September is here, and with it comes a bevy of new books. Below, you’ll find twenty-five delightful reads to consider, each in a fresh paperback edition, including debuts, sophomore releases, rich translations, and new works from established authors. You’ll find new fiction from Adam Johnson, Megha Majumdar, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Gish Jen, Walter Mosley, and many others, as well as wide-ranging nonfiction covering everything from Muriel Spark to the Beatles to the Bard’s legendary rivalry with Christoper Marlowe, and much, much more.
Stay safe, as always, and I hope you’ll add these to your to-be-read piles.
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Adam Johnson, The Wayfinder
(Picador)
“An epic that feels less created than unearthed….Johnson’s dizzying attention to the mercurial crosscurrents of conquest recalls . . . Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob. His bold melding of magic and psychological realism casts a spell as captivating as Marlon James’s Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Yet The Wayfinder is sui generis—a tapestry of South Pacific myth, archetypal quest, political allegory, environmental jeremiad and feminist revision that feels both ancient and impossibly relevant.”
–The Washington Post
Gish Jen, Bad Bad Girl
(Vintage)
“Trigger warning for any daughter who has ever had a fraught relationship with their mother: Bad Bad Girl may prompt a flood of feelings not felt since adolescence….A heart-piercingly personal work that also imparts universal truths about the immigrant experience—and what it is to be a daughter, a mother and a woman….Suffused with love and a desire to finally understand….How rich this book is, and how humane….A marvel.”
–Los Angeles Times
Megha Majumdar, A Guardian and a Thief
(Vintage)
“Luminous….Majumdar conjures a city at once deteriorating and resilient, where markets sell seaweed and synthetic fish, and the city’s ‘remaining benevolent billionaire’ lives on a heavily guarded man-made island in a widening river….There’s no clear-cut villain here, just people attempting to survive and protect their own. Majumdar proves once again that she is a master of the moral dilemma.”
–Publishers Weekly
Frances Wilson, Electric Spark: The Enigma of Dame Muriel
(Picador)
“A brilliant literary critic and chronicler turns her sharp-eyed attention to the life and works of Muriel Spark, a writer of odd and compelling genius herself. Sure to be one of the most compelling biographies of the year, if not decade.”
–Kate Tuttle
Stephen Greenblatt, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival
(Norton)
“In this thrilling and twisty tale, Greenblatt focuses on Christopher Marlowe, the shoemaker’s son famed for provocative plays like Doctor Faustus. With a denouement as propulsive as that of any spy novel, he brilliantly captures sixteenth-century England.”
–The New York Times
Adam Nicolson, Bird School: A Beginner in the Woods
(Picador)
“In this revelatory narrative, Ondaatje Prize winner Nicolson shares his experience observing birds near his home in Sussex . . . Nicolson is especially good at illuminating what goes unseen (or unheard)….He also draws attention to the ways human activity, like intensive farming, has caused bird populations to plummet in recent decades. This is a beautiful love letter to the avian world.”
–Publishers Weekly
Walter Mosley, Gray Dawn
(Little Brown)
“Mosley’s moving author’s note implores readers to see this work as a reminder of the ongoing toxicity of segregation, lynchings, and generations of casual hatred. In Mosley’s masterful hands, this is a portal to Los Angeles streets and their vastly different worlds, communities born of disadvantage, and mysteries that highlight universal truths.”
–Booklist
Karl Ove Knausgaard, The School of Night
(Penguin Books)
“There is nothing in contemporary publishing to remotely compare to Knausgaard’s Morning Star series. Knausgaard…has unleashed something entirely new, an antic and almost dangerously immersive reading experience that will completely take over your life. There is something obliterative about its intensity….The first of the series set in London, and the first to follow a single character throughout, The School of Night is by turns bleak, funny and horrifying, but never less than utterly captivating.”
–Martin McInnes
Sarah Moss, Ripeness
(Picador)
“Tender and rueful, Ripeness is a tale of being a foreigner that moves between 1960s Italy and 2020s Ireland, finding pain and bliss in both. Working at the height of her mature powers, Sarah Moss is a marvel of insight and eloquence.”
–Emma Donoghue
Ian Leslie, John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs
(Celadon Books)
“Of all the creative partnerships of the past century, none seems more resonant or permanent than that of the two Liverpool boys who met as teenagers, collaborated for a dozen years, and altered the world’s expectations of what popular art can accomplish. Ian Leslie’s new book is the best study of that friendship, from improbable beginning to melancholy end—and of all the songs produced between—that we have ever had.”
—Adam Gopnik
Hu Anyan, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing (Trans. Jack Hargreaves)
(Astra House)
“A striking first-person account of being working-class in China and surviving in the gig economy, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is a rare and urgent book for our times. The author’s experiences, shared by countless others all over the world, reveal the shadows beneath China’s economic miracle….His chronicles capture the quotidian tedium of precarious living, and glimmer with grit, hope and humor. The rhythm and style of Hu’s plain prose are masterfully rendered into English through Jack Hargreaves’s translation. To read I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is not just to empathize with the struggles of one man, but to interrogate the structural causes and imagine alternatives to exploitation.”
–Yangyang Cheng
Charlotte Beradt, The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation (Trans. Damion Searls)
(Princeton University Press)
“An unprecedented record of how the Nazi regime extended its grip beyond the public sphere into the innermost recesses of private existence, polluting the sanctity of sleep itself….The Third Reich of Dreams endures as a distinctive and unsettling portrait of life under dictatorship.”
