The weather is changing (well, sort of), the pumpkin spice lattes are beckoning, the kids are back in school, all of which clearly indicates that it’s big book season yet again. And hey, we might not be able to read fast enough to outrun the reality of 2025, but we can try. Here are some of the new fall novels the Lit Hub editors have been reading and loving so far this year.

This decades-spanning seventh novel from the National Book Award finalist and PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of An Unnecessary Woman and The Angel of History is a wondrously exuberant, fearlessly political mother-son saga set against the roiling backdrop of some of the most traumatic events in Beirut’s recent history: the Lebanese Civil War, the 2019 economic collapse, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the 2020 port explosion.

The caustic-but-compassionate Raja is a 63-year-old gay Beiruti high school teacher who, due to the characteristically selfish behavior of his princeling older brother, finds himself once again sharing a living space with his mouthy firebrand of a mother (a magnificent creation). An invitation to an all-expenses-paid writing fellowship in Virginia (extended to Raja even though he hasn’t put pen to paper in twenty-five years), sends our protagonist down an anarchic, era-jumping rabbit warren of memory.

I can think of few novelists more skilled in the art of blending deep trauma with irreverent humor than Rabih Alameddine. You’re so damn charmed by the irascible charisma of his narrators—by their wicked bite and breezy self-deprecation and gimlet eyes—that you’ll let them ferry you to the most heartbreaking and harrowing of places. Raja the Gullible is another tragicomic triumph. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor-in-Chief

Alejandro Varela, Middle Spoon
Viking, September 9

This novel is a spiral, carrying readers down, down, down into the uncomfortable depths of heartbreak. Our narrator, a gay, happily married father of two disentangling himself from a poly love affair, is—depending on the light—brilliant, self-mythologizing, abject, hopeful, and vulnerable. I love Varela’s style, which manages to capture a certain guy (read: hand-wringing, over-educated, PMC elder Millennial flirting with socialism) in a light more precise and endearing than certain snider peers have chosen. But I love even better the ideas this book takes seriously.

Open relationships, medical inequality, and electoral socialism aren’t engaged as jokes or mere biographical shorthand here. Our protagonist feels, lives, and thinks through his ethical dilemmas in the macro-world even as he flops around tortured in the mini-one, trying to throw back his unwanted hurt person thoughts like they’re so much extraneous fish. I’d give this novel to anyone going through a sea change in lifestyle. Our unnamed hero’s one-sided correspondence is exhausting, familiar, humiliating, and rewarding all at once. Just like that new kind of love he’s attempting. A very human and painfully contemporary project. –Brittany Allen, Staff Writer

McKenna Goodman, Helen of Nowhere
Coffee House Press, September 9

As a lapsed Classics major, McKenna Goodman’s sophomore novel had me at the title, but this slim, sly novel had much more to offer than mythology-bait. The novel concerns a disgraced former professor (the Man) and his mannered raging against women (one in particular, but really, of course, all women), looking at real estate after the Fall. The novel’s formal experiments (realtor-as-oracle) are grounded by a sharp humor. Despite its length, Helen of Nowhere manages to feel epic in the best way—the characters feel both familiar and new, the folly of Man is on full display, and on a sentence level, it’s the kind of book that forces you to underline. Goodman’s novel is a tribute to her influences, and a crackling joy to read.  –Jessie Gaynor, Senior Editor

Oh, Trish. If every generation gets the saint they deserve, you are cause to hope. All hail this ardent, ferocious, baroque, bonkers bard. If you know you know, and won’t need convincing. But everyone else? Time to join or die.

Lockwood, who’s been erroneously pegged as an internet bard while managing to craft a literary project that is much bigger than anything Zuckerberg hath wrought, has a new gift for us. Her latest novel continues a confident structural weirding first attempted in her last book, No One is Talking About This. But this novel has even less narrative. It’s more an act of decoupage. Told in poetic, dazzling, and sometimes elliptical vignettes, There Will Never Be Another You begins with illness in Ireland and leapfrogs, like the chronically scattered mind it takes as subject, over many disaggregated memories. Our narrator (presumably Trish) is a victim of Long Covid, and as she works to reconstruct her foggy mind we in the cheap seats are treated to a close read of Anna Karenina, collaboration chronicles starring the playwright Heidi Schreck and a doomed television adaptation, and many vivid “visuals” care of a hallucinogenic mushroom tea. The prose is ecstatic and freaky and muscular. But this is a book that resists binging. As with all her other offerings, there’s gold among the grit. –BA

Olga Ravn, tr. Martin Aitken, The Wax Child
New Directions, September 30

Fans of Olga Ravn’s beautiful and weird stories no doubt have this one on their list already, and it very much lives up to the hype. The Wax Child is an eerie, unsettling book about a group of women who have apparently been possessed and empowered by a tall and headless Devil. A trial and imprisonment ensues.

