Fiction
Historical delights
Zadie Smith’s The Fraud (Hamish Hamilton) kicks off a strong season for historical fiction. Also in September, AK Blakemore follows her acclaimed The Manningtree Witches with a darkly exuberant novel about one man’s insatiable hunger. Set in revolutionary France, The Glutton (Granta) is inspired by contemporary reports of a peasant who would eat anything, from dead rats to forks; and explores poverty, desire and social chaos in thrilling prose. Look out too for Lauren Groff’s wilderness-survival novel The Vaster Wilds (Hutchinson Heinemann), set in colonial America, as an English servant girl goes on the run in a strange new land; and the epic North Woods by Daniel Mason (John Murray), focusing on one patch of New England soil over four centuries and weaving a Cloud Atlas-style narrative of humanity under pressure and nature under threat.
Bestselling crime and spies
September means the annual offerings from Britain’s big three. Richard Osman’s elderly amateur sleuths get a fourth outing in The Last Devil to Die (Penguin), the latest in his Thursday Murder Club cosy crime series, as the worlds of art forgery and drug dealing collide. The Running Grave (Little, Brown), the seventh Cormoran Strike novel by JK Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith, sets the continuing romantic tension between her detective duo against an investigation into a religious cult in Norfolk. And in The Secret Hours (John Murray), Mick Herron takes a busman’s holiday from his Slough House series about washed-up MI5 agents. A historical inquiry into the secret service uncovers dodgy goings on in the “spooks’ zoo” of post-Wall 90s Berlin; it’s pitched as a standalone, but fans will enjoy joining the dots as Herron adds new layers to his shadow world of compromise and betrayal. Meanwhile, Stephen King’s prolific late flowering continues with a new outing for his detective Holly Gibney, chasing down serial killers in Holly (Hodder & Stoughton, Sept).
Prize winners return
Jesmyn Ward is feted for her visceral narratives of racial inequality in today’s US. With Let Us Descend (Bloomsbury, Oct), she looks back to the era of slavery, in the story of a girl’s forced march across America after she is sold by her white slaver father. Mike McCormack follows Goldsmiths winner Solar Bones with the “metaphysical thriller” This Plague of Souls (Canongate, Oct), as a man returns to a mysteriously empty home. Nobel laureate JM Coetzee’s The Pole and Other Stories (Harvill Secker, Oct) is led by a novella about a pianist’s infatuation. And Anne Michaels, known for the multi-award-winning Fugitive Pieces, returns with Held (Bloomsbury, Nov), which spans generations in the aftermath of the first world war.
The cult classic
“If it weren’t such a pleasure to read, I’d say it was an instrument of torture.” You can see why Ottessa Moshfegh is a fan of Dinah Brooke’s pitch-black 1973 novel Lord Jim at Home (Daunt, Oct). A nihilistic satire on upper-class Englishness and emotional violence, it’s shocking and brilliant.
Dystopian visions
In Julia (Granta, Oct), Sandra Newman opens out the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four by looking at that novel’s events from a female point of view. From Julia’s life in a women’s dormitory through her affair with Winston Smith and torture by the Thought Police, on to a meeting with Big Brother himself, it’s a fascinating reflection on totalitarianism as refracted through Orwell’s times and our own. Prophet Song (Oneworld), Paul Lynch’s horribly convincing portrait of Ireland falling under fascist control, has already been longlisted for the Booker; while The Power author Naomi Alderman takes a very different approach in November with The Future (4th Estate, Nov), an explosive tech-thriller about love and survival at the end of the world.
Twisted fairytales
Margaret Atwood recently described Mona Awad as her “literary heir apparent”. (Of Awad’s BookTok sensation Bunny, Atwood remarked: “You think, ‘She’s not going to go there … yes, she is.’”) Rouge (Scribner, Sept) plays with horror and humour in a surreal, gothic tale about a mother-daughter relationship that is also a biting satire on the beauty industry.
Translation highlights
David Diop follows At Night All Blood Is Black with Beyond the Door of No Return (translated by Sam Taylor, Pushkin, Oct), again drawing on historical sources, here to illuminate the slave trade through the story of a French botanist in 18th-century Senegal. The Postcard by Anne Berest (translated by Tina Kover, Europa, Oct), which uncovers the stories of her ancestors killed in Auschwitz, has been a bestseller in France. Meanwhile the Nobel-tipped Jon Fosse, Norway’s “Beckett of the 21st century”, publishes A Shining (translated by Damion Searls, Fitzcarraldo, Nov), following a man’s metaphysical journey through a dark wood; and Karl Ove Knausgård continues his new series with The Wolves of Eternity (translated by Martin Aitken, Harvill Secker, Oct).
The mythic retelling
“Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath / of great Achilles …” Six years ago Emily Wilson became the first woman to translate Homer’s Odyssey; her lean retelling of the companion epic of war and destruction The Iliad appears in September from Norton.
Uncovered Terry Pratchett
A Stroke of the Pen (Doubleday, Oct) assembles early short stories by the late Discworld creator, written under a pseudonym for newspapers in the 70s and 80s and only discovered after superfans combed through the archives. Expect comic fantastical fragments riffing on everything from cave people to Father Christmas.
