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.
Best New Literary Fiction Books October 2026
Every Story Is a Love Story
by Imbolo Mbue
From the New York Times bestselling author of Behold the Dreamers and How Beautiful We Were, a captivating novel about love lost--and the weight of regret
"Every Story Is a Love Story is a deeply moving, beautifully told novel about grief, regret, anger, forgiveness, and the insistent resilience of the human heart. Imbolo Mbue's generosity on the page is breathtaking." -- Patrick Ryan, author of Buckeye
What if I'd never gotten into that car? What if I'd pulled out of the driveway five minutes earlier, or ten minutes later?
Three years ago, Wolo's wife was killed in a tragic car accident. In an instant, the great love of his life was gone, and so was their beautiful future. In the face of a loss that seemed insurmountable, Wolo has slowly rebuilt a semblance of a life: he goes to work, hangs out with a small circle of friends, and fends off the matchmaking efforts of the older women in his family. The grief that dogged him has, with time, become a little gentler.
Until a letter arrives one day, unbidden, threatening to upend his life once again. It is from Victoria, the woman who was behind the wheel that terrible day. Wolo's family pastor tells him the letter is the work of the devil; his mother expressly forbids him from making further mention of it; his father's second wife calls, from Cameroon, to tell him to destroy it. But Wolo ponders it for days, and ultimately agrees to meet with the woman who killed his wife. When he does, the compassion and deep remorse of the woman affects him in ways he had never imagined, and he begins to wonder if the long road to healing can be shared.
What do we owe to those who have hurt us? Are we defined by our worst moments and our deepest regrets? And, more than anything, can forgiveness ease our suffering? Moving and full of life, Every Story Is a Love Story charts the uneven path from heartbreak to healing.
Fair Ones: A Double Novel
by Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet's dialogue-driven, fast-moving double novel Fair Ones follows two Brooklyn women in their forties reeling from the sudden and baffling death of their friend Claire. Fair, Mara's account, opens in the wake of initial shock as she and Jen come to grips with the enigma of Claire's killing. Ones, told from Jen's point of view, picks up a year later as she and Mara wrestle with new relationships and old secrets.
In this vibrant, funny-sad fiction of companionship and solitude, Millet dazzles with dry wit and sharp prose. The narrators' inner and outer conversations, and their ongoing entanglement with the memory of Claire, explore the ways we create and define ourselves through others. Fair Ones is a love song to the intricate annoyances of families both chosen and unchosen--and to the banality, bombast, and humble beauties of midlife friendships.
Partita
by Barbara Kingsolver
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Demon Copperhead, a story of a brief, passionate, life-changing love affair, wrapped up in what might be the greatest romance of all: our eternal human longing for art and beauty.
Livia Cable has made her peace with her marriage and modest livelihood in the farm country where she grew up, until a shocking phone call from an old lover shakes her to the core. Decades earlier, this man knew her as Livia Bohusz, a music conservatory student estranged from her home and family, uncertain of anything except her passion for music and promise as an extraordinary pianist. His request, now, to see her again stirs up ghosts she's kept at bay for a lifetime.
Shifting between past and present, Livia's decision to meet or reject the reunion means confronting step by step, in memories framed as musical dances, the experiences of childhood loss, abandonment, self-immolating passion, and perilous attachment to a man who broke her belief in love and ruptured the course of her life.
With razor-sharp acuity and deep affection, Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver's unforgettable new novel reflects on class barriers, the risks of ambition, and the timeless, life-changing power of art.
Peck & Peck
by Bonnie Garmus
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE, COUNTRY LIVING, AND BOOKPAGE
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of global sensation Lessons in Chemistry returns with an irresistible, delightful, and tender literary novel set in the publishing world of 1980s New York City about a young man whose life turns upside down when he is hired by the most prestigious, secretive, and dysfunctional poetry journal in the world: the renowned Peck & Peck.
Find originality. Reward creativity. Burn the rest.
It's 1982, New York City. Crime is on the rise, muggings are in the streets, and Batter Gray, recent college graduate with a skill that no one wants--an "ear" for poetry--is worried about his future. While all of his friends have real jobs, he's folding T-shirts at the Gap. As for love? No. Not unless you count Sallie Mae, the student loan tyrant. He hears from Sallie all the time.
But when Batter gets a dream job at Peck & Peck, the most prestigious poetry quarterly in the world, his life moves into the literary fast lane. Soon Batter is knee-deep in the secret war between the two Editors in Chief, the famous Peck brothers--twins and enemies--as well as being privy to the private affairs of their thirty-nine editors, whose professed mission is the same: Find originality. Reward creativity. Burn the rest.
And by burn, they mean incinerate. Because at Peck & Peck, "good" isn't good enough, "interesting" doesn't cut it, plagiarists aren't tolerated, and parolees run the mailroom. Still want to submit your poem? Go with God.
