The leaves are turning, and new books abound. Fall is famously publishing’s busy season, and this year is no exception. My favorite book of the year came out this autumn—Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair—and I wouldn’t be surprised if your own favorite read of 2025 awaits you on this list as well.
Here you’ll find around 100 titles out this fall that we’re excited about here at The Millions. Some we’ve already read in galley form; others we’re simply eager to dive into based on their authors or subjects. We leaned on our friends at Publishers Weekly to help blurb some of the many, many titles that we’re eager to put on your radar.
The Millions is, alas, still on hiatus, but we’re determined to continue bringing you our seasonal Most Anticipated previews in the interim (if a bit belatedly).
—Sophia Stewart, editor
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The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus (Scribner)
A successful writer chafes at criticism and obsesses over a murder case in the ponderous latest from Kraus. Read more.
The Great Grown-Up Game of Make-Believe by Lauren D. Woods (Autumn House)
A wife literally begins to shrink inside her house, a mother remembers a surreal encounter between her infant daughter and a bear, and a woman stumbles upon a night club filled with her lover’s exes in Woods’s imaginative debut.
Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck, tr. Kurt Beals (ND)
After winning the Booker International Prize in 2024, Erpenbeck returns with a stunning collection of interlinked autobiographical essays exploring memory, loss, and absence.
The Mind Reels by Fredrik deBoer (Coffee House)
In this bracing debut novel from cultural critic deBoer, a young woman becomes a prisoner of her own mind. Read more.
Mothers by Brenda Lozano, tr. Heather Cleary (Catapult)
From Mexican writer Lozano comes a smashing novel set in 1946, as a wave of kidnappings shock and scandalize northern Mexico. Read more.
It Girl by Marisa Meltzer (Atria)
In this first comprehensive biography of Jane Birkin, Meltzer gives due credit to the woman behind one of the world’s most iconic and coveted handbags—and makes the case for why she was much more than an “it girl.”
Vaim by Jon Fosse, tr. Damion Searls (Transit)
Nobel winner Fosse centers this spectacular story of loneliness, love, and death on three linked characters living in small-town Norway. Read more.
Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon (Penguin Press)
With his casually playful and chillingly resonant ninth novel, Pynchon delivers a warning against global fascism, a slapstick symphony whose antic comedy can’t begin to conceal its hopelessly broken American heart. Read more.
Unfit by Ariana Harwicz, tr. Jessie Mendez Sayer (ND)
Harwicz spins an unrelenting tale of a migrant woman who takes drastic steps to fulfill her radical conception of motherly love. Read more.
Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade (Scribner)
This innovative biography of Stein from Square Haunting author Wade assesses the influential writer’s life and work, from her childhood in California and productive years in Paris, to the ways that scholars constructed her posthumous legacy. Read more.
Intemperance by Sonora Jha (HarperVia)
In the jaunty latest from Jha, a twice-divorced feminist scholar decides to celebrate her 55th birthday by throwing herself a swayamvar, a traditional Indian ceremony in which a woman invites potential suitors to compete for her hand in marriage by performing various feats. Read more.
The Wayfinder by Adam Johnson (FSG)
Johnson, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Orphan Master’s Son, unfolds a majestic saga of political unrest in the South Pacific and a girl’s quest to save her people. Read more.
We Survived the Night by Julian Brave NoiseCat (Knopf)
Fresh off his first Oscar nomination, NoiseCat returns with an oral history and work of reportage that probes Indigenous culture through an intimate journey shared by a father and a son.
Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead)
The gimlet-eyed latest from Taylor follows a creatively blocked painter through the New York City art world. Read more.
Vagabond: A Memoir by Tim Curry (Grand Central)
In this charming debut autobiography, British actor Curry offers a peek behind the curtain of his prolific screen and stage careers. Read more.
A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (Knopf)
Majumdar spins a luminous story of a family facing climate catastrophe and food scarcity in near-future Kolkata. Read more.
A Wooded Shore: And Other Stories by Thomas McGuane (Knopf)
McGuane rounds up another memorable group of misguided and doomed characters in this stellar collection. Read more.
Analog Days by Damion Searls (Coffee House)
Searls, translator of Jon Fosse and author of The Philosophy of Translation, offers in these clear-eyed ruminations a Gen Xer’s impressions of the technology and violence that shape 21st-century life. Read more.
