As the leaves turn and pumpkin spice takes over, it’s the perfect time to dive into some cosy October fiction! This month is packed with spine-tingling thrillers, heartwarming humour, and everything in-between. Whether you’re curling up with a warm blanket or braving the chilly evenings, we’ve got the latest page-turners that’ll keep you hooked all month long. So grab your favourite mug, settle in, and let’s explore the literary treats that October has to offer!

Let’s Dance by Lucy Sweeney Byrne
Banshee Press | 9781739397975 | PB | £16.99 | 3rd October 2024

In her latest collection of dark, hilarious and provocative short stories, Lucy Sweeney Byrne explores women on the brink — of love, of joy, of disaster — with her signature wit, insight and daring. A newlywed grapples with the chasm that has opened up between her and her husband on the subject of children. A young mother tries to eke out a life for her family on an island named for a dead man, unaware of the psychic toll that is taken on her by the land and sea. And a woman at a drug-fuelled house party ruminates on the dark past she shares with one of the guests.

In Let’s Dance, Lucy Sweeney Byrne, in her signature hypnotic prose, explores subjects such as physicality, identity and disillusionment. Utilising forms ranging from flash fiction to novella, Let’s Dance is a glittering display of fiction’s ability to probe, startle and entertain.

A Simple Intervention by Yael Inokaie
Translated by Marielle Sutherland
Peirene Press | 9781908670878 | PB | £12.99 | 3rd October 2024

A ground-breaking surgical intervention promises to free women from psychological disorders. The procedure is painless, the risks are minimal, and patients are calmer and more compliant after healing. The doctor promises them a new and productive life, free from suffering can it be so simple? Meret is a nurse on the surgical ward. The hospital is her home, and her uniform is her identity. She supports her patients through their interventions and is proud to be a part of the solution. But when she falls in love with another nurse, she crosses an invisible boundary and her certainty in the system begins to crumble. With echoes of Kazuo Ishiguro and Margaret Atwood, this is the story of a world of rigid hierarchies and a love with its own rules.

New Collection Editions of 007 Titles from Ian Fleming Publications
HB | £20.00 | 17th October 2024

Rediscover James Bond in these beautiful reissues of Ian Fleming’s classic series, now in hardback! Join Ian Fleming Publications in celebrating the world’s most famous spy, featuring brand new covers from Michael Gillette.

Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand
Influx Press | 9781914391323 | PB | £11.99 | 17th October 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, cache, 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.

Earlyfate by Nat Reeve
Cipher Press | 9781917008068 | £12.99 | PB | 10th October 2024

Pip Property is no stranger to disaster. Typically, they’ve got a plan, but now Dallyangle’s favourite dandy & part-time criminal is locked in the morgue of the crime-fighting Division, gone rogue, accused of far more crimes than they’ve actually committed, with (at least) two bucolic burglars out to strangle them with their own cravat. Their lover — the semi-feral Welsh heiress Rosamond Nettleblack — has disappeared into dangerous hands. Enlisting the Division to save Rosamond might be Pip’s only hope, but the cravat designer and the chaotic vigilantes have never seen eye to eye. The Division is looking to prove themselves to a potential new patron — and trusting schemers like Pip is a risk the detectives don’t want to take. Armed only with a borrowed notebook, threadbare charm, suits without cravat pins and a swordstick everyone keeps confiscating, Pip must get the Division on-side, convince the Division that faith is a thing they can still have, and unravel the truth behind Rosamond’s disappearance before it’s too late.

Meanwhile, Elsewhere edited by Cat Fitzpatrick and Casey Plett
LittlePuss Press | 9781964322001 | PB | £22.99 | 15th October 2024

In 2017, Meanwhile, Elsewhere, a large, strange, and devastatingly touching anthology of science fiction and fantasy from transgender authors was released onto the world. The collection received rave acclaim and won the ALA Stonewall Book Award Barbara Gittings Literature Award. When its original publisher went out of business, the book fell out of print, and LittlePuss Press is bringing this title back to life for a new audience of readers.

What is Meanwhile, Elsewhere? It is the #1 post-reality generation device approved for home use. It will prepare you to travel from multiverse to multiverse. No experience is required! Choose from twenty-five preset post-realities! Rejoice at obstacles unquestionably bested and conflicts efficiently resolved. Bring denouement to your drama with the foolproof augmentation device for our contemporary utopia.

The Rest of You by Maame Blue
Verve Books | 9780857308795 | PB | £10.99 | 29th October 2024

On the cusp of thirty, Ghanaian Londoner Whitney Appiah was born with a special gift. The massage therapist can physically sense where her clients’ trauma lies and heal them. But Whitney has no idea that she too is suffering. Tragic events from her youth have left a terrible, unseen mark. When a dangerous encounter with the man she’s dating triggers a wave of fragmented recollections, Whitney embarks on a journey to reclaim her memories and the truth that is buried deep in her early years growing up in Kumasi, Ghana. Spanning three decades, told through the viewpoints of Whitney, her aunts Gloria and Aretha, and their house help Maame Serwaa, The Rest of You explores what happens when we try to move forward through the lacuna of our past.

The Novices of Lerna by Angel Bonomini
Translated by Jordon Landsman
Peninsula Press | 9781913512569 | PB | £10.00 | 31st October 2024

When unambitious scholar Ramoon Beltra receives a mysterious invitation to a lucrative six-month fellowship at the University of Lerna in Switzerland, he reluctantly complies with the unusual qualifying paperwork requiring several pages of detailed measurements and photographs of his entire body. Beltra soon finds himself in the deserted university town of Lerna, together with twenty-three other ‘novices’ subject to the same undisclosed project — all of them doppelgangers of Beltra himself. At first, Beltra is the only one to bristle at the school’s dizzying array of rules and regulations, but this all changes with the onset of an uncontrollable epidemic, and the fellows begin dying off one by one… The Novices of Lerna is a meditation on identity, surveillance, and isolation that remains eerily relevant. Shot through with wry humour and tender absurdity, this novella offers a perfect introduction to Angel Bonomini’s incomparable body of work.