Hello, fellow Bookworms! Reading season is officially here! Crisp autumn weather, golden leaves and piping-hot cups of tea inside us to sit down, curl up under a cozy blanket and lose ourselves in a fantastic new book. If you're a fan of literary fiction like me, you appreciate books with complex characters, sweeping story arch and poignant emotional themes.
Our editors and book lovers have scoured the new releases lists to bring you the best of the best new books in literary fiction. We look at advances sales, reader reviews, librarian recommendations and more to bring you titles that will delight with each turn of the page. Check out the list below, and visit us again as more new titles are added each month.
September Literary Fiction New Releases
American Hagwon
by Min Jin Lee
The National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko returns with a breathtaking contemporary epic: a masterpiece by turns sweeping and intimate, that reckons with ambition and moderation, lust and loyalty, personal dreams and familial duty.
Min Jin Lee brings grand ambition, fierce heart, and the tenderest hope to a novel I didn't want to end." -- Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger
In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year.
Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children--Bo, DH, and Mido--find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John's oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California--where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children's futures.
The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other's lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security.
In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice--for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers--is a kind of prayer.
The Birthing Tree
by Amanda Peters
NATIONAL BESTSELLING AUTHOR - Carnegie-Winning Author - Winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize - A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
From the bestselling author of The Berry Pickers, an unforgettable novel about a woman who must confront her family's buried truths and memories of passionate young love when her grandmother's death leaves her as the only guide to her community's future
Born under the shadow of a birthing tree sacred to generations of Mi'kmaq women, Aliet Paul grows up outside a small Nova Scotia town with her fierce, loving grandmother Kiju. Her mother died bringing Aliet into the world under that very tree; her father remains a mystery no one will name. Aliet's childhood is shaped by seasonal apple pickers, the medicinal wisdom of the old ways, and the quiet, steadfast presence of John, a boy who becomes her anchor.
But the world beyond their community is changing. Traditional midwifery is condemned, prejudice deepens, and when the wrong person witnesses a birth, the consequences are disastrous. As Aliet comes of age, she navigates love, loss, and a personal tragedy that veers her from the path her grandmother wanted for her. She becomes a nurse trained in modern medicine, yet she carries Kiju's teachings close, tucked beside memories of the tree that once welcomed new life.
Years later, when the call comes that Kiju has died, Aliet returns home to a crumbling house, a community scattered, and a past she thought she'd outrun. As Aliet restores the house room by room, something inside her stirs awake: the threads of her lineage, the old ways of her grandmother, and the mystery of her own bloodline.
As Aliet digs to uncover who her family really is, each revelation pulls her deeper into a web of long-guarded silences, dangerous loyalties, and generational wounds that refuse to stay buried: Someone knew the truth about her mother's final moments. Someone knew what happened in the orchard all those years ago. And someone wants the past to remain undisturbed.
Spanning decades of loss and reclamation, this sweeping yet intimate novel follows one woman's journey to protect the land, the traditions, and the memory of the women who came before her--and to decide which parts of her inheritance she will carry into the future.
Hollow Bones
by Jodi Picoult
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of By Any Other Name comes a riveting novel about the risks we take to protect the ones we love in a world where crisis is always just around the corner.
On September 11, 2001, when Molly Fitzgerald was only two months old, her mother went to an appointment at the World Trade Center and never came home. Her father and the stepmother who raised her couldn't have loved her more, but she still grew up with a healthy dread of disasters.
Now an adult, she runs the Rhode Island Department for Emergency Preparedness, mapping out ways to save lives during storms, epidemics, and airplane crashes. She and her husband, Jesse--a police polygraph expert with his own history of crisis--have found a love that is a solace in a dangerous world. But then the unexpected upends their new marriage, leading them both to question everything they thought they knew.
Moving between past and present, Hollow Bones is an epic story of the lies we tell ourselves as we write the narratives of our lives, the plans we design to protect ourselves at the worst moments, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters.
Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel: The New Miss Marple Mystery
by Lucy Foley - Agatha Christie
The brand-new Miss Marple mystery from Lucy Foley, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Guest List and The Midnight Feast.
High in the Swiss Alps, accessible only by a single, winding railway, stands the luxurious Grand Alpine Hotel. With glorious mountain views and exclusive access to powdery slopes, it draws guests from far and wide.
The notorious actress.
The high-flying politician.
The society wife.
The reckless friend.
The shrewd doctor.
But not everyone is here for a winter holiday.
Beneath the champagne and furs, dark histories simmer; old grudges emerge like cracks in the ice.
And someone is watching from the shadows. A polite, unassuming woman with an extraordinary mind: Miss Marple.
