There are an insane number of books coming out in September that I cannot wait to read. Including some of my most anticipated sequels. All of these are ones that I honestly wish I could read as soon as they come out. Sadly I can’t but I do hope to get to them sooner rather than later.
September 1
From Marlon James, author of the Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings: a propulsive novel about the murder of a gay man in 1980s Jamaica and its tragic consequences.
In 1988, eight men in Kingston, Jamaica begin rehearsals for a play. Though strangers to one another, they share an inescapable truth: All of them are gay. And they live in a world that refuses to accept them.
One night the men are savagely beaten and one of them is killed. As their bodies heal, the survivors begin to face the hatred and contempt that the violence laid bare. Some try to ignore what happened. Others double down on retribution. Some disappear completely.
In The Disappearers, Marlon James has written a riveting and deeply human story of men forced to make compromises to survive what the society they live in demands. It is both a dramatic page-turner and an unflinching exploration of queer life in Jamaica during the 1980s and 1990s.
Every wedding guest’s worst nightmare is on repeat in this wild and twisty new horror novel from the New York Times bestselling author of So Thirsty and Play Nice.
It’s the picture-perfect wedding The venue is dreamy, the weather is beautiful, love is in the air—and Willa Sullivan is having a bad time. She’s excited to celebrate her best friends finally having the big wedding they’ve always wanted, but this is the first time she’s seen her ex-fiancé in months, and he brought a date. Everything feels off, like she stumbled into an alternate universe. But things start to look up when Willa meets Danny, the groom’s charming and single childhood best friend. When they sneak off together, their rendezvous is interrupted by a masked killer terrorizing the reception. Willa and Danny fight to save the ones they love and survive the night, but the killer is unrelenting. A final girl, Willa is not.
Or is she? She wakes up and it’s the morning of the wedding. She just had the most intense nightmare of her life. Only as the day unfolds, there are some uncanny coincidences that make her question whether it was really a dream, déjà vu, or something more sinister. After a horrifying turn of events, Willa comes to understand that she’s stuck in a loop of carnage and terror that she must learn how to escape or else suffer a fate worse than death—being an eternal wedding guest.
Two rivals from opposing families fight their forbidden attraction to each other in the brand new romance from New York Times bestselling author Penelope Douglas.
Summertime is off-season in southern Florida. Families leave their homes to escape the heat, the streets are empty, and the nights are quiet. Perfect time for a little mischief while the police aren’t looking.
As the middle Jaeger brother, Dallas was often lost in the shuffle growing up. Now a man, he’s prideful of his community on the wrong side of the tracks—Sanoa Bay—and aggressively protective of his land and his inner circle. He’s hungry and ready for a fight.
Callum Ames has a reputation in St. Carmen, the affluent neighborhood abutting Sanoa Bay. The hottest. The most popular. Rich. Powerful. Strong. The one all the women want. After four years away, he’s back, but for all his bravado, he’s got one major secret: he doesn’t want a woman.
Summer is also storm season. Heat, wind, rain…
And a lockdown.
In a desperate bid to impress his influential father, Callum suggests a curfew to hinder their rivals in the Bay.
Unfortunately, the Jaegers don’t like rules.
As Dallas and Callum face off and engage, out for each other’s blood, they can’t stop the consuming fire between them and the outcome they already see coming…
The storm of the century.
Shrek meets The Princess Bride in this cozy, low-stakes romantic fantasy. The Pumpkin Bridedelivers all the autumnal feels, a dash of spice, and a guaranteed HEA!
Some curses just need a cozy fire, a little magic, and a second chance to break them.
A cursed knight.
Sir Bram Duncan was once a knight of legend in Harvest Hollow—until the whim of a jealous prince and the trickery of an autumn sprite turned him into the hulking orc Jask Bone-Cracker, and tethered him to Grimroot Farm. For three long, lonely years, he’s hidden his monstrous form and the truth of what happened the night he lost everything, including his true love, Princess Marigold.
A runaway princess.
