6 of the Best New Book Releases Out September 30, 2025

The narrator in King’s latest seems to have lived her best romantic/intellectual/academic life during her senior year of college. It was then that she met Sam and Yash, two grade A students from her 17th-Century Lit class, and really came into her own. That yeae, she entered their world of intellectual rigor, friendship, and love—which winds up placing her in a love triangle. Graduation comes, and lives are changed, and decades later, that precious time in her youth must be confronted again.

Agnir has grown up a captive of an enemy clan, a part of their world for as long as she can remember. When her love for the chieftain’s daughter reveals a magic that could bind her family and their enemy together—or destroy them—they must decide what they will sacrifice to keep the peace. — Liberty Hardy

This genre-bending memoir—which is part memoir, social criticism, and conceptual art—has been long-listed for the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction. It revisits an autobiographical form first introduced by Gertrude Stein almost 100 years ago, in which she narrated her own life story through the eyes of her partner (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, for those curious). Lin details her partner Lan Thao’s wartime journey from Việt Nam and explores her own experience as a genderqueer Taiwanese American. Using everything from cancer to Eve Sedgwick’s eyeglasses, she tells a very personal story while critiquing race and gender norms.

I Am You takes the little that’s known of Dutch Golden Age painter Maria van Oosterwijck’s life and expands it. Things start off when seven-year-old Gerta’s parents chop her hair off, call her Pieter, and ship her off to the Oosterwijck family to work as a boy. There, the newly christened Pieter chops wood, tends to the animals, and even catches the eye of the Oosterwijck’s daughter, Maria, who sketches all of the activity. Maria also eventually exposes Pieter’s secret and pressures her into going with her to Utrecht, where she will be a painter’s apprentice. Maria’s talent is obvious, though because of her gender, she isn’t allowed to join the painters’ guild. Soon enough, Gerta’s talents become clear, too, and the two women must learn to navigate the murky waters of being women who don’t fit narratives.

We love a good bookish book, especially when that book is also a mystery. Martha Thornhill returns to Oxford, England, to become the senior editor of the Clarendon English Dictionary after a decade of living outside the country. While there, her job starts receiving anonymous coded letters that hint at the date her older sister Charlie went missing. As more letters arrive, Martha and her colleagues parse through the elaborate clues to get to the truth of what happened to Charlie all those years ago. It’s looking more and more like Charlie had been keeping a big secret—a secret that some people don’t want to come out.