August brings a wave of remarkable new fiction, spanning literary novels, speculative adventures, cult classics, and striking debuts. Our highlights collect stories of identity, grief, love, language, and the wonderfully strange. Thought-provoking, inventive, and deeply memorable, here are the books heating up the shelves this month!
By Will Heinrich
9781068209741 | Thousand Horsemen Press | PB | 12.99 | 3rd August 2026
From Darkness to Darkness is a portrait of its hero, New York-based art critic Jonah Blank, through his intimate relationships. Handling bitter family arguments, uncomfortable studio visits, marital harmony and struggle and the passing sweetness of parenting with the same acute but delicate touch, Heinrich paints a moving picture of life as something that can never quite be grasped.
By N.H. Kleinbaum and Robert Sean Leonard
9781368119320 | Hyperion Avenue | PB | 16.99 | 4th August 2026
At New England boys’ boarding school Welton Academy, tradition is celebrated and high achievement is expected. When former Welton student and new English teacher John Keating encourages students to ‘make their lives extraordinary’ with his unorthodox teaching methods, he shakes up the stuffy preperatory school’s high-pressure environment and guides his pupils on a journey of self-discovery. Inspired by Keating, high school junior Todd Anderson and friends resurrect the Dead Poets Society: a secret club where, free from the constraints and expectations of school and parents, they let their passions run wild. But the Dead Poets pledges soon realise that their newfound freedom can have tragic consequences. Can the club and the individuality it inspires survive the pressure from authorities determined to destroy their dreams?
By Matt Hill
9781917792295 | Dead Ink Books | PB | 11.99 | 6th August 2026
A noirish near-future thriller about obsession, connection and penance, where human and machine bleed into one, for fans of J. G. Ballard and Joel Lane. When celebrated rally driver Teddy Moon suffers a career-ending crash in the foothills of Eryri, Wales, Lescure senior technician Jim Sorrel shoulders the blame. Cleared of criminal negligence but dismissed by his bosses, Sorrel goes to ground in London during a lethal heatwave. Here, Sorrel’s guilt is only deepened by the disappearance of his young apprentice, Marcus, and by voices from the past haunting him through his phone. Then, a lifeline: Teddy emerges from his coma and asks to see Sorrel in person. Because, Sorrel learns, Teddy has been dreaming of him. And now Teddy has an opportunity to discuss. At Teddy’s behest, Sorrel takes a job couriering worldboxes — seamless, brushed-steel vessels — for well-paying, anonymous clients. It feels like another chance. A way for Sorrel to remake himself. But the worldboxes also seem to carry the threat of something incomprehensible, and soon even Sorrel’s new beginnings falter as retribution draws near. Set against a background of unrelenting heat and oppressive surveillance, Wrecks drives readers towards a grotesque impasse, where blood and engine oil threaten to engulf us all.
By Angel Bonomini
Translated by Jordan Landsman
9798893380484 | Transit Books | PB | 16.99 | 11th August 2026
A man and woman on a road trip make an unplanned detour to Laar, an empty city of palaces and canals that may be no city at all. Two gaucho rebels are captured during war — one finds freedom in writing stories while the other is driven mad with envy. And a traveller in post-war Italy is inspired, almost against his will, to record the mysterious progress of two elephants through the foggy streets of Milan. In twelve short fictions threaded together by an insatiable curiosity about time, memory, art, and the divine, Angel Bonomini (The Novices of Lerna) explores ‘the sweet and subtle interrelations of things.’ Originally published in 1978 and appearing in English for the first time, Slow of Elephants of Milan is an indispensable addition to our literature of the strange and fantastic.
By Kate Huttlestone
9781917792264 | Dead Ink Books | PB | 11.99 | 13th August 2026
A delightfully dark and ravenous tale of morality vs mortality, that asks what you’d sacrifice for your health. Perfect for fans of Monika Kim and Sayaka Murata. Hannah is dying for a cure. After a decade subsumed by a cancer diagnosis, Hannah is now thirty, existing in a hinterland between life and death. Her boyfriend Scott has become more of a carer than a lover, and — with no job, no plans, and no more options — she has resigned herself to no future. But then she’s given the opportunity to join phase one of a clinical trial that might just save her. Almost immediately, she feels different; that evening, her appetite returns. And it keeps growing… Now Hannah is hungry for life. A committed vegetarian, Hannah suddenly finds herself craving meat — but her new hunger isn’t limited to food. Now she wants everything. As new and suppressed desires surface she becomes reckless, destructive, and deceitful. It’s the miracle drug she’s been waiting for, but at what cost? This unique addition to the Weird Girl Lit tradition brings readers face to face with the visceral terror of being trapped in a body that has turned against its master. In a world where women are rewarded for their restraint, A Healthy Appetite introduces us to a character whose insatiable hunger is as vital for survival as the blood that runs through her veins.