Fleeing an arranged marriage to the vain and intolerable Prince Crispin, Marigold finds a safe haven when she stumbles across Jask’s charmed pumpkin farm deep in the forest. Sensing glimmers of gentleness—and a surprising talent for baking—beneath the grumpy orc’s imposing exterior, she begins to feel a familiar longing she believed dead when her Bram disappeared.
One true love.
As magic stirs and pies are baked, truths about Jask’s curse begin to surface. But curses don’t break easily, and wronged princes don’t capitulate. As their peace is threatened, Jask and Marigold must decide: cling to the lies that protect them, or risk everything for a love that could set them free.
Tropes:
• Grumpy x Sunshine
• Dark Secret
• Beauty and the Beast
• Hidden Identity
• Second Chance
• Childhood Sweetheart
• One True Love
September 8
A dark and propulsive new epic fantasy from the #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Fallen Gods trilogy. An intricate tale of warring kingdoms, female rage and a wild magic that refuses to be tamed.
“Death is come to take you home, death of blood and thorn and bone…”
Tilde has always heard the whispers of the kithwood, the voices of her ancestors speaking through the mysterious forest of her homeland.
But now both the kithwood and her kingdom are in danger.
For Tilde is the only surviving heir of a conquered land. To unite the people and finally stop the bloodshed, she marries the aging warlord, King Liran. Her duty is to bind their nations and bear him a son.
But the swan king’s court is dangerous. Tilde is a threat to the claim of Liran’s older sons, who will do whatever it takes to remove her, to the princess Elise who has only ever known loyalty to her family, and to the priests who own them all.
Yet none of them know that Tilde is a snake in their midst, with allies on her side and dark, forbidden power of her own. She wants her kingdom back, and she will sacrifice everything to claim it.
For the queen to rise, the swans must fall.
September 10
It’s the summer of 1951 and everyone is looking to put the dark days of the war behind them. The government’s The Festival of Britain, a celebration of the country’s creativity, grit and ingenuity.
For foreign correspondent turned war reporter Harry Flynn, it might offer the chance of redemption after a bad war in the Far East and a peace that is proving no easier to negotiate. Having failed to resume his journalistic career, he reluctantly joins an oddball team of misfits, ne’er-do-wells and downright chancers helping to ready the Festival of Britain for launch.
Flynn’s attempts to resume some semblance of a romantic life also founder when one of his dates goes missing and he is deemed to be the last person to have seen her alive. Could he have been in some way responsible for her disappearance?
Little does he realize that the answer to some of his mounting problems may lie in the hands of a precocious, straight-talking thirteen-year-old called Veronica and a rather scruffy terrier who goes by the name of Mrs Betty…
Brilliantly plotted, witty and compelling, Our Noble Selves reaffirms Kate Atkinson’s place as one of the greatest chroniclers of our times.
September 15
The final book in the Ninth House trilogy so no synopsis since it’s spoilers.
O’Connor, a vivacious, free-spirited young journalist known for her penetrating celebrity interviews, is bent on unearthing secrets long ago buried by the handsome showbiz team of singer Vince Collins and comic Lanny Morris. These two highly desirable men, once inseparable (and insatiable, where women were concerned), were driven apart by a bizarre and unexplained death in which one of them may have played the part of murderer. As the tart-tongued, eye-catching O’Connor ventures deeper into this unsolved mystery, she finds herself compromisingly coiled around both men, knowing more about them than they realize and less than she might like, but increasingly fearful that she now knows far too much.
This novel of intrigue speeds from one vivid setting to another, all of them factually real even as they are fantastically a clandestine club in Disneyland with a dazzlingly well-stocked bar; a dizzying Shangri-La of a castle hidden away in Burbank; a drive-in movie theater nestled below the most chic streets of midtown Manhattan; an elegant table for four perched thirty thousand feet above the earth.
September 17
From the bestselling author of Station Eleven, Exit Party is Emily St. John Mandel’s epic new story of crimes committed and loves lost across worlds and decades.
2031. America is at war with itself, but for the first time in weeks there is some hope: the Republic of California has been declared, the curfew in Los Angeles is lifted, and everyone in the city is going to a party.
