Must Read Fiction For September 2025

‘Find where you belong and make that place your own…’

Tanner has spent his whole life moving from place to place, belonging nowhere. So when his dying grandmother reveals the name and location of the father he never knew, he plans to visit Asheboro to lay the past to rest, then move on – just as he always has.

Kaitlyn knows exactly where she belongs. In Asheboro, she’s built a life for herself and her kids that she’s proud of, especially after the turmoil of divorce. But when she meets lone wolf Tanner, she can’t help but feel something has been missing until now.

Jasper will never belong again. He had everything – and he lost it all. Now with only his old dog Arlo for company, he lives quietly, haunted by the tragic accident that took place decades before.

Three strangers’ worlds are about to collide, changing the trajectory of all their lives. Because some paths cross, some merge, and others guide you home…

From the much-loved bestselling author of The Notebook comes a brand-new emotional and powerful novel about the journeys we take and those who touch our hearts along the way.

** A creeping story of sibling rivalry and dangerous obsession from the multi-award nominated author of Sunburn **

January 1965. The orphaned O’Leary siblings – Tom, Jack, Anna and Peggy – arrive in the village of Ballycrea, tight-lipped about their troubled past and desperate for a fresh start.

After being met with suspicion from most of the locals, the family are thrilled when they’re taken under the wing of their well-respected neighbours, Bill and Betty Nevan, who offer them work, companionship and an opportunity to fit in.

But for one of the O’Learys, this new friendship sparks an intense attachment that makes the dynamic dangerous for all. It’s difficult to bury secrets, but almost impossible to bury feelings…

Crackling with suspense, Heap Earth Upon It revisits the rural Ireland of Howarth’s critically acclaimed debut and delves into claustrophobic relationships and tangled identities, leaving you wondering who to trust until the very last page. It combines the emotional intensity and slow-burn sapphic obsession of Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea and Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep with the unsettling gothic undertones of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Shirley Jackson’s fiction.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Wally Lamb, celebrated for two prior Oprah Book Club selections, returns with an exceptional third pick, a propulsive novel following a young father grappling with unbearable tragedy as he searches for hope, redemption, and the possibility of forgiveness.

Corby Ledbetter is struggling. New fatherhood, the loss of his job, and a growing secret addiction have thrown his marriage to his beloved Emily into a tailspin. And that’s before he causes the tragedy that tears the family apart. Sentenced to prison, Corby struggles to survive life on the inside, where he bears witness to frightful acts of brutality but also experiences small acts of kindness and elemental kinship with a prison librarian who sees his light and some of his fellow offenders, including a tender-hearted cellmate and a troubled teen desperate for a role model. Buoyed by them and by his mother’s enduring faith in him, Corby begins to transcend the boundaries of his confinement, sustained by his hope that mercy and reconciliation might still be possible. Can his crimes ever be forgiven by those he loves?

What would happen if you finally met your soul mate – but they were married to someone else?

Salento, Italy, June 1934. A coach stops in the main square of Lizzanello, a tight-knit village where everyone knows each other. A couple gets off: The man, Carlo, a child of the South, is happy to be back home after a long time away; the woman, Anna his wife, is a stranger from the North. Carlo’s brother is there to meet them, and he and everyone else can’t help but notice that Anna is as beautiful as a Greek statue. But Anna is not like the other wives. She doesn’t gossip or attend church. She reads books no one else has ever heard of. She even wears pants, just like a man, and thinks a woman should have rights just like a man. There aren’t many options for a woman with Anna’s sensibilities, so when she learns that the post office is hiring, she leaps at the opportunity.

A female letter carrier? It is unthinkable. But Anna soon becomes the invisible thread connecting the town as she delivers letters between clandestine lovers, families waiting to hear news of loved ones away at war, even helping those who can’t read. But for some in Lizzanello, letters come too little and too late. The seamstress, who was Carlo’s first love, can’t help but look at Anna as having taken her rightful place. Carlo’s niece has put herself in a loveless marriage after an impetuous act of jealousy. And Carlo and his brother find themselves trying to cover up a recently unearthed surprise that could shatter all of their lives.