Three or More Is a Riot by Jelani Kobb (One World)
New Yorker staff writer Cobb offers an expansive collection of his published essays, spanning from 17-year-old Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, which “ruined the mood of a nation that had, just a few years earlier, elected its first black president,” to Donald Trump’s return to office in 2025. Read more.
The House of Beauty by Arabelle Sicardi (Norton)
Across this searing collection of essays, former beauty editor Sicardi takes a knife to the industry in which they built their career, considering everything from the shimmering mica in beauty products to the historical connection between fragrance and fascism.
Twice Born by Hester Kaplan (Catapult)
In this affecting memoir, Kaplan examines her relationship with her father, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Justin Kaplan, who died in 2014. Read more.
Bog Queen by Anna North (Bloomsbury)
The discovery of a woman’s body in an English bog kicks off the piercing latest from North, which alternates between the perspectives of a forensic scientist tasked with identifying the remains and the long-dead woman, a young Druid leader who died around the year 50 BCE. Read more.
All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu (Saga)
This dazzling near-future mystery from Hugo winner Liu sparkles with suspense, intensity, and effortless worldbuilding. Read more.
The Land of Sweet Forever by Harper Lee (Harper)
This posthumous collection of Lee’s work offers up newly discovered short stories and previously published essays and magazine pieces that reveal another side to the To Kill a Mockingbird author.
The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers (S&S)
Somers’s latest novel is a wry and ingenious tale of marital infidelity, offering a sardonic view into the pressures of marriage and motherhood and the ambient temptation of adultery. Read more.
Look Out by Edward McPherson (Astra House)
Guggenheim fellow McPherson presents a charming, idiosyncratic meditation on the human urge to see further, and more, in this cultural history of the “aerial view.” Read more.
Time Tunnel by Eileen Chang, tr. Karen S. Kingsbury and Jie Zhang (NYRB)
This sweeping collection gathers stories and essays from every stage of the late Chinese author’s career, some of which have never before been translated into English, spanning Shanghai and Hong Kong to the freeways of Los Angeles.
Looking for Tank Man by Ha Jin (Other Press)
In the latest from the National Book Award winner, a Chinese Harvard student grows fixated on the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Read more.
Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy by Julia Ioffe (Ecco)
This kaleidoscopic volume from Ioffe, a finalist for this year’s National Book Award, combines memoir, journalism, and history to paint a nuanced portrait of modern Russia, all through the lens of womanhood.
That’s How It Works, ed. Katherine Webb-Hehn (Hub City)
This vibrant collection highlights the best Southern fiction published by the Spartanburg, S.C.–based Hub City Press over the past three decades, featuring work by Carter Sickels, James Yeh, and more.
Sacrament by Susan Straight (Counterpoint)
Straight’s immersive latest is a vibrant drama following a group of nurses at the height of Covid-19 in August 2020. Read more.
The Anthony Bourdain Reader by Anthony Bourdain (Ecco)
This career-spanning collection offers up new and never-before-seen material, including diary entries and unpublished short stories, while also celebrating Bourdain’s most compelling and definitive essays.
Patchwork: A Graphic Biography of Jane Austen by Kate Evans (Verso)
This artful and thought-provoking graphic biography from Evans stitches a postcolonial layer into the narrative by examining the fabrics worn by Jane Austen and her contemporaries. Read more.
I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan, tr. Jack Hargreaves (Astra House)
A literary sensation in China when it was first published in 2023, this vivid self-portrait is a universal exploration of gig work and the financial pressures of surviving in today’s big cities.
One, None, and a Hundred Grand by Luigi Pirandello, tr. Sean Wilsey (Archipelago)
The 1926 novel by the late Nobel Prize winner—a meditation on relativism that poses urgent questions about self-perception, insecurity, and doubt—gets a second life in this elegant new translation.
The Book of Kin by Jennifer Eli Bowen (Milkweed)
Bowen’s probing debut questions how we forge relationships, community, and joy within a world rife with isolation and solitude, drawing on her experiences as a mother, daughter, and founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.
Bigger by Ren Cedar Fuller (Autumn House)
Fuller’s collection of personal essays calls on readers to imagine a “bigger” way of being in the world, from accommodating and celebrating difference, to finding new modes of expressing ourselves and loving others.
