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Readers’ Most Anticipated October Books
At the beginning of each calendar month, Goodreads’ editorial team assembles a list of the hottest and most popular new books hitting shelves, actual and virtual. The list is generated by evaluating readers’ early reviews and tracking which titles are being added to Want to Read shelves by Goodreads regulars.
Each month’s curated preview features new books from across the genre spectrum: contemporary fiction, historical fiction, mysteries and thrillers, sci-fi and fantasy, romance, horror, young adult, nonfiction, and more. Think of it as a literary smorgasbord. Check out whatever looks delicious.
New in October: Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver returns with a story of music and regret in Partita. Stephen Graham Jones delivers a long-awaited sequel with the Indigenous horror of Off the Reservation. And historical fiction doyenne Philippa Gregory profiles a real-life 15th-century noblewoman in Royal Witch.
Also on tap this month: backwoods dive bars, NYC poets, and new SFF series installments from Sarah J. Maas, Veronica Roth, and V.E. Schwab.
A Court of Splintered Harmony is the much anticipated sixth book in the Court of Thorns and Roses series, the pioneering romantasy saga from author Sarah J. Maas. Returning readers: Things are looking grim in the Fae territories. An ancient evil is awakening deep beneath a mountain lake. The Night Court must mobilize to meet the threat, but the old alliances are strained or shattered. New readers: Better start here. By the way, official word is that book seven will be released in January 2027.
Twentysomething New Yorker Batter Gray—he was named after the family dog—is determined to make it in the toughest racket known to humankind. He wants to make a living in poetry. The good news: He just got hired at Peck & Peck, NYC’s most prestigious poetry journal. The bad news: His new office is a converted bomb shelter, his communications network is a pneumatic tube system, and colleagues are…difficult. Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry) returns with a quirky, funny, and melancholy city fable.
Read our interview with Garmus.
Read our interview with Garmus.
When Livia Cable gets a phone call from an old flame, she’s flooded with memories of her past as a young piano prodigy at a prestigious music academy. Life took some hard turns in those days, and now Livia must reluctantly assess the consequences. Told in a dual-timeline format, this latest novel from Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver (Demon Copperhead) dares to tackle the really hard stuff: love, loss, art, ambition, and family. Early reviews suggest that readers familiar with musical concepts will find a whole other level to the story.
Read our interview with Kingsolver.
Read our interview with Kingsolver.
Suitable for October reading, this latest mystery-thriller from the prolific Freida McFadden promises some pleasant Halloween vibes. The setup: Newly unemployed, Julia Barlow retreats to her family’s 17th-century ancestral home, a sprawling Massachusetts estate known as Pemberton. A series of disturbances leads to the discovery of a family secret dating back to 1692. Meanwhile, a parallel flashback story fills in the blanks from the other side of the clock. Is Pemberton truly haunted? Depends on how you define your terms.
Historical fiction specialist Philippa Gregory (The Other Boleyn Girl) returns to shelves with the story of Eleanor Cobham, a real-life 15th-century noblewoman with a complicated legacy. Cobham ascended to the heights of medieval English court society, only to be brought down by accusations of witchcraft and treason. But such allegations were often used as political weapons against powerful women at that time. What really happened? Gregory has been called “the queen of British historical fiction,” and she’s all about questions like this.
Veteran genre ace V.E. Schwab—author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil—wraps up her Villains series with Victorious, the concluding chapter in her gritty saga of significantly flawed humans with incredible superpowers. This one is for all the marbles—a final showdown between devoted archnemeses Eli Ever and Victor Vale. With her Villains series, Schwab tinkers with the very architecture of superhero mythology. Bonus tip: Compare the cover art of the three books. See what they did there?
One of the season’s buzzier adult romances, Bad Words is a thoughtful love story with a publishing-world premise: Parker Navarro, aspiring novelist, is devastated when influential critic Selina Chan savages his debut novel. Four years later, author and critic tangle again, this time in the viral court of public opinion. But things change when all the performative sniping leads to a different kind of connection. Author Rioghnach Robinson explores the upside of allowing yourself to be vulnerable.
This debut dark romantasy from U.K. author Charlotte B. Plumb proceeds from an intriguing story setup. For the poor and desperate citizens of Blackbridge, selling your soul is not a figure of speech. Demons are happy to trade favors, if you’re willing to deal away a few years of life. Reap & Sow centers on an uneasy alliance between Eda—a resourceful young soul broker—and a flirtatious demon known as Kit’rath. Early reviews are promising, and the book is being recommended for readers of Rachel Gillig and Hannah Whitten.
It’s a nightmare scenario: On a dim and rainy midnight road, a phantom figure causes a pileup of cars in the forest. Dazed and wounded, five strangers take shelter in a backwoods dive bar. The questions soon pile up. What was that thing they all swerved to avoid? Who’s out in those woods, anyway? And what’s wrong with the clocks in the place? Kelley Armstrong (The Summoning) returns with a multi-POV thriller that gradually transforms into a supernatural horror story.