But this isn’t a typical, seventeenth century witch trial story. For one it’s is narrated by a handmade doll, with strange and roaming powers of observation. Ravn’s prose is striking too, richly marbled with quotation and detail pulled from primary source letters and court documents. The texture of this true language of spells and grimoires is engrossing, and perfect alongside Ravn’s keen ear for viscera: blood sucked from a cut finger, pens scratching and leaking, teeth sliding through the narrator’s wax body.

What might otherwise be a straightforward creepy historical novel is deepened by these uncanny phrasings, and Ravn’s attention to the social bonds in this world. The Wax Child is about the dread of living in brutal hierarchies, and the shapes that friendship and protection take to counteract these grim realities. I was particularly moved by the portrayals of community, especially the sequences of shared work. Ties built through crafting and cooking are constructed out of something other than blood, either shared or drawn. Ravn beautifully brings us inside these circles of care, which to many outsiders might have seemed as strange as witchery. –James Folta, Staff Writer

Lily King, Heart the Lover
Grove Press, September 30

Here’s something about me: I don’t really like books that try too hard to make me feel things. I never “get the tissues ready.” I don’t go in for “heartbreaking.” Lily King, though, is some kind of genius, because in a scant 250 pages, this book both delighted me intellectually and affected me on a profound emotional plane. Or several planes, because this book, short as it is, manages to be many things at once.

Heart the Lover is a campus novel that feels as pleasurable and nostalgic as The Secret History (without the murder). It’s a book about being a young person and a book about not being young anymore. It’s a book about love and regret and the relentless passage of time. It’s a book about other books. It’s both a prequel and a sequel to King’s 2020 novel Writers & Lovers, a book I liked so much that at the time, I bemoaned it for not being long enough. (Thank you for answering my plea, Lily.) It’s the best love story I’ve read all year, and the day I finished reading it, I did something I have never done before: I put my copy into an envelope and sent it to my best friend, so that I’d have someone to talk to about it. Yuck, feelings! But somehow I’m not even that mad about it. –Emily Temple, Managing Editor

Grace Byron, Herculine
S&S/Saga Press, October 7

This debut is for the queer girlies with religious trauma (which is to say, all of my friends). Herculine follows a young trans woman who decides to fight her malaise—and her demonic visions—by joining her ex’s trans girl commune in rural Indiana. What could go wrong! Byron’s novel is dark and voicey and funny in a way that makes you feel like you’re talking to a cool friend who you’re secretly worried about. Like if your coolest, most unstable friend decided to open up to you about the literal demons that have been following her around but you thought you guys were just gonna grab coffee and catch up about boyfriend drama. You know the vibe. I always love when a novel captures a voice so clearly, and I love a novel that’s creepy and spooky, and this book delivers on all of that. Plus, the cover! Come on. Your sleep paralysis demon is begging you to read Herculine. –McKayla Coyle, Publishing Coordinator

Erin Somers, The Ten Year Affair
Simon & Schuster, October 21

Erin Somers’ new novel, The Ten Year Affair, is an extension of her lovely, homonymous story published in Joyland in 2021. The premise is simple: the detailing of an affair, by turns emotional and physical, that takes place over a decade in a small New York town. About two couples, connected and dependent on one another, raising their kids alongside each other, facing the same turmoils, the same existential questions. For Cora and Sam, one half of each of those couples, that connection lives like a rope between them. Like a constant tether to one another, and thus, to another life that they could live, could have lived. What if they had begun an affair as soon as they met each other? As soon as they felt the tug between them? What if they had started sleeping together that first time, what if they had gotten pregnant, what if they had kept it, what if they had aborted it, what if they broke up, what if they got back together, what if they left their partners for each other?

All of this imagining exists in Cora’s mind as she goes through her normal life with her real, kind husband. All of this exists as a current underneath the everyday, child-filled, office-job life she does live. A sort of protection from the here and now: a way to stay on her toes, a way to distract from the mundanity that she’s living, even as it’s good mundanity. Even as it’s mundanity that she always dreamed of: a house she owns, a husband she respects, a town she appreciates, children she loves. Throughout: she imagines. She wishes. She desires. The escape from it all that Sam represents.

