There are lots of new books this September, including many books for men. I already dove in to Chloe Benjamin’s Understory, a story of science, nature and love, which could be great for anyone!
Siren Says by Jennifer Michelle Herrera (fantasy)
A lush, spellbinding tale about a tenacious young woman who must harness her family’s dangerous magic to put a stop to the sacrifices they’ve been making for more than a century
Twenty-five-year-old Raven Wynn knows that the ancient plant magic running through her veins brings nothing but destruction. It doomed her Welsh ancestors. It killed her mother. It’s the reason she’s now bound by a painful curse—one that will destroy her if she can’t find a way to break its hold.
When her estranged Aunt Delilah bursts into her life promising a cure, Raven seizes the chance. However, her freedom comes at a steep Once her magic is fully unleashed, she is more powerful—and more dangerous—than anyone thought possible.
Desperate to tame powers she never wanted, Raven makes a pact with In exchange for learning to control her magic, Raven will capture one of the spirits that roam Delilah’s hometown on May’s Eve so that it may grant Delilah’s secret wish. With the help of an enigmatic new friend, Cherry, as well as an infuriatingly handsome stoneworker, Idris, Raven learns that her task is even more perilous than she imagined—one false move and the spirits could trap her soul—forever.
A sumptuous escape into a world of Celtic spirits and botanical magic, Siren Says is a bewitching story of the unbreakable bonds between women, the interplay between goodness and power, and the capacity of love to mend our very souls.
How Can My Manager Be So Stupid? by Kazumasa Hayami (fiction)
A candid story of one woman’s fight to find her way through her working life, while, against all odds, clinging to her passion for reading and for sharing books.
Kyoko still loves books. Just about. But life at the Musashino Bookshop is starting to get her down. Above all, there’s one question that keeps going round and round her How can my manager be so stupid?
From his obsession with self-help books to his insistence on giving inspirational speeches at staff meetings, everything about Takeru Yamamoto seems designed to set Kyoko’s teeth on edge. And, as the bookshop lurches from crisis to crisis, facing criticism from customers and authors alike, it’s tough for her to keep her love of literature alive. Only the prospect of changing a life by handing over the perfect book keeps her going.
But then she herself is handed a book that changes everything. Within its pages, all the struggles of her daily life are reflected back at her. Was there more to her manager than meets the eye all along?
A winning blend of slice-of-life (somewhat romantic, occasionally ludicrous) comedy, satire, and human drama with a pinch of mystery to spice things up, How Can My Manager Be So Stupid is the perfect read for anyone who has felt that they can’t even . . . with the idiots that walk among us.
Istanbul Dreaming by Denise Derya Brandt (historical fiction)
For fans of Alka Joshi and Marjan Kamali, a gripping historical novel set in 1950s Turkey about a young woman who flees an arranged marriage to pursue independence in Istanbul, where she finds forbidden love with an American airman.
In 1950s Turkey, against the backdrop of the social and political unrest that will culminate in Turkey’s 1960 military coup d’état, a dutiful daughter is torn between family expectations and her dream of becoming a modern Turkish woman.
One night, seventeen-year-old Ayten sneaks away to Istanbul for a night of dancing with her best friend. When her father discovers her rebellion, he forces her into an arranged religious marriage to a distant relative who bullied her as a child. Initially, Ayten resigns herself to her fate—but after her husband sexually assaults her on their wedding night, she flees him and her family for haven in Istanbul.
Living with friends and working as a seamstress at her friend’s boutique, Ayten tries to rebuild her life. Then she meets Earl, an American airman, and they begin to fall in love—but as their connection deepens, secrets and her past threaten to upend all she’s built. Torn between her family and a future with Earl, Ayten must decide what she’s willing to sacrifice for freedom and forbidden love.
Under Story by Chloe Benjamin (science fiction)
The New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists returns with an intimate yet epic love story—and a sweeping odyssey of scientific discovery. Under Storyinvites us to consider the promise of this life, what might lie beyond it, and how far we would go for more time with the people we love, cementing Chloe Benjamin’s place among our best, and most lasting, storytellers.
“We wake up to tomorrow, never yesterday.”
At the edge of the world, biologist Laurel Salter is hiding from everything she’s ever known. For ten hours a day, six days per week, she works as a dishwasher at McMurdo Station, an isolated research base in Antarctica. She tells no one that before she arrived, she was a renowned young scientist with a promising career and a family.
But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can’t escape her past. When a strange light appears across the ice—and draws a group of physicists to McMurdo—her former husband, Eli, won’t be far behind. Laurel is captivated by the Arc: its surreal glow; the way it seems almost alive. And though Eli is reluctant to test her wildest theory, Laurel is convinced that the Arc leads down a rabbit hole and into a world they can barely imagine. Can she persuade him to risk everything to fix the burden that hangs between them—to turn back the clock and live their story a second time?