Ari, newly released from prison, arrives with her friend Gloria just as a fragile new era begins. But there are people at the party who shouldn’t be there. Something is very wrong…
Years later, living a different life in Paris, Ari remains haunted by that night. Whatever happened at the party fractured her sense of reality – and may hold the key to a very different world.
Freedom and surveillance, art and survival, love and loss in a broken world: Exit Party is the electrifying new novel from Emily St. John Mandel.
September 22
He has a secret. She knows he’s lying…
YOU THINK YOU KNOW THE PEOPLE YOU LOVE
Nadeeka is certain Jamie is having an affair. She knows the tell-tale signs. She’s been here before.
YOU THINK YOU KNOW WHO YOU CAN TRUST
When Jamie claims to be at work late, she knows he’s lying. He’s with another woman, and she’s determined to catch him in the act.
YOU THINK YOU KNOW HOW THE STORY ENDS
But when Nadeeka arrives home to confront him, Jamie can’t explain himself. The house has become a crime scene…Jamie is dead.
Not all nightmares come from sleep. Some come from #1 New York Times bestselling author Jeneva Rose.
Three horror stories.
A dinner party. A quiet house. A roadside stop.
You’ll recognize the setup.
You won’t recognize what comes next.
Never Kill the Medium
A thirtieth birthday dinner turns deadly after someone hires a medium for a playful séance. When the ritual spirals out of control and the medium dies, the guests cover it up—unaware that leaving the séance unfinished has allowed something dark to cross over.
The Nightmare House
The Dalton family moves into what they believe is their forever home, in the quiet town of Tillington—until the house whispers, the neighbors watch, and no one believes the one person who knows something is wrong. Newly postpartum, Kristin Dalton soon uncovers a horrifying every family who has lived in this house has died or disappeared.
All Curses Are Final
On the way to a remote winter cabin, a group of friends stops at a roadside store with a hand-painted “All items cursed. Curse lifted at time of sale.” They laugh it off—until one of them discovers an item in her bag she never paid for. As the storm traps them inside the cabin and bodies start to pile up, paranoia takes hold and suspicion turns inward.
All the Sinners Bleed meets My Sister, the Serial Killer in this literary thriller following the grandson of a famous Black actress from the 1940s and 1950s, now a filmmaker himself, who returns to his grandmother’s cabin retreat in the California mountains only to encounter the legacy of her rage.
With flashbacks to Johnny’s grandmother, this novel explores three generations beginning with Mazelle Washington’s life as a young actress. Fifty years after Mazelle’s death, Johnny will discover the secret she’s kept and nurtured since she was a child when she had a dark wish come true.
There’s a monster in the woods outside her mountain retreat, Mazywood, and it is lonely and angry.
From New York Times bestselling author L.J. Shen comes a sizzling age-gap, forbidden MM romance about an FBI agent and the Camorra enforcer who thaws his frozen heart.
Tom
I know a secret that can destroy the most powerful crime organization in America.
For years, I’ve watched Enzo Ferrante get away with murder. Literally.
He’s slipped between the FBI’s fingers time after time, spreading terror and mayhem on the streets of New York, masked beneath a gorgeous face and elegant pedigree.
A sloppy error on his part results in an incident that unexpectedly binds us together.
Suddenly, I’m no longer the special agent who is thirsty for his blood.
I’m his savior. His god. The light in his pitch-black existence.
Now that I caught the social butterfly in my spider web, I’m never letting go.
He is about to taste the venomous kiss of betrayal as I put him and his entire family behind bars for the rest of their lives.
Because when the night falls, the Camorra’s enforcer crawls between my sheets and whispers all his sordid secrets in my ear.
Enzo Ferrante is completely and utterly mine, and no one knows. Not even not his lovely fiancée.
One dead body. Seven mystery writers. And they all know how to get away with murder. In this wickedly clever whodunit, the only thing more dangerous than the setting . . . is the guest list—from the bestselling author of Save the Cat! Writes a Novel.
