September has begun, bringing in a fresh start with a new season, cooler and longer nights, and the chance to curl up with some poignant books. Whether you’re looking to start your first book of the year or finish your hundredth, September has always been the best month for exciting fiction to sink your teeth into. From cosy Japanese fiction, psychological sci-fi thrillers, fantasy bestsellers, and compelling literary fiction, there’s plenty of options to ensure you meet your reading goals before the end of 2026! So strap yourself into the final third of this year and pick up one of these books to make it memorable!

Welcome to The Friday Bookshop, a cosy little bookstore tucked inside a rustic train station north of Tokyo. Rumour has it, you’ll find the perfect book there — one that you need at that particular moment, even if you don t know it yourself…

When college student Fumiya visits The Friday Bookshop as a last-ditch effort to find a book for his ill father, he is disappointed in its ordinary appearance despite whispers of its peculiar charm. But he soon discovers that it not only includes a café where the food menu changes daily on the chef’s whim but also a vast underground vault lined with bookshelves, lovingly converted from an old abandoned subway platform. The bookshop, run by a quirky trio who have been close friends since high school, quickly becomes Fumiya’s favourite place — so much so that he begins to work there part-time.

Fumiya, who was never really a reader, learns to embrace the joy of reading, and that books can be a means to connect with other people and navigate the twists and turns of life. Through colourful interactions with the zany shop owners and their visitors, as well as mouth-watering dishes inspired by the books they recommend, it’s impossible not to fall in love with the seemingly ordinary yet enchanting little bookstore in the subway station in Kanto.

The first book in an immersive and addictive fantasy series from the 4 million-copy selling phenomenon Torsten Weitze.

When tragedy strikes her family, Niri finds herself penniless and alone in a city determined to turn their back on “her kind”. Her only possession is also her only hope — a copper coin that grants her admission to the prestigious Stormfell Academy, renowned for its magical and combative training. But the coin only offers her a place to sleep, and Niri must learn to adapt and fight if she is to survive the Academy — and its occupants. The Tower of Beggars is the first enthralling instalment in the bestselling Stormfell Academy saga / series that has captivated millions of readers in Europe, now available in the UK and US for the first time.

This vivid depiction of queer London life in the late ’50s follows Bruce, a composed, worldly architect, and Philip, a younger man still wrestling with his identity.

A Way of Love charts the charged connection between Bruce, a composed, worldly architect, and Philip, a younger man still wrestling with his identity. Their brief encounter after a concert ignites a bond that neither can forget. Set against the shadows of late-1950s London, the novel follows their attempt to built a life together amid generational differences, emotional volatility, and the pressures of a homophobic society governed by prejudice and restrictive laws.

The new thriller from the master of French crime writing.

Police capitaine Noemie Chastain has everything: a coveted position in Paris, a devoted team and a loving partner. On a dawn raid in a grimy Parisian banlieue, in an instant, she loses it all. Shot by the drug dealer she was about to arrest, she is left with deep scars on her face and deeper, longer-lasting damage to her psyche. Pushed out of her job in Paris by superiors concerned that her disfigurement would damage team morale, abandoned by her boyfriend, she is posted to a police department that serves six sparsely populated communes in the back of beyond, in the southern departement of Aveyron. Her brief: to report on her own department and give head office a justification for closing it altogether.

But when the body of a child floats to the surface of the man-made lake that hides the buried past of the village of Avalone, Capitaine Chastain is forced to take the opportunity to prove her worth and win back her job in Paris. To solve the case, she must lead a team more used to tracking down stolen combine harvesters — handsome Lieutenant Valant, the mayor’s son; ex-Drug Squad Brigadier Bousquet; and green local boy “Bambi” — through the twists and turns of what has become a murder investigation and uncover the dark secrets that have haunted the village for twenty years.

A gripping dual-timeline gothic mystery inspired by the macabre world of Victorian deathphotography.

London, 1865. Desperate for work, Minnie takes employment as a maid for the wealthy Culpepper twins. The siblings lead a strange and unconventional life: Edmund operates a laboratory from the house while Edith experiments with morbid photography. Drawn in by a dangerous attraction to one of the twins, and with a sick sister of her own to provide for, by the time Minnie makes a disturbing discovery it’s too late she must stay and unravel the mysteries of Culpepper House before she becomes a victim of one of Edith’s photographs herself. London, present day. Grieving artist Hadley is consumed by an album of Victorian death photography, including the exquisite image of a deceased young girl with a swan. When this photograph is involved in an art world scandal, Hadley is given the opportunity to create an installation surrounding the image. But the enigmatic Kit Culpepper, of the Culpepper Trust, has other plans. He offers Hadley an eye-watering sum of money to sell him the album and never speak of its contents again. As Hadley digs deeper into the album’s truths, she begins to suspect Kit Culpepper is guarding a deathly secret… and she’s not entirely sure how far he’ll go to keep it.

A taut horror tale of genetics and entitlement!

A wealthy family trying to cheat death is overmatched — by a stubborn teenager hiding in a body that looks just like their son. In this taut tale of genetics and entitlement, nature vs. nurture goes horrifically wrong. Dina Blake’s fourteen-year-old son, Geoff, has just died for the second time. But everything will be okay. The Blake family’s wealth has bought them thousands of clones of each of their children. These children are farmed out to loving families, but with the caveat that the bodies are always available to the Blakes. After Geoff dies, the Blakes upload their son’s memories into Nathan, who is unwilling but unable to stay with the family who loved him.