A breathless page-turner and a love letter to our planet, Under Story grapples with the great questions of our time: human hubris, the precarity of the natural world, and the mysterious webs of consciousness that bind us. A modern epic of science and soul, of bravery and redemption, it offers a vision of the future that demands we reckon with what we owe to one another, and to the earth itself.
Tell Two Friends by Ann Garvin (fiction)
A wickedly funny and empowering thriller about women, the manipulators who underestimate them, and keeping your dignity while saving the day by the author of I Thought You Said This Would Work.
Jane Baye is a regular person, good at a lot of things, but identifying the serial killer right in front of her isn’t one of them.
In 1990, college senior Jane wrote to an incarcerated woman because it seemed like a nice thing to do. Thirty-six years later, that felon, actually a man, has moved in next door. He’s watching her every move, with a decades-long plan for Jane that a nice person like her would never see coming.
Especially because Jane is wrapped up in her own problems: a small-town golden boy with talk of forever and a diabolical history of cheating. When she exposes her ex, the entire town of Wonder Lake turns against her.
It’s no wonder she doesn’t see what’s coming on the night of the Norwegian heritage festival.
But woe to those who mistake Jane for a pushover. When celebration becomes a fight for survival, the very qualities that make her ordinary become the weapons she’ll bet everything on.
#Authorlife by Joe Zagets (satire)
Writing novels wasn’t supposed to be a blood sport.
After selling his first thriller novel for six figures, Mackenzie “Mack” Lane quit his job as a journalist to become a full-time author. Yet, a few years later, his career is spiraling downward.
Mack needs money: his ex-wife wants to send their son to a private high school, and his current wife wants to have a baby.
Out of desperation, Mack concocts a dangerous idea for a publicity stunt designed to boost the sales of his latest novel. If fails, Mack stands to lose his family and what’s left of his career—or worse.
#AuthorLife is a hilarious satire that shows us what can happen when an author gets the wrong sort of inspiration from his dying career…because publishing is a bloody hard business.
Blurbs:
“I’ve never identified so closely with a main character that I can’t stand.” —Alex Grecian, NYT bestselling author of The Yard
“#Authorlife is―somehow―both a blistering satire and a joyous (though nail-biting) thrillride. You will never look at your favorite authors the same. What a clever, astute, and fun novel. Five shining stars.” —T. Greenwood, author of Everything Has Happened, The Still Point, and Keeping Lucy
“I laughed, I winced, and I kept turning pages thinking, ‘Oh man what’s next’?” —Tony Wirt, bestselling author of Just Stay Away and Silent Creek.
The Weight of Angels by John Boyne (historical fiction)
Can one rash decision prove the difference between a life well lived and a life destroyed?
When the Marquess of Queensberry left his calling card at the Albemarle Club in February 1895, it bore only his name and five words: “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite.” The most celebrated playwright of his day famously sued for libel, which led to his arrest, criminal prosecution, and ultimately prison. From then on, his gilded existence spiraled into public disgrace, humiliation, and an early death.
But what if he had simply ignored the insult? What direction might his life have taken? This is the premise of John Boyne’s extraordinary new novel, The Weight of Angels. Rather than dying in penury in Paris at age forty-six, what if Wilde had lived to bear witness to the momentous events and cataclysmic changes of the first part of the twentieth century, and even influence some of them? What if the second half of his life were as dramatic, tumultuous, and exhilarating as the first?
In imagining the life that Oscar Wilde never had, John Boyne has written one of the great what-if stories of modern literature, giving the iconic Anglo-Irish poet and playwright a fresh new voice and the opportunity to take an entirely different path.
I’ve Got A New Complaint by Laurie Notaro (essays)
A brutally and hilariously unfiltered look at being middle-aged-plus in an absurd modern world by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Excuse Me While I Disappear.
Laurie Notaro can time travel. The portal is Scottsdale, Arizona. Once inside her elderly parents’ home, she’s a child again—who’s two years away from collecting Social Security. Caught between generations, Laurie is young enough to be thrust into the role of caregiver yet old enough to be grappling with her own creaking bones and analog life skills. It’s an awkward age.
Navigating it is just a matter of winging it. She runs rampant through Italy with her American driving skills. Infuriating office politics leave her little choice but revenge and some hexes. Laurie also confronts a high school bully at a reunion, considers an elaborate funeral at a puppet theater, and fancies an ideal retirement plan involving bank robbery. As for sex at sixty, honestly, it’s a challenge. The parts are a little rusty (at least they sound that way).