Agu is just a boy when war arrives at his village. His mother and sister are rescued by the UN, while he and his father remain to fight the rebels. ‘Run!’ shouts his father when the rebels arrive. And Agu does run. Straight into the rebels’ path.

In a vivid, sparkling voice, Agu tells the story of what happens to him next. His story is shocking and painful, and completely unforgettable.

May, 1964. At a youth festival in East Berlin, an unlikely young couple fall in love. In the bright spring days, anything seems possible for them – it is only many years later, after her death, that Kaspar discovers the price his wife paid to get to him in West Berlin.

Shattered by grief, Kaspar sets off to uncover Birgit’s secrets in the East. His search leads him to a rural community of neo-Nazis, and to a young girl who accepts him as her grandfather. Their worlds could not be more different – but he is determined to fight for her.

From the author of the no.1 international bestseller The Reader, The Granddaughter is a gripping novel that transports us from the divided Germany of the 1960s to contemporary Australia, asking what might be found when it seems like all is lost.

Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins

A captivating coming-of-age novel about love, sisterhood, secrets and betrayal.

I’m a liar, to begin with.’

I wasn’t always a goddess, you see. My only real power was my beauty – you’ll have heard. It’s legendary. But that was never going to be enough for me.

It took a web of lies to convince the gods of Olympus I was one of them. But I did. I was that good. Zeus gave me a title and riches and loved me. And all he wanted in return was for me to love him back.

But of course, Zeus was a tyrant. (Not entirely surprising when you’re ninety per cent insecurities and ten per cent raw power.) I couldn’t live at someone’s mercy. Really, I had no choice. I had to take on the mightiest Olympian of all. And this bit’s not a lie… I intended to win.

Uncovering secrets that span generations, Rachel Hore delivers intriguing, involving and emotive narrative reading group fiction like few other writers can.

Nancy Foster has harboured a devastating secret that shattered her professional and personal life.  On meeting her, journalist Stef Lansdown realizes that she has the power to restore Nancy’s reputation and to heal the wounds, if only Nancy will trust her. But someone else wants to get to the bottom of the story first, someone who doesn’t want it to be told. 

Set in the beautiful environs of the Norfolk Broads in 2010, and in London in the ’40s and ‘50s, when life for career-driven women was so different, The Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge is Sunday Times multi-million copy bestselling author Rachel Hore’s utterly compelling new novel, interweaving the past and the present. 

The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love each other deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There’s Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of 21st century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who’s barely holding the household together; their son, Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage give him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and, above all, the young Vera, half-Jewish, half-Korean, and wholly original.

Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in life: a friend at school; Daddy and Anne Mom to stay together; and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love’s survival in this great, mad, imploding world.

Both biting and deeply moving, Vera, or Faith is a boldly imagined story of family and country told through the clear and wondrous eyes of a child. With a nod to What Maisie Knew, Henry James’s classic story of parents, children, and the dark ironies of a rapidly transforming society, Gary Shteyngart’s newest novel is among his best and shows why, in the words of Jonathan Safran Foer, he is ‘a national treasure’.

Everything will be fine. That is what Mary and John promise when they tell their two children that they are getting a divorce. But while the end of their marriage offers them both freedom from their dissatisfaction, it brings to the fore the pain and resentments that have always percolated through their relationship and throws into stark relief their shortcomings as partners and as parents.

While John finds a second chance at love – still retaining the support of their children – Mary is forced to contend with the fact that, having always yearned for the approval of others, she is thoroughly unprepared for the waves of change that are coming to reshape her life.

Told from the alternating perspectives of Mary and John as they navigate life in the wake of their separation, Opt Out is an astute examination of the constrictive power of gender roles, and a reckoning with our impossibly idealised conceptions of motherhood. Smart and intimate, it explores the difficulties of breaking away from the constraints of one life in pursuit of another.