When it actually happens, when the affair turns from imagined to starkly real, which life will live on? Which life is the one Cora actually dreams of? It’s a beautiful book about selfhood amidst dependency. About how boring it can feel to get what you want. And about what love really means: the weight of it, the choosing of it. –Julia Hass, Associate Book Marks Editor

Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting
Tor Books, October 28

When I tell you that this is might be not only my favorite book of the year but that it is probably Alix Harrow’s best book yet and an instant addition to my all-time favorite shelf… any of those things should be enough to get you pre-ordering. But just in case: an academic is thrown back in time to accompany his country’s famous knight on her last crusade, only to discover that the history he learned isn’t necessarily the truth. What happens from there was, for me, almost completely unexpected and Harrow activates both the brain and the heart in equal measure. There are spectacular POV tricks, deep reflections on truth, love, and power, as well as a good old-fashioned Courtly Romance (that’s also a bit of a steamy one). This one is special. It might even give you some hope for brighter days to come. –Drew Broussard, Podcasts Editor

Sheldon Costa, The Great Work
Quirk Books, November 4

Costa’s debut novel is a little bit Steinbeck in Washington, a little bit As I Lay Dying in the Olympic peninsula, a little bit Annie Proulx in the Pacific northwest. The Great Work is about a grizzled alchemist and his nephew tracking a strange creature through the Washington wilderness near the end of the nineteenth century. It’s dark and moody, but also grounded and human. There’s a very classic sensibility to the novel, by which I mean it’s kind of about everything in the way that the great novels of yore tended to be. But not in an annoying way! In a way that feels so genuine and satisfying that I know it’s going to settle into a corner of my mind and live there forever. Costa has fashioned a world that you can’t help but be sucked into; the kind of world that feels so full and visceral that you’ll find yourself lost in it for hours. I loved this weird, muddy, beautiful book. –MC

Sarah Hall, Helm
Mariner, November 4

I love the weather. I love thinking about the weather, I love watching the weather, I love the ways that human beings have interacted with and personified and generally related to the weather. Helm is about the only named wind in the British isles and by taking on Helm as a through-line slash main-character, Hall produces a stirring, funny, absolutely idiosyncratic history-novel. It’s also an urgently-felt climate novel, because—spoilers, I guess, unless you’ve looked outside for even a moment in the last several years—climate change threatens not only Helm but the delicate balance of which Helm is only one piece. There are predecessors to this novel—George R. Stewart’s Storm certainly comes to mind — but this is a perfect meeting of mind, style, moment, and story. If one of the major ethical questions of our time, per Robert Macfarlane, asks “is a river alive?,” Sarah Hall convincingly argues that the wind certainly is. –DB

Elaine Kraf, Find Him!
Modern Library, November 11

I’ve said it previously on the Lit Hub podcast, but we’re overdue for a Elaine Krafaissance. Her work was ahead of the curve, and her novels are more accessible than ever thanks to Modern Library’s reissues, complete with excellent new introductions. I’ve yet to read a dud from Kraf, but Find Him! is a great place to start, a strange and engaging 1977 mystery that blends fantastical dreaming, pervasive nightmare, and patriarchal oppression.

This book is a stylish pastiche, as an unnamed woman fitfully reconstructs herself under the thumb of a strange man. Find Him!’s narrator regains consciousness dressed in a school uniform, in a place she doesn’t recognize, and without the ability to speak. She can’t do anything—speak, eat, bathe—without the help of a man named Oliver. Terrifyingly, he seems to play every role in her life: father, lover, guide, torturer. His wife has vanished (huh!), and he seems to be pouring all of his energies into the care and keeping of this mystery woman, who he explains is an alien, arrived from another star.

The woman is able to escape, in a way, and steps out into society. This is where the book really shines: seeing the world through her eyes, and watching her unravel her relationship with Oliver, is exhilarating, especially as told through Kraf’s excellent prose and fascinating formal experimentation.

The novel digs at one of Kraf’s thematic obsessions: characters who are outside of the norm, and the ways that others try to trap them. Who are we within society’s confines? The answers to troubling questions often arrive sideways in Find Him!, and in strange form. Alongside all of Kraf’s work, Find Him! feels destined to take a significant place in feminist literature. –JF

Dark and cinematic, surreal and spare, Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book connotes glinting edges, rolls of film stuttering and starting, and performance, constant performance. The book seethes with a faint promise of violence, but we don’t know where it will come from, who it is that holds the potential for cruelty. A Ripley-esque character named Nicholas is the book’s center; he’s running from a secret past, he will be anyone to anybody, and when he meets Dani, an artist working in Italian cinema, the character is just right. He becomes Dani’s assistant, his lover, his everything. Nicholas was never meant to find himself in this world, but find himself he does, and he sets into motion a conclusion that can never be undone.

