Today in Bookish and Literary History, September 23

2025 The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity, by the Booker Prize–winning author of The Inheritance of Loss.

• Longlisted for Booker Prize
• Finalist for Kirkus Prize

2025 A Carol for Mrs. Dickens by Rebecca Connolly

Catherine Dickens, wife of Charles Dickens, experiences her own Christmas Eve transformation as she magically travels through her cherished memories to rediscover her lost love of Christmas.

2025 A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories by Jonathan Lethem

A definitive collection of new and selected stories by a master of the form

2025 Circle of Days by Ken Follett (UK)

From a bestselling author of epic fiction comes the deeply human story of one of the world’s greatest mysteries: the building of Stonehenge.

2025 It's Me They Follow by Jeannine A. Cook

An allegorical love story — a modern day Alchemist meets The Never Ending Story —set in a world where a book shopkeeper becomes a reluctant matchmaker, bringing soulmates together through books.

2025 My Mother, the Mermaid Chaser by Jamie Jo Hoang

Told in dual POV, this gripping companion piece to My Father, the Panda Killer, follows a teenage son who defies his sister's wishes by searching for more information about their absent mother. Meanwhile, his mother's poignant backstory reveals her struggle with grief and longing, culminating in her heart-wrenching decision to leave her children.

2025 The Dark of the Moon by Fiona Valpy (UK)

Philly Delaney risked everything during the war. From flying planes for the Air Transport Auxiliary corps, aka the ‘Attagirls’, to working with the Bletchley Park codebreakers, and life-or-death missions as an SOE agent in France, she and her colleagues pushed their courage—and their luck—to the limits.

2025 The Guest in Room 120 by Sara Ackerman

1905 As the mother of a university and a woman with an iron will, Jane Stanford has made her share of enemies. After a scare at her mansion in San Francisco and on the advice of her doctor, she flees to Honolulu and the fashionable new Moana hotel. But as fate would have it, the island is not as safe as it seems.

2025 The Killer Question by Janice Hallett (UK)

Janice Hallett, “the new queen of crime” (Electric Literature), returns with a fresh, edge-of-your-seat mystery that takes place at a pub’s weekly trivia night, revealed through quiz categories, phone messages, and email correspondence.

2025 The Sapling by Marc Bendavid

An exquisite debut autobiographical novel about a powerful bond between a young boy and his teacher; an excavation of art, memory, grief, and transformative love.

2025 The Sunflower Widows by Matthew Fults

Where grief runs deep and love lingers long, one woman leads the way from sorrow to strength.

2025 What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (UK)

It set almost a century in the future in a UK partially submerged by rising seas.

2025 What's with Baum? by Woody Allen

Asher Baum is quietly losing his mind. Can you blame him?

2025 Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood

Amid a global pandemic, one young woman is trying to keep the pieces together – of her family, stunned by a devastating loss, and of her mind, left mangled and misfiring from a mystifying disease. She’s afraid of her own floorboards, and “WHAT IS LOVE? BABY DON’T HURT ME” plays over and over in her ears. She hates her friends, or more accurately, she doesn’t know who they are.