Best New Books To Read in October 2025

This is Jon Fosse’s first novel since receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the quiet beginning of a new trilogy. Set on Norway’s rugged coast, it traces how one unexpected reunion at the harbor reshapes three lives. Told in spare, meditative prose, this story of loneliness, love, and death was called “unforgettable” by Publishers Weekly.

In his first novel in more than a decade, the 87-year-old author drops a down-on-his-luck private eye into a missing person case that spirals from Depression-era Milwaukee to prewar Europe, unfolding into a cross-continental tangle of spies, mystics, double agents, and political paranoia—all rendered in Pynchon’s signature mix of absurdity and unease.

Rocky is back—still funny, still spiraling, and now dealing with a grown daughter at home, an elderly father who’s moved in, and a local train crash she can’t stop fixating on. Set in Western Massachusett and packed with Newman’s signature warmth and wit, this standalone follow-up delivers big feelings in domestic doses. People calls it “honest, hilarious and heartbreaking… You’ll savor the prose from the very first line.”

Pulitzer and National Book Award winner Adam Johnson returns with a visionary tale of exile, empire, and resistance set in a fractured South Pacific kingdom. A girl from a forgotten island is thrust into Tonga’s warring courts, where talking corpses, poetic parrots, and politics swirl like storm tides. “A majestic saga of political unrest in the South Pacific and a girl's quest to save her people,” raves Publishers Weekly. “This is remarkable.”

This expansive collection gathers Bourdain’s most memorable work alongside lesser-known pieces that reveal the full range of his voice. Edited by his longtime agent Kimberly Witherspoon and introduced by Patrick Radden Keefe, it includes essays on travel and restaurant life, early diary entries from his first trip to France, short fiction, and excerpts from his unfinished novel. From the restless energy of Kitchen Confidential to later reflections on food culture and mortality, this is a carefully assembled portrait of a writer who never stopped trying to get it right on the page.

In her first essay collection since Feel Free, Smith brings her critical eye to politics art memory and public life. She writes on artists like Kara Walker and Toyin Ojih Odutola reflects on the loss of writers such as Hilary Mantel and Joan Didion and considers films like Tár and cities like New York and London. Whether walking through Kilburn or watching a performance unfold she remains both precise and expansive.

Before becoming a novelist, Sue Monk Kidd built a devoted readership with spiritual memoirs that explored feminine wisdom and contemplative living. Then came The Secret Life of Bees—a debut novel published in her early fifties that became a global phenomenon. In this reflective blend of memoir and guidebook, Kidd draws on her decades of experience and the insights of writers like Woolf and Angelou to explore writing as a soulful practice. Kirkus calls it “a gorgeous memoir of the creative life… designed to bring out the writer’s voice in all of us.”

In this urgent new book, Sanders makes the case that the U.S. has become an oligarchy—and lays out how working people can take back political power. A clear-eyed indictment of inequality and corruption, and a hopeful path forward from one of the country’s most consistent political voices.

The cult author of House of Leaves returns with a genre-defying epic about two friends on a blood-soaked mission to save a pair of doomed horses. Set in 1982 Utah and steeped in frontier myth and surreal horror, Tom’s Crossing is a kaleidoscopic fever dream. Stephen King called it: “Amazing… I’ve never read anything like it.”

Susan Orlean has profiled everything from orchid thieves to bullfighters to librarians to a 10-year-old boy with a pet ferret. In Joyride, the bestselling author of The Orchid Thief and The Library Book traces her evolution as a journalist and storyteller—from her early days at alt-weeklies to decades at The New Yorker to Hollywood adaptations of her work. She writes candidly about deadlines and dead ends motherhood and reinvention writer’s block and obsession and the joy of paying very close attention to the world. “An ebullient frank moving and inspiring memoir” says Booklist.