Best New Books To Read in September 2025

Nearly two decades after The Inheritance of Loss won the Booker, Desai returns with a luminous, shape-shifting tale of modern love and alienation. Set between India, Vermont, and New York, it follows two distant souls bound by family myth, personal hauntings, and history’s weight. “Every character...feels fully realised,” praised the 2025 Booker Prize judges, who called it “philosophical, comic, earnest, emotional, and uncanny.”

The Booker-shortlisted author of No One Is Talking About This returns with a sharp and unsettling portrait of illness, loss, and disorientation in the COVID era. A young woman struggles to hold her family and her own mind together as grief and disease reshape her reality. Publishers Weekly praised it as “a knockout,” noting Lockwood’s “trademark humor, originality, and depth.”

Harvard historian Jill Lepore delivers a revelatory, timely history of America's hardest-to-change document. Published for the 250th anniversary of U.S. founding, this compelling work traces the rarely told story of amendment attempts—almost all unsuccessful—and what that failure means for democracy today. "It is impossible to imagine a more instructive text on a more timely subject by a more accomplished historian," praised author Timothy Snyder.

Lily King is back with another literary triangle, as a college love affair reverberates into midlife. Decades after a brief, intense entanglement with two classmates, a woman is forced to confront the choices that shaped her life. “King is a genius at writing love stories,” said Kirkus in a starred review. “Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.”

Almost a decade after Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, Nosrat returns with 125 personal, vibrant, deeply satisfying recipes—from Calabrian chili crisp to a perfect yellow cake. But it’s also a philosophy of cooking as connection. With tips, techniques, and rituals that nourish far beyond the plate, this is the cookbook to give and keep.

Ten years after her National Book Award–finalist debut The Turner House, Flournoy returns with a sweeping story of five Black women navigating adulthood, estrangement, and shifting allegiances from the late 2000s through the 2020s. "It's easy to marvel at Flournoy's precision with character, the heart of the novel, but it's the book's hard look at social and political realities that give it its teeth," raved Kirkus Reviews. "Elegant and unsettling, this novel evades the expected at every turn."

Grief, desire, and estranged brothers fill the quiet spaces of Rooney’s most emotionally daring novel yet. Now in paperback, Intermezzo earned spots on nearly every Best of 2024 list—and even Obama’s reading list. “Boldly experimental and emotionally devastating,” wrote Publishers Weekly.

“The author of the world’s most famous memoir returns to the form to tell the story of a great love,” declared Kirkus of Gilbert’s first nonfiction in a decade. In All the Way to the River, Gilbert recounts her profound relationship with musician Rayya Elias and the ways love, obsession, and heartbreak can both undo and transform us. “A worthy addition to the literature of addiction and recovery, charming and harrowing by turns,” wrote Kirkus.

Awad’s cult favorite Bunny gets a wildly inventive companion. Now her protagonist is abducted by her frenemies, who seize the chance to tell their own uncanny origin story. Booklist hailed it as “laugh-out-loud funny, cinematic prose… Readers will laugh to tears and be fully immersed in this ethereal trip back to Warren.”

This posthumous collection from the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner gathers unpublished and classic essays on Truman, Washington, art, and the mentors who shaped him, showing how history can guide the present. Edited by his daughter Dorie McCullough Lawson and longtime researcher Michael Hill, with a foreword by Jon Meacham, it offers a final portrait of McCullough’s enduring legacy.