If you want to write a murder, you have to set it in the right location—like an old, converted monastery with an ominous past, hidden deep in the mountains. Then, you have to invite the right people—like a group of mystery writers attending a prestigious mystery-writing conference.
Of course, someone should show up uninvited—like the disgraced literary agent accused of stealing from his top client. Everyone in the story must be hiding something so they can all become suspects when someone ends up dead. That’s when they’ll turn on each other, digging into the past to uncover dark truths—like a book canceled on the eve of publication, two million dollars in missing royalties, and an obsessive fan with a hidden agenda.
But don’t forget to trap everyone there—a landslide should do the trick—so they can’t escape when more people turn up dead. . . .
Welcome to the perfect murder. Nothing will go wrong. Because if anyone can get away with murder, it’s a writer.
A dark and steamy debut novel about a girl—who is sometimes a cat—and the witch she loves, as secrets from her past threaten to unravel the delicate balance of her present, from screenwriter Amanda Mortlock.
Cleo is a willfully aloof college student with an impossible secret. When she meets Wes, a brooding musician, at a Halloween party, their connection is instant, electric, and impossible to ignore. Their romance takes a mystical turn when Wes discovers what Cleo’s been hiding: sometimes she takes the form of his pet cat.
Enter Bailey and Ollie—their magical counterparts—who reveal a deeper tie between Cleo and Wes: he’s a witch, and she’s his animal familiar. As past secrets collide with their entangled present, Cleo faces her greatest fear—losing Wes. With long-gone threats returning and danger looming, Cleo must confront her role in their dark and violent shared history and decide if she’s willing to fight for their future.
For fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and highly bingeable thrillers, Lucy Kline, Necromancer, is a Nancy Drew-style murder mystery mixed with the occult.
It’s been two years since Lucy’s twin sister was presumed dead. As the only person who knew about Louisa’s plan to sneak out on the night she was killed, Lucy still feels responsible for her sister’s grim fate—despite the fact that it was Lucy who eventually cracked the case, putting Louisa’s killer in jail.
Or so she thought.
When another girl who looks just like Louisa goes missing under similarly mysterious circumstances, and ghostly dreams begin to plague Lucy, she throws herself back into the investigation. The more clues she uncovers, the more her nightmares bleed into reality. And signs start to point to the necromancy.
With the help of her classmate Howie and a retired medieval history professor, Lucy must find the culprit behind these disappearances and finally come to terms with the grief that’s haunted her for years.
September 29
The next book in the blockbuster Empyrean series, Threshing Day contains thirteen stories starring your favorite characters and their dragons.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Trust turns to the future with a novel that examines the place of technology in the American imagination
Centuries from now, at the dawn of a historical epoch filled with both uncertainty and promise, an orphan is adrift in a city on the brink of a great transformation. The state has been dismantled, and humans are reinventing social bonds and learning new ways to coexist with nature. Following a childhood defined by loss, survival, and found family, the orphan grows up to become a “pincher,” someone who steals electricity from the grid to sell it on the black market. It’s a high-risk life, one that brings her into a rich art and music scene where she powers underground concerts. It also leads her to a colossal scientific invention that could change the very fabric of reality.
After rewriting America’s past with his two previous novels, Hernan Diaz defies expectations with his third and gives us a breathtaking glimpse into the future. A major achievement from a major contemporary writer, Ply questions the place of technology in the American experiment with a plot that grabs both heart and mind. It is a novel of ideas built from a story of people. Combining Dickensian odyssey, family drama, and scientific thriller, Ply poignantly charts the tenuous boundaries of selfhood and the distance that inevitably stands between us and those we love.
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Better Than the Movies, Lynn Painter, comes a rags-to-riches rom-com about a small-town girl whose family inherits a fortune and moves to New York City, where she meets a big-city boy hiding an explosive secret.
Julia is just a small-town girl from Nebraska who loves her peaceful life. But when her elderly next-door neighbor—who just happens to be a secret multi-millionaire—leaves everything to Julia and her family after his passing, Julia is swept away to live in a historic brownstone in New York City and attend an elite private school for the super-rich.
