The autumn 2025 books to read list has landed, and it is properly stacked, Booker longlists, a Miss Marple revival, and a dystopian electricity thief are all competing for your attention before the nights draw in.
Good news for anyone who treats September as a kind of personal new year: this season’s literary releases are among the most anticipated in years, with heavyweight names arriving in quick succession from now through to October.
Emma Cline returns with Switzy, and a Booker longlisting
It has been a decade since Emma Cline’s debut The Girls landed her firmly on the literary map, and the intervening years have only added to her credentials. According to the Emma Cline Official Website, she was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, won an O. Henry Prize in 2021 for her story ‘White Noise’, and was named a 2024 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, a CV that makes the arrival of Switzy this September feel properly earned.
The novel tells the story of David, a retired executive living with Alzheimer’s who travels to a clinic in Zurich as his final destination, piecing together memories along the way. Sharp observation, underlying wit, and the kind of accumulated emotional weight that only arrives after years of craft. Switzy has been longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, and it is hard to argue with that.
Marlon James is also on the Booker 2026 longlist with The Disappearers, his much-anticipated return. The novel goes back to Jamaica, where a heinous anti-gay hate crime has been committed against a group of amateur actors. It is told through journals, letters, and a chorus of voices punctuated by slang, emotionally raw, chilling, and brimming with rage. Fans of James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings will find everything they were hoping for, and then some.
Lucy Foley, Miss Marple, and a body on the ski lift
If your autumn reading preference tends more towards who-did-it than who-wrote-it, Lucy Foley has you sorted. Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel sees Foley take on Agatha Christie‘s Miss Marple legacy, no small assignment. The setup is a fast-paced mystery set high in the Swiss Alps, where Miss Marple arrives for a holiday only to find a body on one of the ski lifts, with the threat of another murder unless the killer can be found. Exactly as fun and dramatic as it sounds.
For readers who want their fiction to veer into near-future territory, Emily St. John Mandel’s Exit Party is set in 2031, in an America at war with itself. A Republic of California has been declared, parties are kicking off in LA after the curfew lifts, but friends Ari and Gloria experience something at one such party that alters the course of their future and their sense of reality. Critics are calling it Mandel’s best work since the bestselling Station Eleven. TV rights were acquired in a hotly contested 10-way auction, so expect to be hearing a lot more about this one.
Diaz, Kuang and Kingsolver round out a vintage season
Hernan Diaz follows up his Pulitzer Prize for Fiction-winning Trust, the one Dua Lipa chose for her Bookshop-stocked Service95 Book Club and said made her ‘head spin’, with PLY. The new novel is set centuries from now in an American city, following an unnamed orphan who works as a ‘pincher’, stealing electricity to power an underground music scene. When she is invited to take part in an experiment, everything feels at risk. A fiercely intelligent look at technology, climate and capitalism. Out 29 September.
Rebecca F. Kuang, whose Yellowface won a British Book Award and was named Foyles Book of the Year, is said to be at her most personal in Taipei Story. A coming-of-age novel dealing with identity, language, love and grief, it is inspired by Kuang’s own experience of studying Mandarin in Taipei in the wake of her grandfather’s death.
And Barbara Kingsolver, whose Demon Copperhead has rarely been off anyone’s top ten list, turns to pianist Livia Bohusz in Partita, a woman unmoored by her brother’s suicide and her parents’ silence, whose musical talents take her from rural Appalachia into academia and symphony halls. The story was born out of Kingsolver’s love of both language and classical music. Out 6 October.
