Our Most Anticipated Book Releases Of Fall 2025

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Summer reading demands little more than sunblock and welcome distraction. Paperbacks are tossed into beach bags, dampened by pool water, or abandoned mid-chapter in favor of a late afternoon nap under the sun. Fall reading, by contrast, is a different beast. Books migrate from beaches to bedside tables, drawing closer to the lamp's glow as the days quietly retreat and we trade SPF-streaked covers for mug rings and margin notes made in the half-light. 

Reading in fall is a ritual — as instinctive as unpacking sweaters or switching to red wine. Even Reese Witherspoon, whose book club has turned her into a literary tastemaker, seems to agree: her Hello Sunshine brand recently launched Drop of Sunshine wine, practically designed for pairing with plot twists and fleece blankets.

The publishing industry, too, embraces the season with intention. Fall is when they roll out their most ambitious titles. The arrival of October's "Super Thursday" — that annual avalanche of releases — signals the start of the industry's most competitive, most curated stretch. 

So, with fall 2025 on the horizon, we're turning the page towards something weightier. Even as you work your way through the best beach reads on your summer 2025 TBR, the hunt for the perfect book — the one that will carry you through as the months turn darker — begins now. And this year, the contenders arrive with some serious literary firepower.

If Mona Awad's "Bunny" was a fever dream you never quite woke up from, "We Love You, Bunny" is here to pull you even deeper down the rabbit hole. When "Bunny" dropped in 2019, it hopped through literary circles like something bewitched — passed hand to hand by literary It Girls who couldn't look away from its velvet-gloved brutality. Awad's vision of female friendship as gothic absurdity felt perfectly attuned to a moment obsessed with aestheticized girlhood, plunging us knee-deep in beautifully packaged body horror and psychological carnage.

"We Love You, Bunny" returns to the uncanny terrain that made Awad cult-famous: an elite creative writing program at the aptly named Warren College. Protagonist Samantha is older now and has written a best-selling novel that references what happened during those strange, saccharine, violent days. But the past won't stay on the page. In fact, Sam finds herself haunted by it. The more she tries to pin the story down, the more it wriggles free — twitching and elusive.

Awad burrows further into the fragmented, hallucinatory terrain she began to chart in "Bunny." Her commitment to the surreal is gripping, as is her evolving command of structure — the way her stories fold in on themselves, mimicking the mental contortions of her narrator. With its feverish premise, metafiction turns, and a built-in cult following hungry for more, "We Love You, Bunny" is poised to be the buzziest release of the season, set for publication on September 23. Expect this one to hop across nightstands faster than you can say "workshop fiction."

A decade after her stunning debut "The Turner House" made her a National Book Award finalist, Angela Flournoy returns with "The Wilderness," set for release on September 16. Here, we have a novel that breathes in the liminal space between youth and middle age: that murky stretch where the scaffolding of early ambition begins to tremble under the weight of reality.

The protagonists — Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia — are in their early 20s at the novel's start, negotiating love, ambition, estrangement, and the low-grade hum of political unease across the urban metropolises of New York and Los Angeles. There are family fissures, like the ones that keep sisters Desiree and Danielle circling one another warily. There are relationships that are good on paper but feel brittle in private. There is the slippery promise of viral fame, the quiet radicalism of librarianship, the persistent question of how to build something — a restaurant, a career, a life — without capitulating to expectation.

Flournoy, an alum of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, told People she wrote the novel because she hadn't seen a book that captured how essential deep friendship becomes in the long stretch between one's 20s and 40s, "the decades when we truly come into adulthood." If you want to keep your adult friendships for life, this might be the read for you.

You might know Susan Orlean as the journalist behind "The Library Book," a meditative, genre-blurring investigation of the 1986 Los Angeles public library fire, which made its way onto our list of the best thriller and mystery picks from Reese's Book Club. Her earlier work, "The Orchid Thief," inspired the film "Adaptation" starring Meryl Streep and Nicolas Cage. During her seasoned career as a staff writer for The New Yorker, Orlean has made a speciality of immersing herself in unusual lives and overlooked subcultures, often rendering the eccentric with more clarity than the celebrated.

Now, in "Joyride," she's turning her attention inwards. This memoir traces the arc of a writing life — from her early days of chasing stories, through the collapse of a marriage, her late-in-life path to motherhood, the disorientation of success, and the looming presence of mortality. Alongside the personal, she examines the framework of her craft: journalism's shifting eras, from the golden age of alt-weeklies to the increasingly precarious terrain that is the modern media landscape. As she puts it, "The story of my life is the story of my stories." "Joyride" is set to be published on October 14, and it's already shaping up to be one hell of a story.

Quan Barry is promising us a literary horror story this fall. What does that mean? Well, in "The Unveiling," set for release on October 14, the horror begins with a simple work trip. Striker, a Black film scout, joins a group of mostly white tourists on an Antarctic cruise, tasked with photographing locations for a potential movie. But when she and a few others are separated from the main group during a kayaking trip, the narrative starts to unmoor. Psychological disturbance manifests as the novel shifts underfoot, playing with hallucination, suppressed memory, extreme temperatures, and effect of isolation on racial and group dynamics.

Massachusetts-raised Barry is an accomplished wordsmith, with an MFA from the University of Michigan and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford to her name. Her poetry earned her the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and later saw her serve as a judge for the 2021 New American Poetry Prize. Her prose, on the other hand, as flexed in "The Unveiling," is often spare and sharply controlled, interrupted by visual ruptures — blackout text, fragmentary formatting — that mirror Striker's deteriorating grasp on reality. The effect is deeply disquieting, steeped in atmospheric dread and a slow-building sense of existential drift. Just when you think you've found your footing, the ice cracks.

And finally, for the romance lovers: a queer story co-written by wives with all the '90s nostalgia you could possibly want. "Fade Into You" is the latest from writing duo Amber Smith and Sam Gellar. As Smith herself teased on Instagram: "Sapphic, swoony, and set in the '90s ... Do I even need to say more?" 

The premise is deliciously teen-movie adjacent: Bird is a poet in post-camp identity flux, Jessa drowns her domestic chaos with bootlegs and band tees. They'd barely speak if it wasn't for one shared emergency. Their best friends are dating, but the relationship is toxic and, crucially, imploding everyone's senior year. The answer, of course, is obvious. Fed up with playing second fiddle to this bad romance, Bird and Jessa plot to dismantle it. But as their scheming intensifies, so does something else ... a slow, shimmering infatuation of their own.

Early reviews are glowing, with one Goodreads reader calling it "Phenomenal. This is Amber Smith at her best, and with her best — her wife!!" Although the novel isn't one of the LGBTQ+ romances we can dive into during Pride Month 2025, don't be surprised if you find yourself drawn into this new work's chaos and chemistry upon its release on November 4.

To curate this list of fall 2025's most anticipated titles, we focused on a mix of established literary names and standout releases that already have strong early hype — from publishers, booksellers, literary critics, and online bibliophiles alike. We tracked titles being spotlighted in industry newsletters and paid close attention to already beloved authors returning after a significant hiatus.

Fall is one of the most competitive seasons in publishing, when many of the year's most high-profile books are released. With that in mind, we prioritized books that showed clear literary merit — either through subject matter, style, or authorial voice.

Some of these picks are already drawing early critical attention; others are likely to become breakout favorites based on the strength of their premise and early reader reactions on Goodreads, which we also took into account. We expect them to be shaping the literary conversation this season, keeping you turning pages as the clocks go back.