Highlights of the Season


Tennyson Bouguereau – freed man, devoted brother and aspiring singer – is offered the possibility of a new life in Nashville, until an unexpected trip to Victorian England changes everything. This is a companion novel to the brilliant, Costa Book Award-winning Days Without End and A Thousand Moons.


audacious” novel that invites us to consider what it means to be human, says Fig Tree, from the Women’s Prize-winning author of The Power.


Sebastian Faulks Farewell to Eden Hutchinson Heinemann, 17 September, hb, £22, 9781529153224


Set between 1940s Palestine and post-war Britain, this tells of Philip Deval, a soldier who survived the beaches of Normandy and must confront the secrets and scars of all he has lived through – which threaten to upend his future. Farewell to Eden sits alongside Faulks’ best-known novels, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, says the publisher.


Marlon James The Disappearers Hamish Hamilton, 17 September, hb, £20, 9780241714409


Fern Brady


High Energy Unpleasant BRAZEN, 10 September, hb, £20, 9781840918670


Comedian Brady’s unflinching and very funny memoir, Strong Female Character, was great so Brazen will have high hopes for her debut: a novel that explores bodily autonomy and medical misogyny through the story of Mary, who has an illness no doctor seems able or willing to name…


Tice Cin Safe Spaces Granta Books, 10 September, hb, £14.99, 9781803514161


A portrait of the artist as a young musician: Cin’s unnamed narrator traverses the DJ booths, green rooms and dance floors of London, trying to figure out what she wants from the city. A kaleidoscopic novel about heartbreak, imagination, electronic music and grief, says Granta. From the author of Keeping the House, shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Jhalak Prize.


Naomi Alderman The Strangers Fig Tree, 17 September, hb, £20, 9780241777664


After her mother dies, a grieving writer sets up a wildlife camera in her garden and captures the first image of a strange new animal. Soon, the “mimmoths” are as common as foxes, harmless but oddly intelligent and no one knows where they have come from. A “wildly


Autumn/Winter 2026


James returns to the Jamaica of his Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings with this novel about eight gay men who meet for the first time in Kingston in 1988, at a casting call for an openly queer play. Later, a mob will rampage through a rehearsal with tragic consequences. An unflinching portrait of the hatred and shame faced by gay men in a society that refuses to accept them, says Hamish Hamilton.


Derek Owusu The Recovery House Merky Books, 17 September, hb, £16.99, 9781529963809


The Desmond Elliott Prize-winning author of That Reminds Me, who was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 2023, returns with the story of Jamal, an introspective poet who wakes in a quiet, claustrophobic recovery house after a devastating mental breakdown and must find the courage to rebuild himself.


Victoria Hislop The Wine-Dark Sea Headline Review, 24 September, hb, £22, 9781472263988


Hislop’s 10th novel explores the ripple effect of the brutal Greek Civil War on a generation of displaced children. When government soldiers come to Kalopetra in 1946, Fotini urges her eldest daughter to hide with the other children minutes before she and the other mothers are herded onto trucks.


Weeks later, the soldiers return for the children, but not to reunite them with their mothers…


Richard Osman We Chase Shadows Viking, 10 September, hb, £25, 9780241745892


In the second in the We Solve Murders series, unlikely case-cracking trio Amy, Rose and Steve investigate when a dead body is found on the steps of a villa in the Italian hills, next to a threatening note signed by a mystery man. The Daily Express called the first in the series “a sitcom-meets-Bond and a fine murder mystery”.


Laleh Khadivi Female Life on Planet Earth Oneworld, 24 September, hb, £16.99, 9781836432821


When her mother dies, Iranian American LA-dweller Heti must organise the traditional one-year ceremony for all her mother’s family and friends. Then she is sent photographs of her mother as a young woman in Iran, covered from head to toe, pointing a machine gun at a group of sobbing women. A darkly funny, taboo-breaking read, says Oneworld, who acquired this at auction for six figures.


Jodi Picoult Hollow Bones Michael Joseph, 24 September, hb, £22, 9780241676080


Baby Molly’s mother left home for an appointment at the World Trade Center on the morning of 11th September 2001. She never returned. Molly, now older and married to a police polygraph expert, runs the Rhode Island Department for Emergency Preparedness, until the unexpected threatens to upend her new marriage.


Adventure, Crime & Horror


Janice Hallett The Silent Appeal Viper, 3 September, hb, £20, 9781800817265


In Lower Lockwood, amateur thespians are rehearsing for their production of Agatha Christie’s The Hollow. But someone is hiding a secret… and they will not make it to opening night. Lawyers Charlotte and Femi sift through the evidence – will they uncover the truth in time? As always, the reader is welcome to join in with the sleuthing in this sequel to Hallett’s acclaimed debut, The Appeal.


Charlie Higson King Zero Michael Joseph, 24 September, hb, £22, 9780241799710


The first adult James Bond novel from Young Bond creator Higson opens with the murder of an agent in Saudi Arabia by a weapon unknown to the secret service, which triggers a race against time to avert global catastrophe. Higson says his novel “embraces the worlds of both the literary Bond and the cinematic Bond, and my bad guy has all the elements we expect from a classic Bond villain, with a twist that’s not been done before”.


Madeline Miller Mestra Bloomsbury Publishing, 29 September, hb, £9.99, 9781037206122


The latest short story from the author of The Song of Achilles and Circe is a reimagining of the myth of Mestra and her father Erysichthon, the King of Thessaly. Mestra has the ability of metamorphosis, gifted to her by Poseidon, while her father is cursed with an insatiable, unnatural hunger…


Sagas, Romance & Historical


Alice Roberts


The Goddess Queen Simon & Schuster, 1 September, hb, £20, 9781398563032


Debut novel from the academic and broadcaster, best known for Channel 4’s Time Team, Britain’s Most Historic Towns and Digging for Britain, is the story of


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