Literary fiction
Partita
by Barbara Kingsolver
Four years after the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Demon Copperhead,” Kingsolver returns with the heartfelt story of how one woman’s modest but comfortable life is turned upside down when an old lover unexpectedly reaches out. As she weighs whether or not to reunite with him, she faces painful memories from her childhood and from the years she spent as an obsessive music conservatory student.
Harper, Oct. 6
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: Victoria, the driver who killed her. Their meeting sparks a reckoning about life, love and how to move on without letting the past die.
Random House, Oct. 6
Science fiction
Victorious
by V.E. Schwab
The final volume in Schwab’s Villains trilogy brings the long-running rivalry between Eli Ever and Victor Vale — nerdy best friends turned bitter archrivals armed with superpowers and an unhealthy appetite for vengeance — to its explosive conclusion.
Tor, Oct. 6
Experimental fiction
The Occidental Book of the Dead
by T. Geronimo Johnson
It’s almost impossible to describe Johnson’s latest book, a 672-page puzzle of a novel that keeps changing form while unpacking urgent social issues. At the center of the story is George Washington Jonson, a Black police officer who is involved in a tragic incident that leaves a white teenager dead. The aftermath of that event leads to a deeper conspiracy within the police department. Then the book shifts, forcing readers to rethink everything they’ve been told so far.
Morrow, Oct. 6
Romance
Bad Words
by Rioghnach Robinson
Robinson’s enemies-to-lovers rom-com follows Parker, a struggling author whose debut novel was torched by a bad review, and Selina, the critic who panned his work. When their confrontation over Selina’s equally scathing assessment of Parker’s second novel goes viral, the pair find themselves sucked into a very public rivalry — even as they realize they may not despise each other after all.
St. Martin’s, Oct. 6
Memoir
Death of an Ordinary Man
by Sarah Perry
Perry, an English novelist, chronicles the final days of her beloved father-in-law, David, who died of esophageal cancer in 2022. Poignant observations on David’s character are interwoven with broader reflections on mortality, and an intimate accounting of what the end of life looks like.
Mariner, Oct. 6
Technology
The AGI Chronicles
by Kevin Roose
Roose, a technology columnist at The New York Times, interviewed more than 150 insiders at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind for this look into the race to reach the next frontier of artificial intelligence: a system that can outdo humans at nearly anything.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Oct. 6
Memoir
Will and Attention
by Meghan O’Gieblyn
More than a decade after she got sober, and years after she left the fundamentalist faith in which she was raised, O’Gieblyn, a noted essayist and critic, began drinking in secret, attending Mass and speaking to a priest about converting to Catholicism. “Will and Attention” is her memoir of this period of inner turbulence: a philosophical chronicle of earthly cravings, spiritual longings and of the paradoxes of the human will.
Doubleday, Oct. 6
Current events
The Inheritance
by Janet Reitman
“A place where nobody knew your name and everyone had a chance at next year’s Chevy Trailblazer”: For one Palestinian immigrant whose story (alongside eight others) “The Inheritance” recounts, this was the promise of the United States. Through dozens of interviews, Reitman, a contributor to The Times Magazine, chronicles how that dream soured in the aftermath of 9/11, corroded by anger, division and fear.
Random House, Oct. 6
Politics
Blockers
by Michael Lewis
Lewis, the author of “The Big Short,” follows a small cast of civil servants — a tax official, a scientist, a security guard and others — who tried to frustrate the Trump administration’s worst impulses as they were wiped out by the Department of Government Efficiency.
Norton, Oct. 6
History
The Rush
by Nathaniel Philbrick
The California gold rush is an origin story of modern America: a tale of dizzying wealth accumulation, private sector impositions on democracy and xenophobia weaponized by opportunists. Philbrick’s account suggests how this pivotal period in U.S. history edged a still-new nation closer to the Civil War.
Viking, Oct. 6
Literary fiction
Music Against the Night
by Yiyun Li
John Field is a piano prodigy in turn-of-the-century Dublin who invents the nocturne form that another pianist, Frédéric Chopin, will make famous. Adelaide Percheron, or “Percherette,” is an orphan in Pondicherry, French India, who determines to make a life for herself playing the pianoforte. Li’s historical saga merges these two unlikely paths across European capitals at the peak of empire.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Oct. 13
Horror
Off the Reservation
by Stephen Graham Jones
In this sequel to “The Only Good Indians,” the young Blackfeet man Nathan Yellow Tail sets out to find the bones of a Blackfeet boy who died at the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School and bring them home — a quest that proves far more dangerous than he anticipated.