Regardless of indignity or mishap, the #1 New York Times bestselling author finds agency with the sharp wit of a woman who refuses to go gently into that good night.
Tom Clancy Presssure Depth by Jack Stewart (thriller)
Jack Ryan Jr leads a team of divers in a race to beat the Chinese Navy to a weapon of terrible destructive power in the latest entry in the #1 New York Times bestselling series.
Jack Ryan Jr. is on Guam to work on a project for Hendley Associates. It’s a perfectly ordinary insurance matter, but trouble finds the Ryans wherever they go. So it’s no surprise when Jack’s interest is piqued by a US Navy dive team working off the coast of the island.
For years rumors have persisted that the Soviets had placed a device for tracking American submarines on the sea floor. By now the technology should be outdated, but the Americans are still interested in recovering it. It’s a seemingly routine mission until a team of Chinese special forces arrive. They are determined to get their hands on the aging tech even if they have to kill to do it. They’re sure they can handle the Americans, but they don’t know Jack.
The Phoebe Variations by Jame Hamilton (Fiction)
The acclaimed, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World returns with a stunning coming-of-age novel about girls, mothers, and finding one’s way in the world.
Seventeen-year-old Phoebe was never interested in her birth family. But on the cusp of her high school graduation, her adoptive mother, Greta, insists on a visit to meet her biological parents and siblings. The encounter is a jolt, a revelation that derails Phoebe.
With the help of her best friend Luna, Phoebe runs away—as far as their friend Patrick O’Conner’s chaotic home, where she hopes to go unnoticed among his thirteen siblings. But when Phoebe asks Patrick to chop off her hip-length hair, she’s suddenly transformed. Patrick’s older brothers can’t help but notice the striking, Peter Pan-like stranger who has suddenly appeared in their midst.
What starts as an adolescent rebellion soon spirals into a whirlwind of self-discovery and unexpected connections. As she grapples with her shifting identity and strained relationships, Phoebe must navigate the tumultuous road out of girlhood and chart a new and unknown course.
Beyond Honor by K.B. Brodsky (Thriller)
A CIA analyst hunting a conspiracy that leads to the Oval Office. A paramilitary operative confronting his grief on a path of retribution. A Russian agent hiding in plain sight. Jason Matthews’s Red Sparrow meets Jack Carr’s The Terminal List in Beyond Honor, a debut political thriller that plunges readers into a world of international espionage, where loyalty and duty are tested.
Whitney Skyler’s investigation into a Russian-backed bank on American soil leads to the President of the United States. CIA paramilitary operative Kevin Rhoads, a man forged in war zones, is shattered by loss. Recruited for a solo extraction mission deep inside Siberia, he discovers a devastating betrayal.
At CIA headquarters, Director Cynthia King plays an audacious gambit, leveraging a thirty-year debt of honor to save a captured American agent. But in this world of shifting alliances, even the most careful plans can unravel.
Skyler faces an impossible expose her mentor’s dangerous game to protect national security, or reveal to Rhoads, the man she loves, a truth that will transform him into a force of vengeance with death in his wake.
From the war-torn streets of Damascus to the merciless Siberian tundra, from the rugged Kenai Peninsula to the polished corridors of Langley, Virginia, Beyond Honor is a white-knuckled thriller about duty, betrayal, and the impossible choices made by those who serve in the shadows.
Tear the City Down by Andre Hardy (fiction)
For fans of S.A. Cosby and Walter Mosley, debut novelist and former NFL player Andre Hardy’s TEAR THE CITY DOWN is a hard-hitting, heart wrenching crime novel that brilliantly blends elements of jazz, football, and a gritty portrait of a city divided.
Coltrane Davis is at once a knight and a hustler. He has risen to wealth and success, graduating from San Diego’s back alleys to the halls of power through his partnership with Saul Sollman, a crooked kingmaker among the city’s elite. Running multimillion dollar scams with Saul, he has been Saul’s fixer, but now he wants out of the hustle so that he can focus on his teenage daughter’s burgeoning tennis career and finally be the dad he has always wanted to be.
But when the Los Angeles Chargers’ star running back vanishes one evening before a big game, Coltrane is drawn into an investigation of what happened by Saul and his protégé, the player’s agent; the stakes escalate with a gut-punch when the trail leads into San Diego’s underworld of drugs and prostitution and reveals clues to the disappearance of his daughter’s best friend, whose loss has haunted him. Torn by the unreconcilable demands of the life he can’t seem to quit and the fierce desire he has to protect his own, Coltrane brings himself and his loved ones to the brink of destruction in his quest to free himself once and for all of Saul’s control – and focus on what really family.
