Highlights of the Season August General Fiction


Jacqueline Crooks Sky City Jonathan Cape, 6 August, hb, £18.99, 9781787336063 A portrait of ’90s London following the lives of three people – Jaycee, her newly reappeared former classmate and first love, Sol, and her best friend from the homeless hostel where she used to live, Ella-G. From the Women’s Prize-shortlisted author of Fire Rush, which was also shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Jhalak Prize, and won the PEN American Open Book Award.


Tom Newlands Something Like Happiness


Phoenix, 13 August, hb, £20, 9781399607940


Second novel from the author of Only Here, Only Now, winner of the McKitterick Prize and named Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year, tells of teenage sweethearts Frazer and Caitlin who still live in the small, grey town they grew up in. Money is tight on their Scottish housing estate and their autistic son is already struggling at school. They still love each other, but is it enough?


Donal Ryan


Where Are the Kings Doubleday, 13 August, hb, £16.99, 9780857529589 Ryan’s most recent novel, Heart, Be at Peace, won the Orwell Prize for Fiction and was named Irish Book of the Year. Ryan, who was called “the most consistently brilliant Irish writer of his generation” byJoseph O’Connor, is very famous in Ireland but not quite as well-known as he deserves to be over here. This is the story of 12-year-old Jack who comes of age in the wake of his mother’s death.


Liane Moriarty Big Little Truths Michael Joseph, 27 August, hb, £22, 9780241700907


Excitingly, this is the sequel to Big Little Lies,


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immortalised in the TV series starring Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Zoë Kravitz. It has been a decade since the ill-fated quiz night at Pirriwee Primary. When the school receives an anonymous package containing a human finger, could it be mischief, incrimination or even murder?


Cecelia Ahern Love Unlocked HarperFiction, 27 August, hb, £20, 9780008608149


When all the lovers’ padlocks are removed from a Dublin bridge, and couples across the world start splitting up, cynic Melody is intrigued enough to investigate for her podcast. When she meets the man responsible, sparks fly. Latest romance from the bestselling author of PS, I Love You and Paper Heart.


Rachel Cusk Life of M Faber, 27 August, hb, £18.99, 9780571399802


Said to be “a blazing renovation of the form”, the latest from the Goldsmiths Prize-winning author of the Outline trilogy examines fame, power, beauty and truth through the story of a writer who plans to pen the biography of famous film star M. But is M to play a character in the book, or is it the writer who is acting the role of M?


Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Dream Count Fourth Estate, 27 August, pb, £9.99, 9780008685775


Shortlisted for the 2026 Fiction Book of the Year at The British Book Awards, Adichie’s tale of four women, their loves, longings and desires, is now in paperback. “Reads like a feminist War and Peace. A magnificent novel,” said the Sunday Times.


Adventure, Crime & Horror


Susie Dent Death Writ Large Zaffre, 13 August, hb, £20, 9781804187241


Second novel from the doyenne of Countdown’s Dictionary Corner follows Guilty by Definition. Oxford lexicographer Martha Thornhill is summoned when mysterious symbols are found scrawled near the dead body of a university lecturer. Martha recognises the rather


The Bookseller Buyer’s Guide Fiction


literate graffiti and begins to unearth a tragedy that will extend far beyond the walls of the old university.


Vikas Swarup The Girl with the Seven Lives


Apollo, 13 August, hb, £20, 9781035924646


Latest from the author of Q&A, adapted into the multi-Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire, tells of Devi, a fighter from the slums of Delhi, who is being held captive, her life up for sale in an online auction where the highest bidder will determine her fate. Over the course of one night, Devi tells her captor the secrets of her seven lives to date, but can she survive this final test?


Bella Mackie Claws Out! The Borough Press, 27 August, hb, £20, 9780008545581


Third crime caper from the author of How to Kill Your Family and What a Way to Go. To lose one husband is unlucky. To lose two is careless. But three? When Diana targets David for his Hampstead house and bulging bank account, she has to reckon with his entitled and suspicious daughter, Cat.


Adele Parks Eyes on You HQ, 27 August, hb, £16.99, 9780008586423


Latest cat-and-mouse psychological thriller from the author of Our Beautiful Mess. Aged 15, Amy witnessed her father murder his secret lover and her testimony put him away. Years later, she meets Oliver, who has a past he would rather forget. Amy feels drawn to him at a profound level – it seems a lot like love, but is it?