Welcome to another dazzling and unforgettable novel from Bonnie Garmus. If you loved Lessons in Chemistry, you will love Peck & Peck.
Royal Witch
by Philippa Gregory
Royal Witch: the gripping new novel from the international bestselling author. Ambition. Sorcery. Treason. How far will one woman dare to go?
1420. Eleanor Cobham arrives at the court of Henry V. Pretty but not highborn, she hopes for nothing more than to marry well.
It is a golden age for England, its royal family's dynasty stretching across Europe. But chaos waits in the shadows. Betrayals and shifts of power change the flourishing world Eleanor has stepped into.
Working in the household of a Countess who commands her own army, Eleanor begins to see for the first time what a woman is capable of...what men's promises are truly worth.
As the safe, comfortable future she'd envisioned begins to shift, Eleanor changes with it. Now she must use her wits to survive - and to rise. Her newfound ambition will to carry her further than any woman before has dared. But if she is to rule England itself, she will need to turn to darker arts..
Solace House
by Will MacLean
You are about to enter a place of strange genius, possible madness, and timeless love ...
"The Secret History meets The Haunting of Hill House ... rich, thoughtful, terrifying." -- Nicholas Binge, author of Dissolution
An addictive and brilliant puzzle box of a novel following a group of university students who discover an astonishing secret while clearing out a neglected Victorian mansion
For Alex Lane's wealthy university friends, the summer break stretches out before them, full of promise and fabulous plans. But for Alex, broke as usual, going home is not an option. So when the university offers him an unusual summer job clearing out a dilapidated Victorian mansion, Solace House, he jumps at the chance.
Alex joins an unlikely crew of students, from stoner Clive to uptight, short-tempered Helen, and the extremely peculiar Adam. Alex is particularly drawn to mercurial, red-headed Ella, and as the students begin sorting through piles of old newspapers and magazines, dusty antiques, and esoteric junk, Alex and Ella become enthralled by the elaborate and eerie journals of the house's former owner, Edwin Flayne. In these diaries, Flayne details his obsession with his missing mother and his belief in a mysterious realm lying parallel to ours, along with coded instructions on how it might be reached.
As the students gradually uncover the house's secrets, the rift between those who want to delve further and those who believe they've already gone too far grows ever wider.
The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City
by Susanna Clarke
From the bestselling and prize-winning author of Piranesi, an enchanting, beautifully illustrated short story set in the world of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.
'He had already served three kings. He did not see why he should not be useful to a fourth.'
During the conquest of Northern England, the fairy host sweeps across the countryside. The city of Durham finds itself surrounded. But the encircling forces are not fairies, nor even other humans, but trees that trap the city within an eerie wood.
Ranulf, Bishop of Durham-a consummate politician-understands that the survival of the Northern English people depends on his finding a way to unite the two races, human and fairy. And he's not averse to improving his own position at the same time. With these aims in view, he sets off for the New Castle, in search of the new King-the leader of the fairy host, rumored to be a mysterious human boy, no more than fourteen years old, who speaks no word of any human language.
Set 700 years before the events of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City is a bewitching, must-have addition to any fantasy reader's shelf, featuring beautiful illustrations throughout.
The Brightness
by Chad Harbach
From the bestselling author of literary sensation The Art of Fielding comes an urgent, deeply felt story of friendship, art, love, and grief, following two young women on the brink of irrevocable change.
Parties and weddings, messy hookups and marred friendships, art and love and grief--The Brightness follows the electric, chaotic, everything-can-happen lives of Pella and her best friend, Irma, as they fumble their way out of sleepy, Midwestern Westish College and into a larger world that will upend their connection and everything they thought they understood about their own place within it.
At 27, Pella's life looks settled: she's a recent college grad, engaged to Mike, her longtime boyfriend, and helping her friend Owen pull off his own destination wedding on Block Island. But over that wild wedding weekend, Pella's past and present collide spectacularly, blowing up her plans and sending her spiraling toward an unplanned future in New York City. Meanwhile, back at Westish College, 21-year-old Irma's involvement with a politically charged prank--one that has roiled both the campus and the world beyond--threatens to derail her brilliant future. As Irma and Pella cycle through possibilities and identities, both navigate the heights and depths of passion and ambition, and the incalculable wages of love and loss.
In stunning scenes and spectacular characters--each drawn with an almost superhuman vividness and humanity--Chad Harbach captures that specific, shimmering anxiety of your twenties when life still feels wide open, even as hard and irreversible choices start closing in.
Energetic, funny, and deeply human, this much-anticipated follow-up to The Art of Fielding confirms Chad Harbach as one of the most accomplished and deep-seeing writers of our time.
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.