The Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2025

Say goodbye to your beach reads and hello to the most anticipated books of the fall. The upcoming season’s new releases include Margaret Atwood’s long-awaited debut memoir, Too Big to Fail author Andrew Ross Sorkin’s deep dive into the 1929 Wall Street crash, and Patricia Lockwood’s mind-melting follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2021 novel, No One Is Talking About This.

Between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, the “queen of royal fiction” Philippa Gregory returns to King Henry VIII’s court with the story of Anne Boleyn’s sister-in-law. TIME editor at large and best-selling author of Apollo 13 Jeffrey Kluger offers a cinematic retelling of the least appreciated—and most groundbreaking—space program in American history. Elizabeth Gilbert is back with her first nonfiction book in a decade, a memoir about reclaiming her identity after an unfathomable loss. Salman Rushdie’s latest—his third since he was violently attacked onstage in 2022—is a collection of stories that explore life’s final moments.

From Bolu Babalola’s steamy follow-up to her 2022 best seller Honey and Spice to an ecological thriller from A Burning author Megha Majumdar, here are the 24 books you’ll want to add to your fall reading list.

Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy (Sept. 2) 

With her debut memoir, Arundhati Roy chronicles what it was like being raised by her mother Mary, an influential educator and formidable women’s rights activist who was “a terror and a wonder to behold,” according to her daughter. At the age of 18, Roy left her mom’s unpredictably volatile home in order to get away from her behavior, but, also, as the Booker Prize-winning author explains, “to be able to continue to love her.” Mother Mary Comes to Me is a candid look at the shadow Roy’s charismatic late mother cast over the author’s life, work, and memories.

Kiki Banjo, the protagonist of Bolu Babalola’s latest romance, Sweet Heat, hosts a popular podcast where she dishes out modern love advice. But the 28-year-old hasn’t had much luck in the relationship department lately. Several years earlier, she fell head over heels for a smooth-talking filmmaker named Malakai Korede, only for him to leave her for Hollywood. While she’s since started seeing a wealthy app developer, she’s never quite gotten over her ex whose career is soaring just as hers is beginning to languish. When she finds herself face-to-face with Malakai at her best friend’s wedding—where not only is she the maid of honor, but he’s the best man—she must ignore the spark that still burns between them. Unfortunately for her, that’s easier said than done. 

Joan Silber’s tenth novel begins in an East Village apartment in the 1970s, where Ivan, a wayward cab driver, and his best friend, Eddie, a gregarious bartender, are experimenting with drugs. When Eddie suffers a heroin overdose, Ivan rushes him to the emergency room. Convinced that Eddie is going to die and he will be blamed for it, Ivan abandons him and never looks back. Mercy is an expansive tale about guilt and forgiveness that traces the ripple effects of one man’s most regrettable decision over five decades.

All the Way to the River, Elizabeth Gilbert (Sept. 9)

Nearly 20 years after the release of Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert returns with her fourth memoir, which recounts how losing the love of her life led to her salvation. In 2000, Gilbert met Rayya Elias, a vibrant Syrian hairdresser and musician who would become one of her closest friends. Sixteen years later, when Elias was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic and liver cancer, the pair became lovers who shared everything—including their addictions. (Gilbert was addicted to love and sex, while Elias, who died in 2018, struggled with drug dependency.) All the Way to the River is a collection of stories, poems, journal entries, photos, and drawings that act as a loving tribute to Elias, an unfiltered descent into substance abuse, and an intimate look at Gilbert’s hard fought road to recovery. 

With her eighth nonfiction book, Mary Roach offers a fascinating tour of the wonderful world of regenerative medicine. Across 288 pages, she explores the earliest examples of cell repair, tissue engineering, and the creation of artificial organs. She interviews researchers, surgeons, pathologists, and amputees in an attempt to answer the difficult questions surrounding the creation, application, and efficacy of replacement body parts. She also travels to a burn unit in Boston, spends time in a working iron lung from the 1950s, and visits a stem cell “hair nursery” in San Diego, to investigate the ever-expanding medical field firsthand. 

At nearly 700 pages, Booker Prize-winning author Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a sweeping romance that spans decades and continents. After finishing college in Vermont, Sonia, a lonely aspiring novelist, returns to her family in India. On her way there, she meets Sunny, a struggling New York-based journalist who her grandparents once tried to set her up with. The two never got around to meeting back then, but over the course of an overnight train ride, they realize that they have a lot more in common than just their meddling relatives. Specifically, they are both looking for an escape from their current situations. In this epic about love, writing, and destiny, the pair embark on a journey that will change their lives forever.

