespers,” by John Banville; “Girl Dinner,” by Olivie Blake; “The Unveiling,” by Quan Berry; “Vianne,” by Joanne Harris; “We Love You, Bunny,” by Mona Awad; “Boy From the North Country,” by Sam Sussman; “Palaver,” by Bryan Washington; “Alchemy of Secrets,” by Stephanie Garber; “One of Us,” by Dan Chaon; “Fiend,” by Alma Katsu
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