Some fantastic new books releasing this month including the long awaited new novel from Kiran Desai, which was just included in the 2025 Booker Prize Longlist. Enjoy 5 Stunning New Books for September 2025.
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5 Stunning New Books for September 2025
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that served only to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.
Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India. She fears that she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.
What We Can Know by Ian McEwan
2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found.
2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost.
Tom Metcalfe, an academic at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain’s remaining island archipelagos, pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the lost poem, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.
What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.
Sunward by William Alexander
Captain Tova Lir chose a life as a courier rather than get involved in her family’s illustrious business in politics. Set in humanity’s far future, hiring a planetary courier is essential for delivering private messages across the stars.
Encouraged by friends, Tova begins mentoring baby bots, juvenile AI who are developmentally in their teens, and trains them how to interact within society essentially becoming their foster mom. Her latest charge, Agatha Panza von Sparkles, named herself on their first run from Luna to Phoebe station. But on their return, they encounter a derelict spaceship and a lurking assassin, igniting a thrilling chase across the solar system.
Tova and Agatha’s daring actions leave Agatha’s mind vulnerable, relying on Tova’s former AI pupils for help. As Tova starts gathering her scattered family around her, she is chased through the solar system by forces who want her captured and her family erased.
The Wax Child by Olga Ravn
Based on a real-life seventeenth century Danish witch trial, The Wax Child tells in vivid prose the story of Christenze Kruckow, a noblewoman long pursued by a scandal of sorcery. People whisper that in her wake one finds illness, death, and unsettling behaviour by pigs and cats.
Some even say she once fashioned out of wax a child, an instrument of the most sinister magic. Christenze will flee the rumours to Aalborg, that great city of seawater and mist. But even there suspicion and fear rule, and once a rumour of witchcraft has taken hold, it can prove hard to shake.
Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave by Mariana Enriquez
In Somebody is Walking on Your Grave, Mariana Enriquez blends journalistic rigour and her fascination with the macabre as we encounter famous graveyards steeped in history, such as Montparnasse in Paris, Highgate in London, and the Jewish cemetery in Prague, as well as more remote, decrepit, hidden, or secretly beautiful ones. These pages are full of the graves of famous figures – Elvis in Memphis, Karl Marx in London – mournful sculptures, traces of voodoo, catacombs, skeletons and an array of legends and stories. Mariana’s personal journey weaves through haunting narratives, transforming burial grounds into spaces of reflection, obsession, and emotional discovery between the living and the dead.
From the haunting statues of Staglieno in Genoa to the eerie silence of Rottnest Island’s hidden Aboriginal cemetery, Enriquez’s narrative shifts effortlessly between travelogue, essay, and memoir. In her unique voice, cemeteries transform into living, breathing places of reflection, obsession and revelation. As she roams, each cemetery becomes a lens through which she examines everything from colonial violence to the strange rituals surrounding death.
If you enjoyed 5 Stunning New Books for September 2025, check out our Booker Prize 2025 Longlist review