Priestdaddy author Patricia Lockwood’s sophomore novel centers around a woman who is suffering from a mysterious neurological illness that has caused her to disconnect from reality. Inspired by Lockwood’s own bout with COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic, an unnamed author finds herself suffering from disorientation, short-term memory loss, and paranoid delusions amid a global catastrophe. Will There Ever Be Another You follows the protagonist’s surreal trip down the rabbit hole to reclaim her identity. 

Heart the Lover, Lily King (Sept. 30) 

Best-selling author Lily King’s sixth novel looks at a love triangle’s lingering consequences. In her senior year of college, Heart the Lover’s protagonist, an English major who goes by the nickname Jordan, meets Sam, a snobbish classmate who quickly becomes her boyfriend. He teaches her about literature, religion, and obscure card games, but, more importantly, he introduces her to his brainy best friend Yash. When Jordan starts having feelings for Yash, the two begin a whirlwind affair that ends in heartbreak, resentment, and regret. Decades later, when the pair unexpectedly reunite, she is forced to confront the decisions she made in her youth in order to finally move on with her life.

In a near-future India that has been destroyed by extreme heat, drought, and a devastating food shortage, Ma has a chance to flee to the United States with her two-year-old daughter and aging father. But a week before they’re set to leave, she realizes that her purse with all their immigration documents inside is gone. Set over the course of seven days, Megha Majumdar’s haunting second novel follows Ma as she embarks on an exhilarating search for her lost belongings and the person who stole them.

All That We See or Seem, Ken Liu (Oct. 14) 

Ken Liu returns with All That We See or Seem, the first book in his forthcoming techno thriller series that centers around Julia Z, a famous 20-something hacker who has given up her high-stakes cyber punk life for a solitary existence in the Boston suburbs. That is until she’s asked to find a woman who was recently kidnapped. The missing person in question is an artist named Elli, who created an immersive experience using dreams to combat loneliness. Elli’s been taken by a mysterious crime boss with a connection to her artwork. In order to save her, Julia must solve an increasingly complex puzzle that forces her to question reality.

Almost 25 years after the release of her best-selling novel The Other Boleyn Girl, Philippa Gregory is back with a historical drama that focuses on a lesser known Boleyn girl. The Boleyn Traitor tells the story of Jane Boleyn, the sister-in-law of King Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, who was beheaded after being found guilty of adultery, incest, and conspiracy against the crown. Historians believe it was Jane’s allegedly fabricated testimony that led to Anne’s tragic demise. But was Jane really a traitor or was she desperate to simply survive the royal court? This novel about ambition and betrayal looks to answer that very question.

Susan Orlean, the author and journalist behind much celebrated works of literary nonfiction including 1998’s The Orchid Thief, which later inspired the Spike Jonze film Adaptation, is looking inward. Her memoir, Joyride, takes a deep dive into her life, recounting the end of her first marriage, falling in love again, and becoming a mother while saying goodbye to her own. It also acts as a master class in journalism from a bygone era, offering insight into how the longtime New Yorker writer comes up with story ideas, crafts a compelling narrative, stays on deadline, and confronts writer’s block.

Andrew Ross Sorkin’s follow-up to Too Big to Fail, which chronicles the events of the 2008 financial crisis, dives deep into the most infamous crash in Wall Street history. Using historical records along with newly uncovered documents, letters, diaries, and transcripts, 1929 looks at the cataclysmic event through the eyes of those most closely involved. Sorkin introduces readers to the politicians, visionaries, skeptics, and fraudsters who were involved in the era-defining moment, while also laying out the eerie parallels between those powerful 20th-century players and today’s most formidable U.S. leaders.

Author and poet Quan Barry’s horrifying new novel, The Unveiling, begins on a luxury cruise set sail for Antarctica. Striker, a film location scout, has been hired to check out the area for an upcoming big budget blockbuster. The project is about explorer Ernest Shackleton’s 1915 expedition to the Antarctic and its doomed fate. When a freak accident leaves Striker, who is Black, and her fellow wealthy, mostly white passengers stranded on a remote island, she not only has to contend with her privileged shipmates, but the ghosts of shipwrecks past in this supernatural hair-raiser about identity, guilt, and survival.  

Hiromi Kawakami’s 2020 novel, The Third Love, newly translated from the original Japanese by Ted Goossen, is a centuries-spanning historical romance set in Japan. After discovering that her husband is cheating on her, Riko is given an opportunity to magically escape her flawed reality and live inside her dreams. Each night she is able to give love another chance. But there’s a catch: she’s not appearing as herself in her fantasies. Instead, she takes on different identities, from a high-ranking 17th century courtesan to a handmaiden to a princess from the Middle Ages. In this time-traveling meditation on marriage, Riko reconsiders what it means to be a modern wife.