The book’s background is Italy in the 1970s, an era of political upheaval, though the reader only gets glimpses of it. Sometimes it’s easy to forget the specific and transformative time the book is set in, since the reader is plunged so fully into the world of cinema: The Silver Book is mainly about the silver screen, Fellini and Pasolini and the creative, outlandish masterpieces that were being created during the time of tension and tumult. Somehow both spare and ornate, immersive and voyeuristic, The Silver Book has a pull that can’t be denied. –JH

We’re so familiar with memes and their spread, the way that images or quotes or moments worm into our brains… but what about an anti-meme? Something that erases any evidence of itself? What if an X-Files-style (or Delta Green, or SCP, or so on) organization was dedicated to defending humanity against such an inconceivable threat? And what if that fight didn’t go terribly well? Welcome to the Antimemetics Division; no, it isn’t your first day.

The original version of QNTM’s novel (itself a stitch-up of posts from the SCP wiki) pleasantly bent my brain with its propulsive prose and high-flying science fiction concept — but this version, brought to mass market for the first time, has been thoroughly revised to both make it accessible to uninitiated readers and to make the plot really sing. And boy howdy, does it ever: this reads at the pace of technothrillers by Crichton or Preston & Child, but it is unafraid to force the reader to really work their gray matter in grappling with an idea that by definition cannot be perceived. Absolutely spectacular stuff, for sci-fi fans and those looking for thrills of any stripe. –DB

Soraya Antonius, The Lord
NYRB Classics, November 25 

The Lord is a sharp portrait of pre-Nakba Palestine and its British colonizers, a timely reissue about colonized people and their imperial overseers, unable to see the shape of the world around them. The Lord is beautifully written, with a sympathetic attention to character and culture from Antonius, the daughter of a Mandatory Palestine socialite and an author and civil servant.

The book is narrated by a young journalist, interviewing an elderly woman about her life as a missionary teacher in 1930s Jaffa. She lived surrounded by colonial administrators and as her Palestinian students and their families. One of these students grows up to become a traveling magician, and as his act becomes increasingly uncanny (he turns brandy into juice) and then political (a Homburg hat becomes a keffiya), it gets the attention of colonial authorities. His character is the most interesting, a revolutionary who can only be understood as a cheap trickster. His first “miracle” is doing too well on a placement exam: how could he have done it without divine intervene? The British are baffled.

A historical awareness always lurks just out of view: Sykes, Picot, and Balfour are casually referenced, as is Zionist violence and promises made by the British Empire. There are also echoes in the crumbled crusader castles, spots for picnic excursions and parallels for the barbed wired rolling out across the colony. We know where this is headed, and so does our narrator, but the British characters’ breezy confidence and deep denial keeps them rooted in well-mannered contempt. As the book progresses, the history becomes harder to ignore and harder to justify away. The strikes and eventual armed revolution in the late ’30s ramp up, with the colonial administrators only ever considering them “events,” disconnected and lacking any throughline in ideology or history.

Any sympathy we might have had starts to curdle as the British characters quickly revert to casual, practiced cruelty. The school teacher did seem to care for her pupils and their families, and to love the country and culture she has adopted. But the piece she is missing and the unbroken tether to the metropole ultimately hobbles her.

The relevance of The Lord is impossible to ignore, especially in the character of a British journalist, who is extremely detached and mercenary. He finds that his dispatches aren’t moving copies like they once were: “…the papers had found other subjects, Palestine not enjoying the capacity to increase sales, and things went on as before, except in the destroyed homes.” –JF

Plus just as many fall novels we haven’t read yet, but that we’re particularly anticipating:

Sarah Moss, Ripeness (FSG, September 9)
Natsuo Kirino, tr. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, Swallows (Knopf, September 9)
Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness (Mariner, September 16)
Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hogarth, September 23)
Chris Kraus, The Four Spent the Day Together (Scribner, October 7)
Megha Majumdar, A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf, October 14)
Ken Liu, All That We See or Seem (Saga Press, October 14)
Adam Johnson, The Wayfinder (MCD, October 14)
Quan Barry, The Unveiling (Grove, October 14)
Claire-Louise Bennett, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye (Riverhead, October 21)
Oyinkan Braithwaite, Cursed Daughters (Doubleday, November 4)
Bryan Washington, Palaver (FSG, November 4)
Quiara Alegría Hudes, The White Hot (One World, November 11)
Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, House of Day, House of Night (Riverhead, December 2)
Lauren Rothery, Television (Ecco, December 2)