While some are back to school, some are mourning Brat Summer, and others are rediscovering their woolly jumpers, we have the perfect list of fiction titles to welcome you into autumn!

Demons of Good and Evil by Kim Harrison
Ace, 9780593437551, PB, £8.99, 3/9/2024

Rachel Morgan will learn that the price of loyalty is blood in the next Hollows novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Kim Harrison.

Rachel Morgan, witch-born demon, suspected that protecting the paranormal citizens of Cincinnati as the demon subrosa would be trouble. But it’s rapidly becoming way more trouble than even she could have imagined. While Rachel and her friends may have vanquished the trickster demon Hodin, his mysterious associate known only as ‘The Mage’ is eager to finish what Hodin started, beginning with taking down Rachel’s power structure piece by piece. With her world falling apart, Rachel desperately needs help. But with all of her supporters under attack, her only hope is to make a deal with the unlikeliest of allies…

The September House by Carissa Orlando
Berkley – US, 9780593548622, PB, £12.99, 3/9/2024

When Margaret and her husband Hal bought the large Victorian house on Hawthorn Street — for sale at a surprisingly reasonable price — they couldn’t believe they finally had a home of their own. Then they discovered the hauntings. Every September, the walls drip blood. The ghosts of former inhabitants appear, and all of them are terrified of something that lurks in the basement.

Most people would flee. Margaret is not most people. Margaret is staying. It’s her house. But after four years Hal can’t take it anymore, and he leaves abruptly. Now, he’s not returning calls, and their daughter Katherine — who knows nothing about the hauntings — arrives, intent on looking for her missing father. To make things worse, September has just begun, and with every attempt Margaret and Katherine make at finding Hal, the hauntings grow more harrowing, because there are some secrets the house needs to keep. A compulsive, relentlessly readable debut that perfectly melds horror and women’s fiction with an incredible twist. Perfect for fans of The Hacienda and How to Sell a Haunted House.

Earthly Creatures by Stevie Davies
Honno Welsh Women’s Press, 9781916821019, PB, £9.99, 5/9/2024

A riveting, epic historical novel set in 1940’s Germany, told from the often unexplored perspective of the Hitler Youth.

For all her life, idealistic 20-year-old bookworm Magdalena Arber has been split down the middle: veering wildly between fidelity to indoctrinated Nazi beliefs, and her father’s humanist values. Then comes the summons — the Nazi War Labour Service is conscripting her into a teaching position in East Prussia. Magda is elated. It’s a release from the cosy cage of childhood, and a chance to form young minds. She enters a lush rural world of forests, lakes, and meadows where order prevails. Yet there are monstrous hands out to shape the whole continuum of earthly creatures. The Gestapo are a lurking darkness. There is bombing further East, and news of a moving Russian front. Will Alt Schonbek burn as well? Can Magda survive?

Fears: Tales of Psychological Horror by Ellen Datlow
Tachyon Publications, 9781616964221, PB, £17.99, 10/9/2024

Bestselling horror editor Ellen Datlow (Body Shocks) returns with her most eclectic anthology: twenty-one stories of extreme psychological dread from horror icons from around the world.

In this uniquely unsettling anthology, editor Ellen Datlow has unearthed twenty-one exemplary tales of what humanity fears most: People. Fears contributors include Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen Graham Jones, Priya Sharma, Simon Bestwick, and more.

A Scarab Where the Heart Should Be by Marieke Bigg
Dead Ink, 9781915368614, PB, £10.99, 12/9/2024

Jacky ‘The Beetle’ McKenzie is, if you ask her, the most sensible and rational person in the world. Unfortunately, her ordinary and the rest of the world’s ordinary don’t mix. To the rest of the world, she is belligerent, weird, obsessive, angry and volatile. Always, in the background, husband Mark and girlfriend Clarissa have one eye on each other, both asking the same question — which of them will she push too far first? Which of them will abandon her, and which will be left to pick up the pieces?

A Scarab Where the Heart Should Be invites us into the mind of one of the world’s few true individuals as she embarks on her quest to streamline her life into the most perfect version it can be. Part visionary architect, part whirlwind of furious artistic chaos, but always, unwaveringly, searingly true to herself, this is a case study on what happens when obstinate obsession comes up against an unyielding society from the author of Waiting for Ted.

Half Swimmer by Katja Oskamp, translated by Jo Heinrich
Peirene Press, 9781916806009, PB, £12.99, 17/9/2024

From the author of Marzahn Mon Amor, winner of the Dublin Literary Award 2023.

Growing up in 1980s East Germany, as the daughter of an army officer and a teacher, Tanja seems set up to become a model citizen of the German Democratic Republic. Except she has other ideas. And so, it turns out, does the course of history. Half Swimmer is a collection of stories from one life, following a young girl as she attempts to forge her own identity under the social pressures of both the GDR, and the capitalism of a unified Germany.

Romeo & Seahorse by Nikolaj Tange Lange
Cipher Press, 9781917008044, £11.99, 19/9/2024

A frantic love letter to love itself, Romeo & Seahorse is a sexy, frightening, tender, and visceral rush through Berlin’s chemsex scene.

Romeo has Hepatitis again. It’s no surprise, and when you haven’t slept for days staying awake is easy. And anyway, there’s the promise of more drugs, more sex. Leaving his boyfriend at home he heads out for hookups, getting abjectly high and pushing his body to grotesque extremes in an urgent but dissociated quest for romance. What follows is a delirious trip through squalid rooms, hospital wards, and nighttime parks, broken by memories of first loves, European travels, and meditations on what it means to be a Romeo.

With chaotic chemsex escapades and musings on romantic love, art and belonging, Romeo & Seahorse takes us to places not often explored in fiction. For fans of Dennis Cooper, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and Brontez Purnell.

Generation Loss: A Cass Neary Novel by Elizabeth Hand
Influx Press, 9781914391323, PB, £11.99, 19/9/2024

Cass Neary is not afraid of living on the edge. A photographer whose shots of New York’s punk scene in the seventies briefly earned her fame, caché, and a cultish kind of cool, Cass has spent much of her life since then in the dark, watching and waiting. But thirty years later she is alone, adrift, and falling rapidly into oblivion. So when an old acquaintance asks her to interview a fellow photographer — a notorious recluse who lives on an island off the coast of Maine — she accepts. There, she stumbles across a decades-old crime still claiming new victims. Amid this inhospitable hinterland, Cass comes to realise that her final shot might also be her shot at redemption.

First published in 2007, Generation Loss is a mesmerising literary crime thriller from the author of A Haunting on the Hill.

Pocket Ghosts from Galley Beggar Press
Turkey, baubles and jingle bells are all very well – but there’s no better Christmas tradition than the ritual of telling a gripping festive ghost story. Galley Beggar Press are delighted to revive this popular tradition in their Pocket Ghosts range – a series of beautiful, collectible books featuring some of the finest stories in the genre.