Sagas, Romance & Historical


Latest in Polygon’s acclaimed Darkland Tales series unites McDermid with Sharp, Scotland’s geographer royal, for this novella that traces the story of Scotland’s only trading colony, a dream of prosperity that collapsed in a failure that bankrupted a nation and propelled it towards political union with England.


Sophie Irwin Henrietta Century, 13 August, hb, £16.99, 9781529963519


The Georgette Heyer estate has given this first-ever continuation novel the stamp of approval. Irwin is, of course, an excellent writer of historical fiction in her own right (A Lady‘s Guide to Fortune-Hunting was a hoot) and the perfect author to take on the challenge as she wrote her undergraduate thesis on Heyer, dubbed the Queen of Regency romance. A “huge” publicity campaign is promised as this year also marks the 100th anniversary of Heyer’s first historical romance.


Jess Kidd Little Spark Canongate Books, 13 August, hb, £18.99, 9781838856557


I am the biggest fan of Kidd’s dazzling invention and unique style; her books are always so unmistakably hers. So I am very much looking forward to this Victorian- era mystery featuring the titular orphan, once the star of an electrifying travelling act but now stuck in a London gaol, who is offered a chance at redemption by assisting a reclusive family in their vast house on the Kent marshes with the creation of automata: miraculous, lifelike machines.


Science Fiction & Fantasy


Saara El-Arifi Earthbound HarperVoyager, 27 August, hb, £18.99, 9780008597078


Val McDermid, Jo Sharp This Door of the Seas Polygon, 6 August, hb, £12, 9781846977466


The first in this epic fantasy series won Pageturner Book of the Year at The British Book Awards. Now, the Faebound trilogy concludes with Yeeran and Lettle’s world shaken by a revelation from the Fates that changes everything: the obeah are not what they seem…


September General Fiction


William Boyd Cold Sunset Viking, 3 September, hb, £20, 9780241761090


The third mystery starring Gabriel Dax (Gabriel’s Moon, The Predicament) finds the accidental spy en route to Russia with a delivery for celebrated defector Kit Caldwell. But Caldwell is convinced the KGB suspects him of treachery and he wants to get out – now. Dax is soon embroiled in a web of shifting loyalties.


The original, and much loved, five volumes (The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off and All Change) took the Cazalet family from the late 1930s to the ’50s. Here, the author of the My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You trilogy picks up the story in 1962, with the world on the brink of the Swinging Sixties…


Alice Hoffman The Witches of Cambridge Scribner UK, 8 September, hb, £16.99, 9781398565296


Latest from the author of Practical Magic follows two women from very different backgrounds in 1950s Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they become involved with a secret group of witches at Radcliffe College. When girls from the Lilith Society begin to go missing, Ava and Lauren realise that the witch trials of the past may not be as deeply buried as they once believed.


Rebecca F Kuang Taipei Story The Borough Press, 8 September, hb, £22, 9780008702557


Colm Tóibín The Bridge Picador, 3 September, hb, £12.99, 9781037418525


A sequel to A Long Winter, this short novel (128 pages) also works as a standalone. A new bridge, connecting two remote valleys in the Pyrenees, is nearly complete, making it easier to smuggle contraband deep into the mountains, but Miquel fears his father is unprepared for the realities of what this will mean.


The Borough Press is positioning this as Kuang’s “literary debut” although she is well- known to the trade as the author of Yellowface and SFF bestsellers Babel and Katabasis. This is the story of Yale student Lily Chen, who arrives in Taipei for the summer, and embarks on a search for understanding: of herself, the culture she inherited and the meaning of home. A UK author tour is planned with a “huge” marketing campaign.


Kate Atkinson Our Noble Selves Doubleday, 10 September, hb, £22, 9781529937824


A new Atkinson is always a pleasure, and this is a standalone set during the 1951 Festival of Britain, where former war reporter Harry Flynn, having failed to resume his journalistic career, reluctantly takes a job. Then a date goes missing, and he is deemed to be the last person to see her alive. Might the answer to his mounting problems lie in the hands of a precocious 13-year- old called Veronica?


Louisa Young The Golden Hours Mantle, 3 September, hb, £20, 9781035068876


A continuation of the Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard.


Sebastian Barry The Newer World Faber, 10 September, hb, £20, 9780571378449


In the aftermath of the American Civil War,


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