Notable Novels of Fall 2025

What are the novels on everyone’s lips in Fall 2025?

Well, the Booker shortlist has just been released. We will shortly publish an in-depth discussion of the six books that made the cut, but generally the 2025 judges’ selection has been received favourably: “rich and remarkably varied,” as The Guardian declared in an editorial. We have previously featured Susan Choi’s rapturously received Flashlight, and Andrew Miller’s Walter Scott Prize-winning The Land in Winter;  the judges also flagged up Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny and David Szalay’s Flesh, as well as The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits (who recently recommended us the best road trip novels) and Audition by Katie Kitamura (who once spoke to us about marriage and divorce in literature). But, as I say, more on this soon.

There are a number of highly anticipated new novels just newly released, not least Patricia Lockwood’s latest, Will There Ever Be Another You. I love Patricia Lockwood. Her writing is irreverent and funny and full of non-sequiturs, yet also full of pathos and depth. You may remember her memoir, Priestdaddy, about growing up in the Midwest as the daughter of an charismatic, gun-toting Catholic priest, or her heartbreaking novel No One is Talking About This. Will There Ever Be Another You features a narrator unhinged by Long Covid, whose brain fog is modelled on symptoms experienced by Lockwood herself, as detailed in a London Review of Books diary published in 2020. (“I was under the impression that I had taken detailed notes throughout the experience,” as she recalled, “but when I opened the file called ‘quarantine’ I found it to be 158 words long and full of cryptic particles: ‘Masque of the Red Death. Statue of Pericles. Tigers.’ Fine, whatever.”) Also unmissable: this profile of Lockwood, which ran recently in the New Yorker.

You may, like me, be excited to learn that the Nigerian-British novelist Oyinkan Braithwaite has a new novel. In Cursed Daughters, a young woman believed by her relatives to be the reincarnation of her drowned cousin desperately seeks to break the family curse that leaves all their women in their maternal line heartbroken. This bleakly humorous family saga will not disappoint those who loved Braithwaite’s hit debut, My Sister, the Serial Killer and offers a fascinating portrait of life in Lagos, which she depicts as utterly modern yet deeply superstitious. (Out now in the UK; 4 Nov in the US)

I am, thank you. What other new literary novels should I look out for in fall 2025?

In November, Olivia Laing (whose experimental novel Crudo was an international bestseller and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) will publish The Silver Book, a novel billed as both “a queer love story and a noirish thriller” set in 1970s Italy. In it, a young English artist meets the (real) production designer Danilo Donati, before joining him as his assistant at the film studio where reality is recast and reconstructed. These are troubled times—the ‘Years of Lead,’ during which hundreds died in terror attacks—and very soon the violence will be knocking at their door. Laing wrote the book in a three-month frenzy in 2024, describing the process as like “an extraordinary tidal wave I was riding…I’d be typing as fast as I could, with the sense that I could hear the words.” I can’t wait to read the result.

Ian McEwan returns with his nineteenth(!) novel, What We Can Know. He describes it as “a novel about a quest, a crime, revenge, fame, a tangled love affair, mental illness, love of nature and poetry, and how, through all natural and self-inflicted catastrophes, we have the knack of surviving somehow.” In the apocalyptic 22th century, a historian searches for a literary manuscript last seen at a scandalous 2014 dinner party; since then the world has been ravaged by fire, pandemic, nuclear explosions, rising sea levels. Imagine A.S. Byatt’s Possession set in the world of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and you’ll get an idea—and McEwan brings bravura and extravagance to this terrible vision. The New York Times’ Dwight Garner declared it “a piece of late-career showmanship” from the old master. “It gave me so much pleasure,” he added, “I sometimes felt like laughing.”

Anything else you want to mention?

Yes. While I have you, let me draw your attention to Chris Kraus’s The Four Spent the Day Together. Kraus, the avant-garde author of I Love Dick, offers a new freewheeling autofiction in which the main character, ‘Catt’ becomes obsessed with a grim real-life murder in northern Minnesota around the time that her own partner relapses into alcoholism. Krause has explained that, while attempting to report the case in a true crime style reminiscent of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, she “started to realize that it was not possible to write that kind of book anymore.” They “took place in backwater towns, pre-internet, where people really thought they were invisible. Everyone, the perpetrators, the defendants, the judge, the whole community, would just pour their hearts out. That’s not happening now.” However, while researching she was struck by the similarities between the depressed mining town in which the murder took place and the working class Connecticut community in which she herself grew up. Those parallels then formed the core of the book, which wrestles with class in contemporary America, addiction, and—as ever—art. (Out Oct 7.)

It’s exciting to see so many new books from big-hitter authors after what felt like a quiet summer. Each of these books has been eagerly awaited, and we’d love to know what you think. Let us know on social media—or send us your own personal watch list of notable novels in Fall 2025.