It should be a dream come true. Wrong. Julia doesn’t fit in at her new school; worse, she’s failing. Enter Damion, the mysterious and handsome tutor who will get Julia back on track. Except Damion has a secret. He is the great-nephew of the man who left everything to Julia’s family. Damion doesn’t buy for a second that the person who was like a father to him would leave his home to strangers. And he’s determined to prove it.
To uncover the truth, Damion schemes to earn Julia’s trust. Not an easy task with Julia unsure about this rich boy with a rebellious personality. But the more time Damion spends with Julia, the more his plan begins to backfire. Because he is falling for the enemy—and the enemy is falling for him.
As Damion and Julia figure out where they belong, can they see past their differences and act on their feelings, or will the trust Damion has worked so hard to gain fall apart?
Return to the world of Truly Devious as Stevie Bell and her friends travel to New York to solve a murder in the next standalone mystery from New York Times bestselling author Maureen Johnson.
Welcome back to Harker Academy for Deviant Defense, where the line between hunter and hunted has never been thinner.
From the three-time Bram Stoker Award–winning author of Good Neighbors comes a chilling tale of a journalist’s descent into horror as she uncovers the dark secrets behind a trad wife influencer, blending suspense with a critique of modern femininity and the manipulative forces of social media.
Every day, millions watch Mia Wright, the “trad wife” queen, on her idyllic 300-acre farm. With her handsome husband, seven perfect children, and a life of from-scratch meals and pastoral bliss, she’s an icon of modern femininity. But behind every perfect image is a secret. And in this case, the secret is a horror.
Desperate to save her tarnished career, journalist Jenny Kaplan arrives at Black Swan Farm to profile Mia. Jenny is ready to write a scathing exposé, determined to expose the deception behind Mia’s curated life. But soon, Jenny has more to contend with than staged videos and picture-perfect poses. There’s something wrong at the farmhouse. Something slithers through Jenny’s dreams, and at night, the children sing strange nursery rhymes.
She’s losing time. She’s losing her hair. She starts to worry that she’s losing her mind.
There is a horror at the heart of Black Swan, and it’s waiting just for Jenny. Trad Wife will make you question what’s real and what’s just a perfectly curated deception…
Will you see the lie?
From the bestselling author of The Housekeepers comes a glossy, dark, page-turning mystery to rival The White Lotus – unfolding over twenty-four fateful hours in London’s most lavish hotel.
1923. Diana Gold, owner and impresario, throws open the doors to the most opulent new hotel in London. As the champagne flows and the chandeliers shimmer, millionaires and gamblers rub shoulders with film stars and royalty. Everyone who’s anyone is here.
Everyone, that is, except two guests due at midnight. Powerful and dangerous, they’ve dragged Diana from the gutter and taught her all she knows. Her fate rests in their hands. If everything goes right, a whole new life awaits. One mistake will cost her everything.
For this is much more than a hotel – it’s the heart of Diana’s intricate masterplan. Over twenty-four fateful hours, her guests will learn why they’re really here. And Diana will take perfect care of them – unless they take care of her first.
But when a body is found in the depths of the hotel, Diana’s lavish opening night suddenly spirals out of control. . .
Dive into the chilling depths of Latiné horror with Something Followed Us Home, edited by Bram Stoker Award–winner Cynthia Pelayo, a groundbreaking anthology where each story reimagines immigration, colonization, faith, and folklore as the fears we inherit and carry across borders and generations.
Something followed us home. It crawled in with our prayers, slipped into our beds, watched from mirrors, waited in water, and learned our names. In these stories, horror does not announce itself. It possesses, feeds, whispers, and waits.
Gathering chilling work from some of today’s most acclaimed Latiné voices, this anthology moves through haunted households, brutal landscapes, sacred spaces turned dangerous, and bodies claimed by forces both ancient and intimate. The dead murmur behind locked doors. Bones rebuild themselves under merciless suns. Love becomes a doorway for demonic hunger. Prayers summon answers that arrive too late…or too fully. Blood, devotion, and memory intertwine as the past presses back with teeth.
Books With Cassie 