I Punched an Alien and Now We’re in Couples Therapy
By Kimberly Lemming
9780593818657 | Berkley – US | PB | 17.99 | 18th August 2026
It’s not in Blair’s nature to just give up. Not when she’s beamed up to a spaceship and then dropped on an alien planet. Not even when she’s in the middle of a forest fire surrounded by dinosaurs. And definitely not when she’s captured by an arrogant alien king. If King Osid thinks he can break her, he’s in for a shock. Blair lives by one motto: If you stay ready, you never have to get ready. But absolutely nothing could have prepared her for finding out that she’s that arrogant King Osid’s mate. Despite recent hiccups, the alien researchers are determined to get their breeding program back on track. With that in mind, Blair and Osid are bundled off to the research center for what they’re told is couples counselling. As they face a series of increasingly dangerous challenges, it soon becomes clear the research aliens may have confused an episode of The Bachelor with Survivor. Bonding over their common enemy, and shall we say… encouraged by love darts, Blair and Osid let down their walls (and take off their clothes). When they discover that there are — somehow — even more secret plans in the works, another hilarious, steamy, over-the-top adventure is in store.
By Pia Ghosh-Roy
9781917378215 | The Indigo Press | PB | 12.99 | 20th August 2026
Chatterjee Mansion is a 1940s art-deco house in Calcutta with floors of polished marble and rooms filled with lies and omissions. In this house, late on a rain-soaked night, the turn of a single key unlocks a story that throws its women on a journey across the worlds of the living and the dead, and shatters all they know to be true. And I Am The Arrow is a kaleidoscopic tale of flight and survival, of forbidden love and wasted ambition, and secrets that hide in plain sight. Trying to make sense of this world is Mishu, a young woman recently returned to India, just as Niyoti, her grandmother and the family matriarch, falls into a coma. As Mishu, her mother Ira, and their servant Bani wait to see if Niyoti wakes or leaves them forever, long-buried truths come to the surface, revealing a rich and dramatic story of India’s social and political struggles entwined with the family’s gains and sacrifices. Narrated by the women and the ghost who haunts them all, And I Am The Arrow is an exploration of death and grief, of memory and reality, and of the ways we love and bruise each other.
By Raymond Benson
9781915797681 | Ian Fleming Publications | PB | 9.99 | 20th August 2026
They call him the Number Killer. A calculating assassin who always leaves a numerical calling card. But now he’s picked the wrong victim — M’s lover — and James Bond is going to beat the odds and make things even. From the desolate badlands of Texas to the crumbling ruins of Greece, the danger multiplies as Bond tracks his quarry to a sinister cult of fanatics shrouded in the teachings of the Greek mathematician Pythagoras. With a vicious cadre of killers trying to subtract him from the equation, Bond must infiltrate the cult and stop their chaotic computations – or the next number that comes up may be his own…
By Craig Davidson
9780593512968 | Penguin Books – USA | PB | 12.99 | 25th August 2026
Growing up in 1980s Niagara Falls — a seedy but magical, slightly haunted place — Jake Baker spends most of his time with his uncle Calvin, a kind but eccentric enthusiast of occult artifacts and conspiracy theories. The summer Jake turns twelve, he befriends a pair of siblings new to town, and so Calvin decides to initiate them all into the ‘Saturday Night Ghost Club’. But as the summer goes on, what begins as a seemingly light-hearted project may ultimately uncover more than any of its members had imagined. With the alternating warmth and sadness of the best coming-of-age stories, The Saturday Night Ghost Club is a note-perfect novel that poignantly examines the haunting mutability of memory and storytelling, as well as the experiences that form the people we become, and establishes Craig Davidson as a remarkable literary talent.
By Sheree Renée Thomas
9798887441955 | PM Press | PB | 13.99 | 25th August 2026
This book of poems, stories, and essays draws together examples illustrating a mind immersed in Black legends and white myths, and in the growing realisation of our place in the world and time, and in irresistible pull of the future: starships, floods, dancers twinned by crystal-filled caverns, and iridescent crops of living retribution. In her interview, Thomas explores the intricate intersections of poetry and activism and underscores the way she inhabits them. Taste with this book’s tongue the salty sweetness of her world.
By Benny B. Peterson
9781923058866 | Text Publishing Company | PB | 11.99 | 27th August 2026
Jamie is bad at endings, which is why she’s stuck at a dead-end newspaper job, continuing to have break-up sex with her first ever hetero partner, and haunted by the what-ifs of her ex-girlfriend Mari — a charismatic and brilliant musician — and their former band together, the Maidenheads. Since they (and their band) broke up a decade ago, Jamie hasn’t been able to sing. Then an unexpected opportunity to perform with Mari’s successful new band arises, and Jamie jumps at it. What begins as a return to music becomes a reckoning with the weight of unfinished love, the voice she has long kept buried, and her own complicated past. But as Jamie channels more of her energy into the band, other threads in her life begin to fray, and she must make some urgent choices about her future. Electric, spine-tingling and filled to the brim with tenderness and honesty, The Maidenheads is a novel about the tenacity of first love, the life-changing power of music and the difficult, necessary work of becoming yourself.