When a body is found and a blizzard cuts off all escape, only Miss Marple can connect the clues before the killer strikes again. Because it isn't a question of who has a motive, but who's next? …
The Radiance
by Ayad Akhtar
A NEW YORK TIMES NOVEL EVERYONE WILL BE TALKING ABOUT IN 2026 - A TIME MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2026
"Simply put, a work of genius." -- Abraham Verghese, author of The Covenant of Water
When a hit-and-run shatters more than his body, a writer is plunged into a spiritual awakening he can't tell from madness. In its grip, he's drawn to a brilliant campus colleague by an uncanny pull, and into a scandal that threatens to destroy them both.
What begins as a provocative portrait of academic and cultural warfare deepens into erotic entanglement, the exposure of a family secret, and the mystery surrounding the narrator's accident--both the violence and its aftermath.
Moving between rural America and Europe, Islam and Christianity, the intimate and the metaphysical, The Radiance is of our American moment and beyond it--asking not only what has broken, but what radiance remains.
Sophie, Standing There
by Meg Mason
"So smart, so funny, so moving. I absolutely loved it."--Bonnie Garmus, New York Times bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry
The "brilliant" (Ann Patchett) and much beloved author of the critically acclaimed Sorrow and Bliss returns with a tender and hilarious novel about heartbreak and the journey from isolation and loneliness towards love.
Sophie Pattison loves books. And as well as a dream job at a local book festival, she has a husband she adores, a lifelong best friend, Emma, and a brother she's always been close to. Which makes you wonder why since Christmas Sophie has been living alone, estranged from Emma, avoiding her brother, and about to be fired.
Now it feels like the only thing she has left is reading. When Sophie re-discovers an author she first read in her twenties, the words on the page reach her in a new way--becoming both solace and company. Sophie devours every one of the author's novels and begins to dream of meeting her, but knows they never will. But what if she did? What if, by then, the author feels like a friend? What if, for Sophie, it feels almost like love?
In this much anticipated novel, Meg Mason captures the heartache and dark humor of our relationships in all their complexity, with a story about the power of connection and an ode to the inexplicable nature of the human heart.
Switzy
by Emma Cline
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE - A mesmerizing portrait of an aging man's last pilgrimage, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls and The Guest.
A private plane cuts through the winter night, somewhere over Greenland. David, a retired executive, sits back in his leather seat, playing solitaire on his phone. Click. Click. Drag. Click. The notebook in his jacket pocket is filled with familiar phrases, urgent reminders to himself, but he struggles to recognize his own handwriting.
A mystery, among many mysteries. The world, once so knowable, has been rendered inscrutable.
This is what David knows: Cody, his assistant, asleep in the seat next to him, will shepherd him along the voyage. A stopover in London. Dinner with his adult daughter. A meeting in France with an old friend, estranged for decades.
His final destination is Zurich.
David glides through hotel rooms and airports and foreign cities, running out the clock on his mortal life. His grasp on the present slips away, and the past rushes in: the Sunday roasts of childhood. The stiff clothes meant only for church. A summer at a school friend's house. The losses and missteps that punctuate a life.
As David's arrival in Zurich looms, an exquisitely rendered portrait of an unraveling mind emerges, both darkly humorous and profoundly moving. Hypnotic and startlingly original, Switzy probes the depths of human consciousness, revealing what a man is left with when the accomplishments and compromises that have defined him, and the illusions he's relied on, vanish.
The Witches of Cambridge
by Alice Hoffman
The brand-new series from the bestselling author of Practical Magic, following two brilliant young women in 1950s Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they become immersed in a mysterious secret group of witches at Radcliffe known as the Lilith Society.
Once upon a time, women were drowned in the river and the only witnesses were the crows in the trees. The Puritans blamed Eve for the sins of the world. That was when we began to meet in the name of Lilith, Adam's first wife--banished for refusing to do as she was told.
We Fly Together...
By the 1950s, Cambridge, Massachusetts feels far removed from the legendary witch trials that marked its early days as a colony. Ava, a bright young woman from a small town in Maine, arrives for her first year at Radcliffe College.
There, she meets Lauren, her opposite in every way--the wild and brazen daughter of a wealthy and well-established Cambridge family. But the two have more in common than they think. Both are recruited by the Lilith Society, a secret organization of witches at Radcliffe dating back to colonial times. As they learn more about their legacy, Ava and Lauren form a close bond that is put to the test as they learn to navigate their new power, friendship, and love.
While Radcliffe seems like a safe haven, the shadow of McCarthyism looms large, an ever-present threat to the flourishing creative and intellectual life in Cambridge. And as girls from the Lilith Society begin to go missing, Ava and Lauren realize the witch trials of the past may not be as deeply buried as they once believed.
Related Book Recommendations for Bookworms
Want more inspiration? Check out our guide to the best literary fiction books of Summer 2026. You may also enjoy our list of the best women's fiction and historical fiction novels coming out this fall.