The 35 Best New Book Releases This Week: Sept 10-16, 2024

Here are the 35 best new book releases out this week: September 10-16, 2024. It’s hurricane season and storms can strike anywhere. So be prepared: make sure you have lots of books on hand and candles and flashlights to read them by! (Okay, also make sure you have bottled water and peanut butter and maybe a solar powered generator and such, but priorities, people!)

Books really are one of the necessities and luxuries in life. So check out the best books of the week to discover books you’ll want to read, books to share with your family and friends and coworkers, books for the kids in your life and books that will make great gifts.

Start scrolling down to check out the titles I’ve curated just for you. These are the books I’ve read and loved, books by favorite authors, books getting great early buzz from the industry and readers like you on BookTok and GoodReads and books that just look too appealing to ignore. They’re grouped in batches to make it easier for you to browse, just like browsing the aisles of your favorite bookstore! You’ll find three works of fiction and then a popular history and then three mysteries and thrillers and then biographies and romance and sci-fi and fantasy right down to picture books you’ll love to read out loud just as much as the kids in your life will love to hear. So let’s get reading! At the head of the Parade are…

The 35 Best New Book Releases This Week: Sept 10-16, 2024

1. Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
2. The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife by Anna Johnston
3. Dear Dickhead by Virginia Despentes; translated by Frank Wynne

Writer Elizabeth Strout is the sort who stays put and observes the quiet changes that take place over time; she plants her crop and watches it grow. Her book Tell Me Everything returns to the town of Crosby and checks in on beloved (or at least memorable) characters like Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton when a terrible crime shatters their lives.

Well, what would you do? Frederick Fife is 82 years old, close to homeless, broke and very kind. When he’s mistaken for a man who should be taking up residence at a nursing home, what’s the harm? Frederick gets a roof over his head, three meals, round the clock care and spreads happiness to one and all. It’s a win-win…until the real new resident turns up.

French artist Virginia Despentes is an enfant terrible who enjoys provoking, naturellement. Co-directing a movie that becomes the first film banned in France in 28 years? Check. Sex work? Check. And now, writing a novel that takes on the poisonous swamp of the internet. Despentes tells the combative story of an actress and so-so novelist who exchange insults online with the ferocity that only faceless anonymity can provide.

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout ($30; Random House) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife by Anna Johnston ($30; William Morrow) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Dear Dickhead by Virginia Despentes; translated by Frank Wynne ($28; Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

4. Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari is a popularizer of broad brushstroke ideas. He shot to fame with Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, a work people loved and academics grumbled over (out of envy or Harari getting stuff wrong, depending on your point of view). Harari followed that with more bestsellers and public pronouncements, like “Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so.” Now he’s tackling the information age by charting our use of knowledge and how it’s been preserved and disseminated for 10,000 years. Each change in format–papyrus to stone to paper to zeros and ones–offers new challenges and opportunities for some to control and others to access information. Harari charts it all–in broad brushstrokes!–and posits some concerns about AI.

Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari ($35; Random House) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Related: The 43 Best New Book Releases: Fall 2024

5. Fatal Gambit by David Lagercrantz; translated by Ian Giles
6. Passiontide by Monique Roffey
7. The Mesmerist by Caroline Woods

Swedish author David Lagercrantz brings back his detective team Rekke and Vargas for another acclaimed mystery. But which is the more pressing concern: a man who says his dead wife has popped up in a new photo 14 years later…or the new person Rekke’s daughter is dating, but won’t tell him about?

The island of St. Colibri is rocked by the brutal murder of a steel drum musician named Nora, visiting during Carnival. Yet another woman dead on an island that has seen this too often? That’s too much for four disparate women. They form a very unlikely alliance: the leader of a sex workers collective, the wife of the island’s prime minister, a friend of the dead musician and an activist. They will solve this crime…and they might not stop there, assuming they're not stopped first by the killer.

A real 19th century scandal is at the heart of The Mesmerist. In Minneapolis, some desperate folk find refuge at the Bethany Home for Unwed Mothers. You’d think the women staying there would prefer privacy. But a new tenant sparks rumors and jealousy and that unearths a shocking secret. Then the bodies of other women start piling up....

Fatal Gambit by David Lagercrantz; translated by Ian Giles ($30; Knopf) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Passiontide by Monique Roffey ($28; Knopf) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

The Mesmerist by Caroline Woods ($28; Doubleday) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

8. Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boot
9. I Once Was Lost by Don Lemon
10. Who Could Ever Love You by Mary L. Trump

Washington Post columnist Max Boot delivers a new biography of Ronald Reagan. While it’s reportedly not as hagiographic as the new film biography starring Dennis Quaid, Boot’s take on the New Deal Democrat turned demonizer of Medicare and Republican icon is generally sympathetic. It’s Reagan the pragmatist and compromiser, say reviews.