The one to make you laugh
In the funny and deeply relatable Weirdo (Faber, Sept), standup Sara Pascoe brings her quirky observational comedy to the story of a young woman navigating the trials of life – love, money, purpose – while trying to seem normal.
The queer history
Drawing on documents and images from real-life pioneers, the hugely ambitious Blackouts by Justin Torres (Granta, Nov) is an intimate, playful account of an old and a young man talking; but it builds into a rich, poetic reclamation of cultural inheritance.
Elegant autofiction
In Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief, the Nigerian-American writer and photographer Teju Cole has built up a wide-roaming, groundbreaking body of work. In Tremor (Faber, Oct), a west African professor working in the US considers the meaning of art and storytelling in the face of a brutal past and violent present.
Alternative world-building
Golden Hill author Francis Spufford spins a sideways entertainment with Cahokia Jazz (Faber, Oct), a murder mystery set in a version of 1920s America. Cahokia was a Native American city in the centuries before European contact; here it lives on into the age of gangsters and speakeasies, a melting pot of drama and possibility.
Magical worlds for children
Katherine Rundell took a break from children’s fiction to publish her effervescent biography of John Donne; now she begins a fantasy series in the vein of Narnia and His Dark Materials with Impossible Creatures (Bloomsbury, Sept), set around a hidden archipelago where the animals we consider myth – griffins, unicorns, kraken – live and thrive. Meanwhile, the first in an epic fantasy trilogy from Kiran Millwood Hargrave, In the Shadow of the Wolf Queen (Orion), celebrates magic, nature and adventure.
Immersive YA
The epistolary novel Yours from the Tower by Sally Nicholls (Andersen, Sept) explores the hopes, struggles and first loves of three friends at the end of the 19th century, who have left boarding school for very different lives.
The big graphic novel
The creator of Ghost World, Daniel Clowes, returns in October with Monica (Cape), one woman’s life assembled through a kaleidoscope of stories and genres.
Out-of-this-world nature writing
Samantha Harvey is a beautiful stylist; in Orbital (Cape, Nov) a group of astronauts look down on our fragile Earth. It’s a slim, profound study of intimate human fears set against epic vistas of swirling weather patterns and rolling continents.
And if you only have one hour …
From the short stories in Walk the Blue Fields to her stunning novella Foster, Claire Keegan is known for Tardis-like narratives that are bigger on the inside. In 2021, Small Things Like These, a tale of compassion and indifference in an Irish community, became the shortest book shortlisted for the Booker. In September a new story, So Late in the Day (Faber), gets a standalone publication. The memories of a man over one evening as he looks back on a failed romance, it illuminates individual limitations and misogyny across Irish society.
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Memoir
The months leading up to Christmas are typically when famous actors and musicians spill the beans in books. Among the A-listers putting pen to paper this autumn is Barbra Streisand, whose memoir My Name Is Barbra (Century, Nov) will look back at her six-decade career spanning stage, screen and the recording studio. The book remains firmly under lock and key, but promises to be “frank, funny, opinionated and charming” as she traces her path from her Brooklyn childhood to international fame.
The actor Patrick Stewart’s pre-fame story is one of extreme sadness and hardship: growing up in poverty in Mirfield in West Yorkshire, he was the son of a soldier who returned from the second world war with PTSD that would manifest in violence towards his wife. In Making It So (Gallery, Oct), Stewart poignantly recalls those early years as well as his first forays in theatre, his long and recently reprised stint as Captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation and late-career superstardom via the X-Men franchise.
Werner Herzog’s Every Man for Himself and God Against All (Bodley Head, Oct), translated by Michael Hofmann, recounts the film-maker’s impoverished childhood in a Bavarian village where the family had to make a loaf of bread last a week and the children went without shoes in the summer. Herzog goes on to chronicle his early jobs herding cows, fishing for squid and working as a rodeo clown before rising to become a celebrated director of films including Grizzly Man, Fitzcarraldo and Rescue Dawn.
There have been plenty of books written about Britney Spears, including Heart to Heart, which the singer co-wrote with her mother in 2000. But her autobiography The Woman in Me (Gallery, Oct) promises a new level of candour as it covers not just her childhood and early years of fame but the controversial conservatorship that placed her father in control of her medical and financial affairs in 2008, and which was terminated after a sensational court hearing two years ago.
Sly Stone, the funk supremo behind Everyday People, Family Affair and I Want To Take You Higher, has joined forces with journalist and author Ben Greenman for the memoir Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) (White Rabbit, Oct). The book chronicles Stone’s early life as a musical prodigy, his rise to fame in Sly and the Family Stone and his gradual descent into cocaine addiction and destitution. As his friend Questlove notes in the foreword: “Sly has lived a hundred lives and they are all here.”
Sonic Life (Faber, Oct) will see Thurston Moore looking back at his career with Sonic Youth and the sounds and scenes that shaped him, while in Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton and Me (Octopus, Sept), lyricist Bernie Taupin discusses, among other things, his creative partnership with Elton John and his move to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s.