In Jaquira Díaz’s debut novel, This Is the Only Kingdom, a mother and daughter deal with the fallout of a murder that rocks their tight-knit Puerto Rican community. In 1975, a 16-year-old house cleaner named Maricarmen falls in love with Rey el Cantante, a strong-willed musician and petty thief beloved by the barrio locals. But Maricarmen’s mother disapproves of the relationship—and throws her daughter out of the house because of it. Newly on her own, Maricarmen discovers she’s pregnant and is left to support herself and her baby girl after Rey goes on the run from the law. Fifteen years later, a shocking act of violence upends Maricarmen’s life, forcing her to make a difficult decision that puts her already complicated relationship with her grown-up daughter in jeopardy.

With her wide-ranging new essay collection, Dead and Alive, Zadie Smith finds light amid the darkness of our present moment by putting the focus on the art and artists that she admires most. Across 30 essays, Smith celebrates the work of painter Kara Walker, critiques the themes of the 2022 Cate Blanchett film Tár, interrogates what it means to be someone’s muse, and pays tribute to the legacies of recently deceased authors Joan Didion, Martin Amis, and Hilary Mantel. 

The Defender, Ana Huang (Oct. 28) 

The Defender, the second book in best seller Ana Huang’s Gods of the Game series, is a star-crossed sports romance set in the world of the English Premier soccer league. Vincent DuBois, the captain of the Blackcastle Football Club, is rich, successful, and in terrible danger after someone breaks into his home. To keep safe from the mysterious intruder, he secretly shares an apartment with sports nutritionist Brooklyn Armstrong, who also happens to be his coach’s daughter and his sister’s best friend. For years they’ve been at odds, but when they find themselves playing house and liking it, Vincent worries that catching feelings for Brooklyn might be his inevitable downfall.

Book of Lives, Margaret Atwood (Nov. 4)

Margaret Atwood’s long-awaited memoir acts as a travelogue through her unconventional life and celebrated career. In Book of Lives, she explores how a nomadic and often lonely childhood, often spent in the wild forest of Northern Quebec with her entomologist father and dietician mother, led to her becoming a writer. She reveals the real-life mean girl from her youth who inspired her 1988 novel, Cat’s Eye, and details how living in Berlin in the 1980s influenced The Handmaid’s Tale. She also writes about her outspoken support for women’s rights, adventures in Hollywood, and decades-long marriage to novelist Graeme Gibson, who died in 2019. 

Bread of Angels, Patti Smith (Nov. 4)

Fifteen years after the release of her National Book Award-winning debut memoir, Just Kids, Patti Smith is back with her fourth autobiography, which follows her unlikely rise from an imaginative working class kid to a punk rock icon. Bread of Angels covers Smith’s hard scrabble adolescence in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the making of her seminal 1975 album, Horses, and her marriage to MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, who died in 1994 at the age of 46. 

The Eleventh Hour, Salman Rushdie (Nov. 4)

Salman Rushdie’s latest release is a collection of five stories—three novellas and two shorter tales—set across India, England, and the U.S. that examine life, death, and what might come after. The Eleventh Hour includes stories about a musical prodigy from Mumbai who is hellbent on destroying her rich in-laws, the ghost of a Cambridge academic looking to enact revenge against his longtime tormentor, and a young American writer who is trying to solve the mystery of his mentor’s unexpected death. Rounding out the quintet is a modern parable about freedom of speech and a piece about a feuding pair of old men dealing with their own personal tragedy amid a national disaster.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Elizabeth Kolbert’s latest release, Life on a Little-Known Planet, is a collection of essays on the wonders of nature and the growing environmental threats that risk destroying it. Across 17 pieces, most of which originally appeared in the New Yorker, Kolbert takes readers around the globe to visit a carbon neutral island in Denmark, a melting Greenland ice sheet, and a Florida community that voted to give rights to waterways. She also introduces readers to those who are trying to protect our planet—a climatologist known as the “father of global warming,” an entomologist racing to find rare caterpillars before they go extinct, and a biologist who is using AI to help humans communicate with whales—in hopes of encouraging others to do the same. 

Palaver, award-winning author Bryan Washington’s follow-up to his 2023 novel, Family Meal, is an intimate look at a young gay man struggling to reconcile with his family. Since leaving his Houston home ten years prior, the story’s protagonist has been working as an English tutor in Tokyo. In that time, he’s managed to build a community of close friends, but he still struggles to understand why his Jamaican-born mother chose his homophobic brother over him. When she unexpectedly arrives at his doorstep looking to make amends, he must confront the trauma of his past by giving her an opportunity to process her own.