Best New Books To Read In Autumn

Discover a selection of new release books to add to your reading list, bring to your next book club and share with friends.

The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon

The scope of this wondrous novel may be larger than life, but its beauty lies in its intimate rendering of ordinary people. The book thrusts us into the first half of the 20th century amid the assassination that triggered World War I. Here in Sarajevo we meet Rafael Pinto, a pharmacist with a sensitive soul whose life is changed forever when he and thousands of men like him are conscripted into the army. In the trenches he falls for a fellow soldier and their epic story of survival spans continents, empires and the calamitous events that shaped history.

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

The author of Little Fires Everywhere — a bestselling book-turned-TV mini series — returns with a novel set in the not-so-distant dystopian future. At its centre is Bird, a young boy who lives under an authoritarian American regime and has grown up confronted by fear and hatred against people of Asian origin. After receiving a mysterious letter, Bird embarks on a torturous journey to find his mother, a Chinese American poet who supposedly abandoned her family. His quest uncovers disturbing truths about ‘civilised’ societies, and ultimately suggests that art is a powerful means of resisting oppression.

Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo

This is the eagerly awaited sequel to acclaimed fantasy novel Ninth House, which Stephen King called “the best fantasy novel I've read in years”. Reading the first book is recommended as the world created within these pages is magnificently detailed, tangled with magic and history and full of twists and turns. In the world of the Ninth House, Yale University is a place of wealth, power, violence and the paranormal, and in Hell Bent readers return to the Ivy League institution where our heroine Galaxy ‘Alex’ Stern is determined to enter the underworld to save her mentor, Darlington.

The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis

It may be over a decade since his last book, but The Shards is 100% Bret Easton Ellis: dark, lurid, sexy and violent. This explicit work of metafiction takes us back to 1980s Los Angeles, where Bret is writing his first book and attending high school with his privileged, superficial and disillusioned friends. Their world is equal parts glamorous and depressing, until a mysterious new student arrives and Bret’s desires and grip on reality spiral. As Bret’s obsession with his handsome classmate climaxes, another student is found dead and a serial killer threatens to target Bret and his friends.

The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

Written by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz in 1938, the tale of how this book came to be is as gripping as the novel itself. Boschwitz wrote it in four weeks following the Kristallnacht pogroms, when Nazi leaders unleashed a wave of anti-Jewish violence in Germany. The young German Jewish author had fled the country a few years earlier as a refugee, and while his novel was unsuccessful in its time, in 2016 the original typescript was rediscovered and a new edition was recently re-released. Fraught with tension and absurdity, it blurs the line between historical testimony and fictional thriller.

The Lovers by Yumna Kassab

Pulled from a tarot card deck, the title of this poetically written novel nods to the way love’s destiny is often attributed to fate — the dreams, pacts and made-up truths we make. Yumna Kassab, a writer from Western Sydney, tells the story of a tumultuous relationship in which rich girl Jamila and serious Amir meet and fall in love. Inevitably, class, cultural and geographic divides intervene, not to mention familiarity, boredom, cruelty. The beauty of this book is that every reader will bring to it their own experiences, assumptions and imagery, shaping The Lovers into something truly universal.