Don Lemon had a fall from grace, first with his abrupt departure from CNN to a blink-and-you-missed-it almost gig with Elon Musk’s X. He found solace in a journey of faith, exploring what it means to be religious in America today (or spiritual!) and how faith impacted his life during Lemon’s darkest professional hour.

From Reagan to Trump, but in this case Mary L. Trump, the daughter of Freddy Trump, Donald Trump’s brother and the presumptive heir of the family fortune. Mary shows where it all went wrong, detailing the cruelty of her grandfather and how it devastated her late dad and indeed everyone around them.

Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boot ($45; Liveright) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

I Once Was Lost by Don Lemon ($30; Little, Brown and Company) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Who Could Ever Love You by Mary L. Trump ($29; St. Martin’s Press) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

11. Sunshine and Spice by Aurora Palit
12. Vilest Things by Chloe Gong
13. Casket Case by Lauren Evans

Three romances to heat you up as the weather cools.

In Sunshine and Spice, fake dating is the answer to Naomi and Dev’s problems. Naomi needs to learn more about Bengali culture. Dev needs a girlfriend so he can avoid his mom’s arranged matchmaking. So of course they start “dating.” And then they start to realize maybe it’s time to lose the air quotes around “dating” once and for all.

Chloe Gong is retelling Shakespeare’s doomed romance Antony and Cleopatra and sets it in the fantasy world of the kingdom of Talin. In book two of Gong’s Flesh and False Gods series, enemies Calla and Anton face an uneasy truce as they work together to rule the land. When disaster strikes, their wariness must become a real partnership if they’ve any hope of keeping Talin intact.

In Lauren Evans’ debut novel Casket Case, Nora reluctantly returns home to a small town in Alabama and takes over the family business: making caskets. Then she meets the perfect guy, a kind and thoughtful man who works in logistics…for Death. I mean, this is supposed to be a problem for Nora? It feels like they’d have so much in common, not to mention a common (business) interest in the natural circle of life. But the course of true love never did run smooth.

Sunshine and Spice by Aurora Palit ($19; Berkley) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Vilest Things by Chloe Gong ($28.99; S&S/Saga Press) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Casket Case by Lauren Evans ($17.99; Dell) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

14. By The Fire We Carry by Rebecca Nagle
15. The Sing Sing Files by Dan Slepian
16. Bone of the Bone by Sarah Smarsh

Rebecca Nagle delivers a true life legal thriller with rare ambition and scope. By The Fire We Carry is being acclaimed as one of the best books of the year for weaving together so many storylines into a compelling whole. A murder in a small town in the 1990s sparks a remarkable court fight all the way to the Supreme Court, with Nagle bringing together the Trail of Tears, the history of the Muscogee peoples and other Indigenous folk and the ins and outs of tribal law. It climaxes with a Supreme Court ruling that might begin to offer some justice to those mistreated for so long.

You can be depressed by never-ending stories like The Sing Sing Files, where innocent people are behind bars for too many years. Or you can take heart from the never-ending stories like The Sing Sing Files, where people spend years and years–indeed in this case decades–fighting against injustice and offering hope to those who might have given it up. I’ll take the latter.

Essayist Sarah Smarsh grew up on a wheat farm in Kansas and was the first person in her family to graduate from college. That gives this National Book Award finalist strong insight into the heartland of the country, the class differences that Americans tend to pretend don’t exist and how they impact the many issues of the day. Her acclaimed essays of the past decade are gathered here, along with a new one that cumulatively shine a spotlight on the country as it is and the working class that makes up the broad majority. Wait, does that sound noble and boring? In Bone of the Bone, Smarsh also writes about being a Hooters Girl, the nonsense of ‘red vs blue” states as a way of seeing America and the revealing socioeconomic signifier of dentistry. Since I just went broke paying for desperately needed crowns on my teeth, I'm interested!

By The Fire We Carry by Rebecca Nagle ($32; Harper) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

The Sing Sing Files by Dan Slepian ($30; Celadon Books) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Bone of the Bone by Sarah Smarsh ($29.99; Scribner) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

17. Once More From The Top by Emily Layden

What if a pop star like Taylor Swift had a deep, dark secret? Once More From The Top is not about Taylor Swift. But this murder mystery set in the pop world is very Swiftian. That used to mean "as in Jonathan Swift," the biting satirist who wrote Gulliver’s Travels. Now it means Taylor! In Once More From The Top, Dylan Read is the biggest pop star in the world. Dylan's been a huge success ever since releasing her debut album during senior year of high school. Everyone knows everything about Dylan...except for the devastating secret about her best friend disappearing the year before our hero went global. And now that her friend’s body has been found, everything everyone thinks they know about Dylan Read is being upended and will change everything. (Or perhaps just provide the basis for her next album?) No, no. It changes everything.