Saga Press, Oct. 13
Postapocalyptic fiction
The End of Everything
by M. John Harrison
In this eerie, Booker-shortlisted novel set in the years following a disaster that changed the world as we know it, Phillip Tennent scours the English coastline for artifacts dredged up from the Channel — until one day he comes upon a strange, shape-shifting entity with mystical and destructive powers.
Riverhead, Oct. 13
Literary fiction
Luna, Phoenix, Queen
by Julie Orringer
This novel of marital betrayal follows Barr, a struggling writer, who discovers a secret trove of legal pads belonging to his wife, Dava, who has early-onset dementia. They contain the manuscript of an autofictional novel about an affair Dava had with a fellow professor. In an act of vengeance, Barr begins to co-opt the story as his own.
Knopf, Oct. 13
Coming-of-Age Novel
Peck & Peck
by Bonnie Garmus
Garmus follows up the best-selling “Lessons in Chemistry” by turning from 1960s Los Angeles to 1980s New York City. The aspiring writer Batter Gray joins the staff of the most celebrated poetry journal of his day and finds himself caught between the feuding editors-in-chief, twin brothers who give the book (and the journal) its title.
Scribner, Oct. 13
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.
Zando, Oct. 13
True crime
The Best Kind of American
by Kim Ghattas
The 1984 assassination of Malcolm Kerr, the outspoken president of the American University of Beirut, is the central thread of Ghattas’s account charting how U.S. foreign policy fueled the conflict in the Middle East for decades.
Holt, Oct. 13
Family memoir
Kolkhoz
by Emmanuel Carrère; translated by John Lambert
Carrère’s mother was France’s pre-eminent historian of Russia; his father hailed from the Bordeaux bourgeoise. For his latest book, the celebrated French author of deeply personal nonfiction takes readers on an immersive tour of more than a century of Franco-Russian history, unfolding it through the prism of his family’s story and against the backdrop of his own mounting unease in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Oct. 13
Science
Bogland
by Merritt R. Turetsky
The ecologist Turetsky transports readers deep into the mysterious terrain of the bog — somewhere between land and water — to explore its rich history and ecological importance. From Borneo to Greece to Greenland, Turetsky makes a passionate case for these wetlands as both eerie preservers of the human past and models of symbiotic existence.
Norton, Oct. 13
Biography
Emperor of Nothing
by Blake J. Harris
The “pretty, pretty good” jokes will write themselves as fans and critics dig into this biography of the co-creator of “Seinfeld,” who went on to kvetch his way through 12 seasons of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” The TV Larry may not like small talk or the stop-and-chat, but the real deal sat down for numerous interviews for this account.
Dey Street, Oct. 20
Religion
Redemption
by Lawrence Wright
The New Yorker staff writer and author of books about the 9/11 attacks and the Church of Scientology turns his attention to capital punishment. Following a group of nuns as they minister to women on death row in Texas, Wright finds his ideas about state executions shaken as he comes closer and closer to accepting that most American of faiths: the belief in second chances.
Knopf, Oct. 20
Speculative Fiction
Public Access Afterworld
by Jane Schoenbrun
Schoenbrun, the filmmaker behind the idiosyncratic horror movies “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” and “I Saw the TV Glow,” imagines a television channel from another dimension in their debut novel. The dual narrative alternates between two suburban teens in 2009 and a trans content moderator in 2026, all of whom come across strange broadcasts that allude to a hidden and possibly dangerous world behind our own.
Hogarth, Oct. 27
Literary 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.
Little, Brown, Oct. 27
Biography
Frank Capra
by Sam Wasson
Following up his books about 1970s cinema auteurs, Wasson turns to a legend of old Hollywood. This mammoth biography follows the Sicilian immigrant who went on to direct such American Everyman classics as “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”
Harper, Oct. 27
Sports
The Glass Box
by Calum Marsh
An investigative journalist sets his sights on the strange tale of CrossFit, the notoriously hard-core multimillion-dollar fitness phenomenon, and the rise and fall of its controversial founder.
HarperOne, Oct. 27
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