10 September Fiction Releases To Get Your Hands On

By Carrie McBride, Communications
September 21, 2023

You may have aged out of the fun of having new school supplies in September, but perhaps you can find a similar satisfaction with cracking open a new book (e-book readers, just go with it). Below are 10 titles published this month to get excited for including the reappearance of beloved Stephen King character Holly Gibney, Zadie Smith's first foray into historical fiction, and a debut novel from Kim Coleman Foote infused with her own family's history.

  • The Fraud

    by Zadie Smith

    In 1873 Victorian London, with the city mesmerized by the “Tichborne Trial,” wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claims he is the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title, Mrs. Eliza Touchet becomes determined to find out if he’s really who he says he is or if he’s a fraud.

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    The Vaster Wilds

    by Lauren Groff

    Escaping from a colonial settlement in the wilderness, a servant girl, with nothing but her wits, a few possessions and some faith, is tested beyond the limits of her imagination, forcing her to question her belief of everything her own civilization taught her.

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    Holly

    by Stephen King

    Formerly shy private detective Holly Gibney reluctantly agrees to search for a client’s missing daughter, which may have something to do with an unholy secret being harbored in the basement of a pair of semi-retired octogenarian academics.

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    Idlewild

    by James Frankie Thomas

    Fay and Nell, two outcasts at an artsy Quaker high school in downtown Manhattan, start an intense 18-month friendship on 9/11. They bond fiercely and make choices they'll regret for the rest of their lives. Looking back on these events as adults, the estranged friends recall backstage theater department intrigue, antiwar demonstrations, smutty fanfic written over AIM and a shared dial-up connection—and the spectacular cascade of mistakes, miscommunications, and betrayals that would ultimately tear the two of them apart.

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    Rouge

    by Mona Awad

    A horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale about a lonely dress shop clerk whose mother’s unexpected death sends her down a treacherous path in pursuit of youth and beauty. Can she escape her mother’s fate—and find a connection that is more than skin deep?

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    Wellness

    by Nathan Hill

    Alongside the challenges of parenting, married couple Jack and Elizabeth encounter cults disguised as mindfulness support groups, polyamorous would-be suitors, Facebook wars and something called Love Potion Number Nine as they undertake separate, personal excavations in their quest to find health and happiness.

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    Land of Milk and Honey

    by C Pam Zhang

    Accepting a job at a decadent, mountaintop colony, a young chef, with the help of her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter, is awakened to the pleasures of taste, touch and her own body until she is pushed beyond her boundaries in a plot to reshape the world far beyond the plate.

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    Coleman Hill

    by Kim Coleman Foote

    In 1916, during the early days of the Great Migration, Celia Coleman and Lucy Grimes flee the racism and poverty of their homes in the post–Civil War South for the “Promised Land” of Vauxhall, New Jersey. But the North possesses its own challenges and bigotries that will shape the fates of the women and their families over the next seventy years. Told through the voices of nine family members—their perspectives at once harmonious and contradictory—Coleman Hill is a penetrating multigenerational debut.

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    People Collide

    by Isle McElroy

    When Eli leaves the cramped Bulgarian apartment he shares with Elizabeth, his more organized and successful wife, he discovers that he now inhabits her body. Not only have he and his wife traded bodies but Elizabeth, living as Eli, has disappeared without a trace. What follows is Eli’s search across Europe to America for his missing wife—and a roving, no-holds-barred exploration of gender and embodied experience. 

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    A House for Alice

    by Diana Evans

    The matriarch of the Pitt family yearns to return to Nigeria to live out her final years but her trip is made more complicated by her arguing daughters and a fire that kills her estranged husband.

Summaries provided via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more