Here’s the risk you run when cleaning out an old Victorian mansion: You might stumble into a parallel dimension. That’s the moral of the story with Solace House, the new horror novel from London author Will Mclean (of the 2020 ghost story The Apparition Phase). The college students tasked with cleaning up Solace House don’t know it yet, but they’re about to enter a realm of supernatural mystery that should feel familiar to readers of Shirley Jackson, M.R. James, and the weird fiction classic House of Leaves.
The tireless Stephen Graham Jones returns with this sequel story to his 2020 breakthrough horror novel, The Only Good Indians. Set five years after the events of the first book, the new story finds our hero Nate Yellow Tail joining a group of Blackfeet activists on a perilous mission: They intend to repatriate the bones of a young Indigenous boy who died at the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Things get weird, and by weird we mean terrifying. Jones has a wicked way of turning real American history into vivid, visceral horror.
From the author of the adored Monk & Robot books comes a new sci-fi vision with a love story at the core. Signy is a botanist and healer, bioprinting medicine from her small shop on the dirt-poor planet of Fortune. Cora is a Rorqual pilot, bonded to one of the giant living ships that roam the solar system. When Cora comes to Signy for help with a dangerous malady, the two women must find a way to trust each other. The good news: Love is powerful and tenacious in any environment.
This one gets a little tricky: Public Access Afterworld, the debut novel from writer and filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun, is designed in part to be a story sequel to Schoenbrun’s acclaimed 2024 indie horror film, I Saw the TV Glow. But the novel also stands on its own as a deranged collision of horror, conspiracy thriller, and head-trip speculative fiction. Spanning multiple decades, the story involves a surreal pirate TV broadcast and thin spots in our consensus reality. If you grew up drowning in relentless mass media—and you did—then this story is for you.
Author Tessa Bailey has earned a loyal readership with her contemporary romance novels like It Happened One Summer. Bailey takes a detour with her new book, a feverish love story dropped smack into the middle of a dystopian time-travel thriller. Our heroine, Magnolia Brown, is torn between two men—brothers, no less. Complicating matters: Magnolia is actually from the future, stranded in a timeline that was never hers. Returning Bailey fans, rest easy: Early reviews indicate that the sex scenes remain…hmm, let’s say compelling.
If you’re looking for some new variations on historical fantasy and romance tropes, maybe check out this celestial love story from author Ann Liang. Set in a mystical version of ancient China, Liang’s latest features an unlikely partnership between Ruija, the Goddess of Healing, and Keran, the God of Death. The upside? They’re both in the same line of cosmic duty and can commiserate on mythological hassles. The downside: Their affections cause disastrous consequences—floods, plague, this sort of thing. It’s a lot of pressure.
Returning readers up on their math skills will immediately note the significance of the title in this new series starter from Veronica Roth. Five is a very central number in Roth’s popular Divergent series, and indeed The Sixth Faction kicks off a major expansion to the saga. Look for more YA dystopian thrills along with various romance threads and a new narrative direction concerning underground rebellions. Pro tip: Official advance word confirms that Beatrice Prior is back.
Australian author C.G. Drews specializes in YA horror stories that capture those deeper, darker fears of adolescence. Drews’ latest parable tells of a lonely teenage boy stuck on a boondocks island where sorrow and misery reign. Also in the mix: an eldritch ocean god and a magical wish gone wrong. Readers of early-access editions are responding with the usual enthusiasm. Drews takes a raw and bloody approach to horrors both supernatural and emotional. The really scary stuff.
Set in a world of cruel immortals and deadly power struggles, author Marie Lu’s latest standalone YA fantasy introduces a compelling new heroine. Rose Lin Fairchild is a bringer of death. Quite literally. She is the Harbinger of Raven, the god of Death. A murder among the gods leaves Rose as Raven’s heir, but to ascend she must resolve her complicated feelings for Étienne Beauchard, the Regent of Lies. Lu, author of the acclaimed Legend YA sci-fi series, pivots to mythological romantasy, with a bonus murder mystery superstructure.
It’s a pickle, all right: Molly Graham has just woken up in the hospital where she’s informed that a head injury has led to some memory loss. In fact, Molly can’t remember the last six years at all, and she’s very surprised to find out who she married. Aster Bishop was her sworn enemy at boarding school, and now she’s supposed to be his wife? Debut author Amanda Gayle adds some crafty designs to the second-chance romance blueprint.
Hockey lust continues its strange flirtation with the zeitgeist in this fourth installment of Peyton Corrine’s sports romance series. The setup: Lillian LaBlanc is feeling lost, having flunked out of her Ivy League school. So she considers it a happy distraction when college hockey star Toren Kane—childhood friend and first love—comes back into her life. Toren has his own issues, alas. A scandal has just cost him his slot as a first-round NFL draft pick. What these two need is a fresh start and a healthy relationship. Something goal oriented, perhaps.
