8 Latest Book Releases Everyone’s Talking About
From Desai to Roy, these are all the books we're loving this fall
Every literary season has its zeitgeist — that subtle shift in what the world seems hungry to read. Some years belong to autofiction, others to sweeping historical sagas or coolly detached essay collections that make a case for the intellect. But 2025, in all its chaos and renewal, feels like the year writers began reaching inward again — toward memory, mortality, and the untranslatable mess of being human.
It’s a season of reckoning, not escape. Kiran Desai returns after two decades with a novel about the quiet devastations of love and exile; Salman Rushdie writes, unflinchingly, about what it means to confront life’s “eleventh hour”; Arundhati Roy mourns her mother with prose that could light a match in your throat. Even Dan Brown, high priest of airport thrillers, seems to have written something that doubles as an elegy for his own genre.
Below, ten books that define the cultural conversation this Fall.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
Twenty years after The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai is back — and it’s like time stood still waiting for her. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a story of love stretched thin across borders: between Vermont, New York, and a small, suffocating Indian household. It’s a novel about what happens when intimacy erodes slowly, not dramatically — when the person you love becomes a ghost with a heartbeat. Desai writes with a stillness that feels radical in our era of constant refresh. Critics called it “Romeo and Juliet for the global age,” but that’s too neat. It’s more like a hymn to inherited loneliness — that quiet, familiar ache we mistake for normal.
We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad
Trust Mona Awad to turn academia into gothic performance art. We Love You, Bunny, the feverishly anticipated sequel to her cult hit Bunny, returns to the surreal MFA world that once felt like a cross between Heathers and Hell. This time, Awad flips the narrative, offering an alternate perspective that peels back the layers of performance, delusion, and desire. Awad’s genius lies in making you complicit: she lets you laugh at the absurdity of art school politics even as you feel the rot underneath. For readers exhausted by tidy realism, We Love You, Bunny is a reminder that fiction can still be strange, dark, and deeply feminine in its rage.
The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie
After surviving an attack that nearly ended his life, Rushdie’s newest collection, The Eleventh Hour, is both elegy and exorcism. These five interconnected stories stretch across India, England, and America, tracing characters who find clarity only when time begins to run out. It’s hard not to read it autobiographically — as if Rushdie, having glimpsed mortality, is turning his gaze back on the themes that once defined him: identity, exile, reinvention. For an author so long mythologised, The Eleventh Hour is startlingly human — the kind of book that reminds you why fiction, at its best, outpaces death.
Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood
Atwood calls it a memoir, but it’s really a mosaic — shards of memory, wit, and literary gossip stitched together with her signature dry humor. She revisits her childhood in Quebec’s wilderness, her bohemian youth in Toronto, and the literary friendships that shaped her. She’s self-aware enough to poke at her own legend, and generous enough to let us in on the joke.
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
Grief, when written honestly, can feel like rebellion. In Mother Mary Comes to Me, Roy trades the political for the personal, writing about her mother, Mary Roy — a formidable activist and educator whose defiance shaped the feminist movement in India. But this is not a sentimental memoir. Roy’s prose, lyrical as ever, cuts with scalpel precision. She writes about loss the way she writes about revolution: with clarity, anger, and unbearable tenderness. If The God of Small Things was about the grammar of love, this is about its aftermath — the way love lingers after death, reshaping everything it touches.
1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin
Most financial histories read like tax audits. 1929 is the rare exception — vivid, cinematic, and unnervingly relevant. In nearly 600 pages, Sorkin reconstructs the Great Crash not as an economic event, but as human theatre: a parade of arrogance, greed, and catastrophic optimism that still echoes in today’s markets. Drawing from newly unearthed archives, he writes with the flair of a novelist and the precision of a historian.
The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown
Dan Brown is not supposed to be subtle — and thankfully, he isn’t. But The Secret of Secrets, the sixth in his Robert Langdon series, feels oddly elegiac. Sure, there are the usual encrypted codes, Vatican corridors, and time-sensitive revelations. But beneath the spectacle lies a melancholy awareness of obsolescence — of a writer revisiting his obsessions with mortality and meaning.
Always Remember by Charlie Mackesy
There’s a reason Mackesy’s The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse became a global balm during lockdown: it spoke to the inner child without pandering to it. Always Remember continues that conversation — the same four friends wandering through uncertainty, asking gentle questions about resilience, grief, and joy. It’s easy to dismiss books like this as twee, but Mackesy’s magic is sincerity. In a cultural moment addicted to irony, he writes like someone who still believes in tenderness. And that, in itself, feels radical.