Jack the Modernist by Robert Glück (NYRB)
Glück’s novel of sex and art—a cult classic and trailblazing work of postmodern gay fiction—traces the gradual dissolution of a love affair against the backdrop of 1980s San Francisco.
Dead and Alive by Zadie Smith (Penguin Press)
Novelist and critic Smith brings an incisive eye and keen wit to art, music, fiction, politics, and more in these wide-ranging essays. Read more.
Little F by Michelle Tea (Feminist Press)
By turns heartbreaking, hilarious, and hope-filled, the latest from Tea follows a 13-year-old runaway’s search for a queer paradise. Read more.
November
On the Calculation of Volume III by Solvej Balle, tr. Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (ND)
In the ingenious third installment of Balle’s septology, Danish rare book dealer Tara Selter is still trapped in the 18th of November. Read more.
Dress, Dreams, and Desire by Valerie Steele (Bloomsbury)
Steele, once described by critic Suzy Menkes as “the Freud of fashion,” probes the intersections of psychoanalytic principles and the clothes we wear.
Queen Esther by John Irving (S&S)
Irving revisits the setting of The Cider House Rules with a novel about a Viennese Jewish orphan and her adoptive family in New Hampshire. Read more.
Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood (Doubleday)
The remarkable debut memoir from Booker Prize winner Atwood recounts pivotal moments in her personal life that shaped some of her most enduring work as a writer. Read more.
Lightbreakers by Aja Gabel (Riverhead)
A California couple’s marriage is put to the test when they take part in a dodgy experiment in Gabel’s satisfying sophomore novel. Read more.
Palaver by Bryan Washington (FSG)
Washington revisits the Japanese setting of his novel Memorial with a bighearted drama about a 30-something Houston man’s reunion with his estranged mother. Read more.
The Year of the Wind by Karina Pacheco Medrano, tr. Mara Faye Lethem (Graywolf)
Pacheco Medrano dazzles in her English-language debut, the surreal story of a 50-something Peruvian writer reckoning with her cousin’s disappearance during the government’s conflict with a Maoist insurgency in the 1980s. Read more.
Helm by Sarah Hall (Mariner)
This virtuosic outing from Hall gives voice to the Helm—a storied northeasterly wind known for its destructive power and distinctive cloud formations that blows down the Cross Fell escarpment in Northwest England. Read more.
Bread of Angels by Patti Smith (Random House)
Smith returns with yet another memoir, even more intimate than the last, traversing her teenage years, romantic entanglements, defining losses, and creative liberation.
False War by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, tr. Natasha Wimmer (Graywolf)
Cuban writer Álvarez constructs a mesmerizing novel out of vignettes featuring characters who left Castro’s Cuba only to experience more dispossession and indignity. Read more.
Hidden Portraits by Sue Roe (Norton)
In six biographical essays, Roe paints a detailed study of the women who inspired, loved, and troubled Pablo Picasso: models Fernande Olivier and Marie-Thérèse Walter, ballerina Olga Khokhlova, painters Dora Maar and Françoise Gilot, and Picasso’s widow, Jacqueline Roque. Read more.
Pandora by Ana Paula Pacheco, trans. by Julia Sanches (Transit)
Equal parts ribald and unsettling, Brazilian writer Pacheco’s English-language debut chronicles a literature professor’s mental breakdown. Read more.
Governing Bodies by Sangamithra Iyer (Milkweed)
Iyer traces her passion for conservation and animal rights activism back two generations in this beautiful debut memoir. Read more.
Queen Mother by Ashley D. Farmer (Pantheon)
Historian Farmer offers an impressive biography of pioneering Black Nationalist Audley “Queen Mother” Moore. Read more.
Life on a Little-Known Planet by Elizabeth Kolbert (Crown)
Kolbert has radically informed the way modern audiences understand climate change, and her newest collection is no exception, zooming into stories of hope, activism, and innovation across the globe.
Black-Owned by Char Adams (Tiny Reparations)
Former NBC News journalist Adams debuts with an illuminating history of America’s Black-owned bookstores, from the Tribeca storefront opened in 1834 by abolitionist David Ruggles to the radical bookshops of the 1960s. Read more.