–Times Literary Supplement
Mia Couto, The Cartographer of Absences (Trans. David Brookshaw)
(Picador)
“In its temporally fragmented structure and use of found documents, Mia Couto’s newly translated novel feels like a new direction for him. It’s also an intensely powerful work about revolution, compromise, and long-buried secrets—one that both explores Mozambique’s troubled colonial history and raises big questions about ideals and sacrifice. A haunting, compelling book.”
–Tobias Carroll
Amie Barrodale, Trip
(Picador)
“Amie Barrodale’s funny, sad, heretical debut novel, Trip…is a magnificent and lovable work—both page-turning and coolly visionary….It takes an audacious novel to remind you that not only can reading fiction feel like a psychedelic experience, but that you don’t even have to be dead to roam in a bardo of mutual creation. That volatile, metaphysical space between an author’s mind and a reader’s is there for the experiencing on this earthly plane.”
–Bookforum
Nathan Harris, Amity
(Little Brown)
“A smartly imagined western with a different sort of hero….Harris’ latest is a rejoinder to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), with plenty of bloodshed and a villain who’s Holden and Glanton all rolled up into one…To top off a skillfully constructed plot, Harris has a gift for vivid imagery…and period language….A memorable, impeccably written tale that engages the reader, with its twists and turns, from beginning to end.”
–Kirkus Reviews
Tim Berners-Lee, This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web
(Picador)
“Part memoir, part manifesto, Berners-Lee’s chirpy book This Is for Everyone is both an engaging history of the origins and evolution of the web and an ingenious road map for how we can reclaim control over our digital lives. His big idea, which has now become his latest personal obsession, is to restore data sovereignty to every individual by redesigning the web…the seventy-year-old Berners-Lee is still fighting to preserve the web’s original promise, which, he argues, has been despoiled by malign users, rapacious corporations and authoritarian governments.”
–John Thornhill
Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley
(Bloomsbury Continuum)
“Tech reporter Silverman’ssharp and ominous account delves into the radicalizing worldviews of Silicon Valley billionaires in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s reelection, and warns of a fusion of corporate and state power through which tech titans seek to enact undemocratic agendas. It’s an essential unmasking of the growing extremism among America’s wealthy.”
–Publishers Weekly
Agustín Fuentes, Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary
(Princeton University Press)
“Reproductive anatomy is more variable than commonly understood, according to this eye-opening study….The raft of research convincingly debunks the idea that sex anatomy has much consequence on behavior, character, or cognitive ability…and the illuminating discussions of animal biology demonstrate the profound diversity of sex expression in nature…. [Sex Is a Spectrum is] a resounding refutation of the idea that there’s anything natural about the gender binary.”
–Publishers Weekly
Jordan Castro, Muscle Man
(Catapult)
“Muscle Man is a triumph. It’s like reading Walter Benjamin or Thomas Bernhard on creatine powder and gym memes. Jordan Castro is an outrageously gifted novelist who has given us a truly original fable of the contemporary moment. Everything in this novel is feral and brilliant, and dizzyingly funny. Castro is one-of-one, and this book is pure heat.”
–Brandon Taylor
Anne Berest, Claire Berest, Gabriële (Trans. Tina Kover)
(Europa Editions)
“The Berest sisters follow up Anne’s The Postcard with a colorful portrait of their great-grandmother Gabriële Buffet-Picabia. With lyrical prose, the Berests blend historical context with more intimate insights, such as their attempt to understand why the Picabias were cold to their children. Readers with an affinity for early 20th-century art will especially enjoy this.”
–Publishers Weekly
Heather Aimee, The Irish Goodbye
(Holt)
“The Irish Goodbye has it all: a lovable cast of complex characters; forbidden affairs; a stately, crumbling beach house; a doomed sailboat; long-suppressed family secrets; and one pressure-cooker of a holiday weekend. Above all, this finely-crafted novel explores what it means to be a family, and what we owe each other and ourselves.”
–Amy Shearn
Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It
(Picador)
“The steady decline of the technology you use every day isn’t just in your imagination―and in Enshittification, Cory Doctorow explains how we got here. Witty, incisive, and urgently relevant, this book reveals how we can reclaim our digital lives from the forces that have degraded them.”
–Molly White
Ciara Greene, Gillian Murphy, Memory Lane: The Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember
(Princeton University Press)
“There is no shortage of books on memory, from self-help guides for the anxiously aging to scholarly works of history. Memory Lane is distinctive for taking the standpoint of applied cognitive psychology. Emphasizing how memory functions in everyday life, Greene and Murphy explore the processes of memory and the influences that shape them….Memory Lane offers an informative and readable account of how the apparent weaknesses of human memory may be strengths in disguise.”
–The Conversation
Zuzan Říhová, Playing Wolf (Trans. Alex Zucker)
(Catapult)
“A gripping and cinematic English-language debut that blends elements of folk horror, psychological thrillers, and the story of Little Red Riding Hood to stunning effect . . . Říhová is also a poet, and it shows in the lyrical and atmospheric language of the novel, impressively translated by Alex Zucker. It is a dark beauty, a brutal and violent novel, but one that ensnares.”
–BookRiot
Sam Sussman, Boy from the North Country
(Penguin Books)
“A man convinced he could be Bob Dylan’s son returns home to care for his ailing mother in Sussman’s gorgeous autobiographical debut. At the novel’s heart, though, is Sussman’s intense portrait of a mother and son’s emotional bond. It’s a stunner.”
–Publishers Weekly
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