Dina’s younger daughter, Di, is terrified because she knows something her parents don’t — the memory transfer doesn’t always go as planned. The Geoff who’s been living with them since his first death isn’t the person her mother thinks he is, and the families of the bodies the Blakes steal aren’t all innocent. When Geoff returns to life in Nathan’s body, he has to contend with Nathan’s frustrating desire to live and his unexpected ability to fight for his life. For some children to live, others must die. Dina must decide how far she’ll go to protect her children, and Geoff must find out if, and who, he’s willing to kill.

Planet Earth is cooked. Abby Horne wants off.

Abby always believed she was destined for great things. But her dream career as an industry-disrupting fashion designer went up in smoke, and her aspirations to become a world-renowned yogi and/or save the endangered tigers proved equally fruitless. She’s in her early thirties, suffering the unbearable burdens of adulthood and anonymity, when she wakes up after a drunken bender with an all-new, all-consuming purpose in life: to be the first person on Mars. Perfect timing — Danish tech entrepreneur Tor Skovgaard is currently recruiting for a one-way mission to colonise the red planet. Abby knows this is it: her last-ditch bid for purpose and glory. And if she can’t be humanity’s saviour… she’ll settle for being its martyr. Blue Giant is a deranged love letter to a generation torn between helplessness and selfishness and anyone who’s ever paused their doom-scrolling to ponder their place in the vast universe.

A compelling, tender, unforgettable portrait of a challenging father and son’s dynamic!

Stuart is raised on a nature reserve in Cumbria; his family is poor. Stuart is sensitive — endlessly bullied in school, he believes in magic and feels more comfortable taking dance class than playing football. Stuart grows up straddling two worlds, becoming the first in his family to go to university. His father, an ex-con, is quick to throw a punch, and won’t eat anything in public “more flamboyant than a ploughman’s” in case someone would take him for a “nancy-boy”. An avid birdwatcher, he has found peace in his new life as a caretaker for a nature reserve. When his father is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Stuart grapples with grief as he tries to become the man he thinks his father would want him to be. Interwoven in the narrative are snippets of British wildlife, particularly the birds that captivate Stuart and his father, and reflect the bond they share. The writing is surprising, hilarious, and devastating. This is a story about grief, about masculinity, about the love of a parent and what remains when they’re gone.

The award-winning Helle Helle expands the universe of her much-loved they with a novel about the irrepressible Hafni.

Hafni says she’s getting divorced. To celebrate, she sets out across Denmark on a smorrebrod tour, to taste-test all of the best open-faced sandwiches her country has to offer. One month later, she makes a phone call from a lay-by to tell us where she went, what went wrong and why she’s been gone for three weeks longer than expected. Marked by Helle Helle’s signature subtlety and infused with her dark humour, Hafni says explores the desire to be anyone but yourself — and what it means to rediscover who you are.

The breath-taking and consequential first novel in nearly two decades from the award-winning author of the cult sensation, The Orange Eats Creeps.

In the late 19th century on the central California coast, two wayward young hoboes — Paulette and Kenneth — threaten to kill a menacing man who wronged them: Paulette’s father, Rodney Eligon. A handful of years later, the town of Anzar has become the stomping grounds for all manner of cults, eccentrics, earth religions, and communal living. Presiding over the town from the luxe frivolity of their family manor, the Hasleys have ruled Anzar for generations. Their grip on the town is threatened by the rise of the working class, and their union with the itinerant population. Meanwhile, Paulette has taken up residence in the home of Johnny Hasley, a wealthy faux-socialist poseur, hoping to become his wife. Her plans are complicated by boot-prints in the garden signaling the arrival of Kenneth, who carries with him a dark secret that poses a grave threat to both of them. In Anzar’s cracked mirror, Californian freakiness meets Victorian preoccupations with the domestic, pollution and filth, haunted houses, fringe societies, living death, spiritualism, vampiric women, and class parasites. Acid Green Velvet is a surreal powder keg of nihilism, fathers and their failures, manifest destiny, and American identity, penned in rapturous prose by the fiercest writer of her generation.

A young patient’s unexpected suicide after being diagnosed with early-stage Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leads his oncologist to take a sabbatical, leaving her teenage daughter in the care of her ex-husband. An affair with a researcher 20 years younger than her, followed by a shock late-stage breast cancer diagnosis forces her to re-assess her thinking on cancer treatment, and her life as a woman and a doctor.

Present-day Minneapolis. Dr Ana Jovanovic, oncologist, goes against the advice of her hospital’s tumour board and schedules her patient Jonathan for exploratory surgery. She is proved right when the surgery reveals that he has cancer. But when Jonathan is unable to face his diagnosis and takes his own life, Ana is sent into a tailspin. She takes an unplanned sabbatical, hoping to rediscover herself outside her dual, devouring roles of doctor and mother to fifteen-year-old Maggie. A new relationship with Duri, a young medical intern who needs Ana’s help to expose data falsification at his cancer research lab, promises both an exciting love affair and redemption for failing Jonathan. But mere months later, Ana discovers that the aches and fatigue she has been feeling are due to late-stage breast cancer. Now sharply aware of her own mortality, she is confronted for the first time by how it feels to be the patient; faced with making impossible decisions about quality of life and quality of death.

“Right.” She flicked the thin dress straps off her shoulders, then reached behind her back for the zip. “Let’s get started, mister.“

Anthony is barely present in his own life. A failed academic career, a soul-crushing call-centre job, an Alcoholics Anonymous group he resents attending: he’s checked out from all of it. He spends the Sydney summer trying to avoid the sun, and lives only for the evenings when he can visit Emma, a sex worker at a local brothel. It’s during these rented hours that Anthony finds brief moments of human connection. He can afford to see Emma maybe once a month, but he can never hold on that long. Then Emma disappears, and there’s nowhere left for Anthony to hide. By turns appalling, funny and tender, The Bedevilments is an eye-opening story about addiction, sex and anonymity.