Fire in Every Direction by Tareq Baconi (Washington Square)
In this poignant autobiography, queer Palestinian writer and activist Baconi tenderly explores identity, nationality, and family history. Read more.
The Bridegroom Was a Dog by Yoko Tawada, tr. Margaret Mitsutani (ND)
First published in 1998, Parul Sehgal called Tawada’s absurd yet tender tale of unexpected romance “her masterpiece.”
The Silver Book by Olivia Laing (FSG)
Laing, who’s written nonfiction about the lives of artists and one previous novel, Crudo, fuses the two forms with a lush narrative of art and love in 1970s Italy. Read more.
The White Hot by Quiara Alegria Hudes (One World)
The potent debut novel from playwright and memoirist Hudes follows a single mother who abandons her daughter to try and find herself. Read more.
The Emergency by George Packer (FSG)
Packer, a journalist and National Book Award winner, delivers a propulsive Orwellian novel set in a strange future world known as “the empire.” Read more.
Find Him! by Elaine Kraf (Modern Library)
Kraf, who died in 2013, depicts in this striking 1977 novel the eccentric life of a mysterious unnamed woman who confesses she has “no identity, no ability to think or speak.” Read more.
This Unruly Witness, ed. Lauren Muller, Becky Thompson, Dominique C. Hill, and Durell M. Callier (Haymarket)
June Jordan’s legacy as a poet, activist, and healer is celebrated in this landmark collection, complete with contributions from such luminaries as Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Imani Perry, and Angela Davis.
The Book of Women’s Friendship, ed. Rachel Cooke (Norton)
Drawing on fiction, diaries, poetry, and letters, this first major anthology of female friendship succinctly mines the impact, history, and beauty of platonic love between women.
The Body Digital by Vanessa Chang (Melville House)
Chang, director of programs at Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology, debuts with a lofty history of the relationship between technology and the human body. Read more.
Estate by Cynthia Zarin (FSG)
The elegant latest from Zarin offers a new and seemingly autofictional version of the love story central to her previous novel, Inverno. Read more.
Girls Play Dead by Jen Percy (Doubleday)
Percy, a New York Times Magazine contributing writer, offers a groundbreaking exploration of women’s often shamed and silenced responses to sexual assault. Read more.
Blank Space by W. David Marx (Viking)
Marx offers an astute glimpse into how culture has stagnated throughout the past 25 years while examining how commercial and technological forces have played into that shift.
My Little Donkey by Martha Cooley (Catapult)
In this elegant volume, novelist Cooley reflects on her late-in-life move to Italy. Read more.
Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times by Tracy K. Smith (Norton)
The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet demystifies an art form that for many can seem inaccessible and intimidating, arguing that poetry—and the humanity it brings to the fore—is needed now more than ever.
Winning the Earthquake by Lorissa Rinehart (St. Martin’s)
Historian Rinehart offers an illuminating biography of the first woman elected to Congress. Read more.
(Th)ings and (Th)oughts by Alla Gorbunova, tr. Elina Alter (Deep Vellum)
The 61 stories in this razor-sharp collection from Gorbunova evoke the absurdity of everyday life in post-Soviet Russia. Read more.
Queen of Swords by Jazmina Barrera, tr. Christina MacSweeney (Two Lines)
In this propulsive, deeply researched narrative, readers accompany Barrera as she investigates the influential 20th-century Mexican novelist Elena Garro, using everything from Garro’s archives to astrology.
The Week of Colors by Elena Garro, tr. Megan McDowell (Two Lines)
Publishing in tandem with Barrera’s The Queen of Swords is this dazzling 1963 collection of stories about hauntings, curses, and the uncanny from Garro, a pioneer of magical realism. Read more.
Baby Driver by Jan Kerouac (NYRB)
The autobiographical novel by Jack Kerouac’s daughter, first published in 1981, offers a thrilling and unflinching glimpse into the author’s difficult childhood—shaped by paternal neglect—and the sense of resilience and self-reliance it instilled in her.
Married Life by Sergio Pitol, tr. George Henson (Deep Vellum)
From one of Mexico’s most influential writers comes a satirical, unsparing story about a heartbroken wife seeking a fresh start in the wake of her husband’s infidelity.