Once More From The Top by Emily Layden ($28; Mariner Books) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

18. Somewhere Beyond The Sea by TJ Klune
19. Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty
20. Sky Full Of Elephants by Cebo Campbell

Author TJ Klune follows his acclaimed bestseller The House in the Cerulean Sea with a follow-up that continues the heart-warming but fantastical struggles of Arthur Parnassus as headmaster of a very unusual orphanage.

Australian bestseller Liane Moriarity knows how to craft compelling fiction. Her books Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers and Apples Never Fall have all become starry miniseries. And Blake Lively is attached to a film version of The Husband’s Secret. So surely someone has already snapped up the rights to the juicy premise of Here One Moment. Passengers on a flight have the bizarre experience of watching a woman go up and down the aisles politely telling everyone when and how they’ll die. Shortly after the flight lands, her predictions start to come true. OK, I’ve never bought the idea that immortality is inevitably a curse (though it does raise issues!). But knowing when and how you’re gonna die? No thank you.

Writer Cebo Campbell delivers his debut sci-fi novel and it has a doozy of a premise. The United States becomes a post-racial society for one very simple reason: one day, every white person in the country simply walks into the nearest body of water. One year later, the country is still reeling and reforming itself in unexpected ways, from events large–like the Kingdom of Alabama–to small, like a Black man named Charlie Brunton released from prison for a wrongful conviction and now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University. When Charlie’s estranged daughter reaches out, they go on an eye-opening road trip to see what this new land of opportunity is really like and if anything, perhaps, anything has been lost.

Somewhere Beyond The Sea by TJ Klune ($28.99; Tor Books) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty ($30; Crown) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Sky Full Of Elephants by Cebo Campbell ($27.99; Simon & Schuster) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

21. The Siege by Ben Macintyre
22. A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men by Shannon Monaghan
23. The Notebook: A History of Thinking On Paper by Roland Allen

Author Ben Macintyre offers a real life thriller with The Siege, which recounts an Iranian hostage crisis. Not that one, but one entirely new to me: while Americans were held hostage in Iran, Saddam Hussein bankrolled six Arabs who stormed the Iranian embassy in London, hoping to force the UK to back their rebellion against the Ayatollah. Crazy, right? And it’s all true.

World War II will forever be a source of new and surprising stories, both real and fictional. Writer Shannon Monaghan offers up a real thriller: four men who served in special ops for Britain, fighting behind enemy lines all over the place and then continuing to serve their country for decades later, in one capacity or another. Picture them: Peter Kemp, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War; David Smiley, an expert on blowing things up; Billy McLean, a veritable Laurence of Arabia when it came to inspiring guerrilla fighters; and the politically savvy Julian Amery, because war ultimately comes down to managing personalities. Monaghan tells their stories both together and separately, which means telling the story of war in the UK for much of the 20th century.

Consider the notebook. Author Roland Allen certainly has. He captures the history of the modest notebook, how it went from a useful way to jot down info to–mysteriously–a way of keeping a personal diary. (That began in England around the 1550s and damned if anyone knows what sparked the idea and why there and not France or Germany or anywhere else first.) The notebooks of the famous like Darwin and Da Vinci and of course Pepys share space with more humble efforts, all of it showing why and how notebooks remain such a potent tool in our digital age. And yes, Allen did begin working on this project by grabbing a notebook. Not a Moleskin actually, but “a chunky teal Leuchtturm,” since I know you were about to ask.

The Siege by Ben Macintyre ($32; Crown) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men by Shannon Monaghan ($32; Viking) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

The Notebook: A History of Thinking On Paper by Roland Allen ($19.95; Biblioasis) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

24. So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison
25. Lucy Undying by Kiersten White
26. The Devil by Name by Keith Rosson

I am not the person to turn to for advice on horror novels. I get scared just looking at the covers of these new horror books. But author Chuck Tingle–who I have read, nervously–says the modern vampire tale So Thirsty is “as beautiful as it is horrific.” Acclaimed writer Nalini Singh says Lucy Undying–about Dracula’s first victim and her centuries-long search for true love–is “simply stunning.” And Stephen King, who knows a thing or two about horror, says The Devil By His Name and its prequel Fever House “are exciting, suspenseful, horrifying and written at a flurry-of-punches pace. Read them now and you can thank me later.” And if that’s not enough recommendation, then maybe you’re the monster!