In the debate around the South African athlete Caster Semenya, her biological identity and her right to compete in international tournaments, one voice has often been missing: hers. In The Race to Be Myself (Merky, Oct) the double Olympic champion finally makes herself heard as she reflects on her rural beginnings and early running career, the shock at learning of her hyperandrogenism (meaning she has no womb and naturally elevated testosterone levels) and her treatment at the hands of the press and sporting bodies.
The Taiwanese-American author and New Yorker contributor Hua Hsu’s Pulitzer prize-winning Stay True (Macmillan, Sept) is finally publishing in the UK. A portrait of Hsu’s friendship with a college friend who died tragically young, it is a richly observed examination of grief, being an outsider and the healing power of art. In the melancholy Father & Son (Picador, Sept), the Soft City author Jonathan Raban, who died at the start of this year, reflects on his relationship with his army captain father, and tells the intertwined stories of his father’s war years, as revealed in his letters to Raban’s mother, and his own recovery from a life-changing stroke.
Lastly, in the essay-length The Young Man (Fitzcarraldo, Sept), translated by Alison L Strayer, the Nobel prize-winning French author Annie Ernaux recounts her affair with a student 30 years her junior when she was in her 50s. Their relationship prompts the author to recall moments from her own youth and to reflect, acutely and without sentimentality, on memory and the passing of time.
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Nonfiction
If you read one book about ...
AI
The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma (Bodley Head, Sept) by Mustafa Suleyman
Suleyman is one of the co-founders of DeepMind, the British startup that was snapped up by Google in 2014 and whose mission is to develop artificial general intelligence, the kind of AI that most resembles the human brain. So, he knows whereof he speaks, and that makes his message all the more sobering. Suleyman believes that massive transformational change – the wave of his title – is now inevitable, and that there is only a narrow path for humanity to tread between catastrophe and authoritarian dystopia. This book sets out what we need to do to avoid either.
History
Emperor of Rome (Profile, Sept) by Mary Beard
Mary Beard’s regular book-length forays into ancient Roman culture include her 2015 bestseller, SPQR, and 2021’s Twelve Caesars, about the enduring influence of the empire’s rulers in art. While Emperor of Rome attempts to answer grand questions about those rulers – where did their power come from and what did it consist of? – it also drills down into their daily lives, fly-on-the-wall style. We are given snapshots of the emperor “at home, at the races, on his travels”. But the portrait also includes the people who helped keep the show on the road, from wives to jesters, slaves and soldiers, as well as the ordinary citizens who wrote in asking for help with their problems.
Culture
Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business (Corsair, Oct) by Roxane Gay
In the 10 years since her breakout collection of essays, Bad Feminist, cultural critic Roxane Gay’s razor sharp intellect has ranged far and wide: from police violence to gay pride, from the Roseanne reboot to why she hates the beach. She has interviewed Madonna, Janelle Monae, Nicki Minaj and Pamela Anderson. Opinions is a new collection of the best of her nonfiction writing, all powered by a dry wit and penetrating insights into how society works, and who it works for.
Politics
What Went Wrong With Brexit: And What We Can Do About It (Canongate, Sept) by Peter Foster
The rollercoaster of the last few years has seen a rash of “setting the record straight” book deals from turfed-out politicians. Boris Johnson’s still doesn’t have a publication date, but this autumn sees Nadine Dorries’s The Plot, about his downfall, alongside unlikely shelfmate Theresa May, who has written about political corruption in The Abuse of Power. For a less axe-grinding take, and one that gets to the issues underlying so much of the recent chaos, try Peter Foster’s What Went Wrong With Brexit. Now the FT’s public policy editor, he was a balanced voice at the Telegraph where he covered Europe during the negotiations, and here presents prognosis and prescription for Britain’s Brexit-related woes.
Science
Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution (Hutchinson Heinemann, Oct) by Cat Bohannon
A sprawling survey of the evolution of women’s bodies over 200m years, Cat Bohannon’s deeply researched book covers everything, as the author herself puts it, “from tits to toes”. Partly, it’s a bid to correct the “male norm” – the fact that scientists default to male bodies, be they mouse or human, when studying things in the lab. That means that models of normal functioning and disease all skew male, as do the treatments that are then developed. But this isn’t just a book for women: Bohannon invites you to “think of yourself: to think about where your body comes from, how the evolution of biological sex shapes it – whether you identify as a man, a woman, or another gender”.
Music
Listen: On Music, Sound and Us
(Canongate, Oct) by Michel Faber
Faber is best known for his novels Under the Skin and The Crimson Petal and the White, but he’s been incubating a different kind of book for years, one about his greatest passion, music. The result is a series of finely tuned observations formed from personal memories, nuggets of neuroscience and interviews with musical luminaries, in which he attempts to explain “what really happens when we hear, and what’s really going on when we listen”. The answer is a combination of biology and biography. Sounds simple enough: Faber’s kaleidoscope-like book explains why it really isn’t.
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