Palace of Deception by Darrin Lunde (Norton)
The rise of scientific racism takes on a new dimension in Lunde’s stunning investigation into the American Museum of Natural History and its complicated origins.
Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen, tr. David Hackston (Little, Brown)
Turpeinen’s fantastic debut interweaves the fate of an extinct aquatic species with the stories of the people who discovered and destroyed it. Read more.
Racial Fictions by Hazel V. Carby (Verso)
Combining historical analysis, literary criticism, and cultural theory, Carby’s interrogation of the racial myths that have shaped our world is as insightful as it is timely.
December
House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Riverhead)
This vivid 1998 novel from Nobel winner Tokarczuk prefigures the discursive style of her later work such as Flights, with the story of a woman who moves with her husband from their Polish city to rural Silesia. Read more.
A Long Game by Elizabeth McCracken (Ecco)
Story Prize winner McCracken distills decades of personal experience into 280 idiosyncratic reflections on writing. Read more.
Algorithm of the Night by A.S. Hamrah (n+1)
The film critic’s talents are on full display in this collection, which gathers recent essays from n+1, The Baffler, the New York Review of Books, the Criterion Collection, and more.
The Complete C Comics by Joe Brainard (NYRB)
Throughout the 1960s, Joe Brainard teamed up with such poets as John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Barbara Guest to create pioneering, collaborative comic strips—and now, these comics are compiled for the first time in a single, sweeping volume.
Galapagos by Fátima Vélez, tr. Hannah Kauders (Astra House)
Colombian writer Vélez makes a striking debut with a fever dream of a novel that evokes the AIDS epidemic as it follows a group of artists and political radicals on a phantasmagoric voyage. Read more.
Barbieland by Tarpley Hitt (One Signal)
Timed perfectly to Barbie’s cultural resurgence, Hitt deftly unpacks the history behind and enduring appeal of the beloved doll.
The Jaguar’s Roar by Micheliny Verunschk, tr. Juliana Barbassa (Liveright)
The Brazilian author’s fifth novel, and first to be translated into English, weaves an extraordinary tale about an Indigenous girl’s kidnapping during a colonial expedition and the ramifications that unfold centuries later.
The Award by Matthew Pearl (Harper)
Pearl takes a knife to the publishing industry and its much-ballyhooed literary prizes, offering a keen-eyed portrait of ambition, jealousy, and desperation.
Casanova 20 by Davey Davis (Catapult)
Davis unfurls a fascinating narrative of art and desire, following an amorous and preternaturally beautiful young man and his unusual friendship with an elder painter. Read more.
Googoosh by Googoosh (Gallery)
The legendary Iranian superstar tells the story of her rise to fame in pre-revolution Iran, her arrest and imprisonment, her 20 years in exile, and, eventually, her triumphant return to the global stage.
The Aquatics by Osvalde Lewat, tr. Maren Baudet-Lackner (Coffee House)
Cameroonian filmmaker and photographer Lewat makes her English-language debut with a shocking morality tale about an African woman torn between her bureaucrat husband and her artist friend, whose homosexuality is a high crime in their fictional country of Zambuena. Read more.
The Lord by Soraya Antonius (NYRB)
This timely, vivid novel meditates on myth, community, revolution, and prejudice through the eyes of a magician living in Palestine before the Nakba.
Television by Lauren Rothery (Ecco)
Rothery’s nimble debut zooms in on an aging, A-list movie star, the relationships that buoyed him throughout his career, and the disparities of talent, wealth, and artistry that mar Hollywood.
A Danger to the Mind of Young Girls by Adam Morgan (Atria)
Morgan, founder of the Chicago Review of Books, debuts with a comprehensive biography of Margaret C. Anderson (1886–1973), founder of the early-20th-century avant-garde magazine The Little Review. Read more.
Daring to Be Free by Sudhir Hazareesingh (FSG)
In this stunning revisionist history, Hazareesingh makes the case that enslaved people rebelled against their captivity throughout all four centuries of the Atlantic slave system—and that those efforts contributed more to their freedom than “the campaigns of enlightened white abolitionists.” Read more.
Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether (Feminist Press)
This new edition of Meriwether’s classic novel about a young Black girl’s coming of age in 1930s Harlem offers a fresh glimpse into the author’s legacy, featuring new writing celebrating her life, work, and activism.