So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison ($29; Berkley) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Lucy Undying by Kiersten White ($28.99; Del Rey) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

The Devil by Name by Keith Rosson ($30; Random House) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

27. Ida, In Love and In Trouble by Veronica Chambers
28. How To Lose A Best Friend by Jordan K. Casomar

We tend to trap our heroes in marble. It’s hard to think of Lincoln weeping or Joan of Arc ever feeling doubt. So the remarkable Ida B. Wells is always shown as a crusading journalist, a fighter for racial and gender equality in the not-so-free world after the Civil War changed so much. She is admirable, worthy, noble and yes, she deserves her flowers. But of course she’s also human. Writer Veronica Chambers gives her a heart and the courage to search for a love that will allow her to be who she must. After all, no romance that would hold you back is worthy of the name, is it?

Romance is never easy. But it can be brutally hard when you’re falling in love with your best friend, as in the novel How To Lose A Best Friend. Zeke and Imogen have always been close and everyone around them expects–no, knows–they belong together. But they’ve never seen each other that way. Until Zeke does. But Imogen still doesn’t. Can you destroy a friendship by asking for more? Yes. Should you even try? Umm, maybe?

Ida, In Love and In Trouble by Veronica Chambers ($18.99; Little, Brown Books For Young Readers) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

How To Lose A Best Friend by Jordan K. Kasomar ($19.99; MTV Books) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

29. Uprooted by Ruth Chan
30. Kwame Crashes The Underworld by Craig Kofi Farmer
31. Kareem Between by Shifa Saltagi Safadi

Moving is never easy for kids. But moving from one country to another when you’re 13 years old? That’s really tough. That’s the story Ruth Chan shares in her graphic memoir: being uprooted from Toronto to Hong Kong (in 1993, no less!). Critics praise Chan for capturing the perspective of a 13 year old so well in this work that discovers home indeed can be wherever the heart is.

Craig Kofi Farmer makes his debut with Kwame Crashes the Underworld, an adventure story with all sorts of Percy Jackson vibes. But instead of Greek gods, 12 year old Kwame faces the not-so-mythical forces found in the Ghanian underworld known as Asamando. Kwame must tussle with angry gods, save the world above…and learn how to say goodbye to the grandmother he loves so dearly. So once you’re done with Percy Jackson’s latest, Kwame is waiting.

Like Ruth Chan, the hero of Kareem Between is caught between worlds. Everything seems to be going wrong for the Syrian-American seventh grader Kareem. He messes up his tryout for the football team, he's saddled with showing a new kid from Syria the ropes and he finds out his mom’s visit to Syria proved torturous and she can't come home. So now I feel like a bit of a jerk for complaining about too much homework when I was in seventh grade.

Uprooted by Ruth Chan ($14.99; Roaring Brook Press) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Kwame Crashes The Underworld by Craig Kofi Farmer ($17.99; Roaring Brook Press) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Kareem Between by Shifa Saltagi Safadi ($18.99; NPOL) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Related: Best-Selling Author Jeffery Deaver on His New Series and His Favorite Books

32. Bear and Bird: The Adventure and Other Stories by Jarvis

This is the third Bear and Bird book from Jarvis. They’re gentle, amusing, sweet-natured tales anyone can identify with and enjoy. The tales revolve around miscommunication, feelings of jealousy, a day under the weather and so on. A picnic is an adventure, friends may quarrel but make it up soon enough and life is quite nice, if you just take a moment to enjoy it. You can read the books in any order. Heck, you can read the stories in the books in any order. The word “timeless” springs to mind.

Bear and Bird: The Adventure and Other Stories by Jarvis ($15.99; Candlewick) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

33. Mamá’s Magnificent Dancing Plantitas by Jesús Trejo; pictures by Eliza Kinkz
34. Within My Branches by Nicholas Michel; translated by Sarah Ardizzone
35. The Backward Day by Ruth Krauss; pictures by Marc Simont

Mama’s Magnificent Dancing Plantitas captures the exuberant desire of a little boy to help with delightful charm (and great artwork by Eliza Kinkz to go with the breathless text).

For a gentle change of pace, Within My Branches quietly shows how one tree can be visited by so many creatures during its lifetime.

The classic picture book The Backward Day shows a little boy impulsively waking up and doing everything backwards–putting his clothes on backwards, walking downstairs backwards and sitting at the breakfast table and saying “Good evening” when his dad walks into the room. Author Ruth Krauss wins you over when the dad amiably says “Good evening” right back and doesn’t wonder what the heck is going on when he sees his son wearing underwear on the outside of his pants. It’s another treat from NYRB Kids. If NYRB puts it out, you should buy it.

Mamá’s Magnificent Dancing Plantitas by Jesús Trejo; pictures by Eliza Kinkz ($18.99; Minerva) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Within My Branches by Nicholas Michel; translated by Sarah Ardizzone ($22; Pushkin Children’s Books) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

The Backward Day by Ruth Krauss; pictures by Marc Simont ($16.95; NYRB Kids) Buy now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Related: The 32 Best Romantasy Books of All Time