8 New & Notable Books Coming in October 2026

Livia Cable has long accepted her marriage and modest farm country life. But when an old lover calls her out of the blue, it shocks her. 

The woman he knew years ago was a music conservatory student, uncertain of everything except her passion for music. It’s a life she left behind. One that comes roaring back. He wants to meet. 

Unsure whether she should, Livia is thrown back into the past as she faces childhood trauma, abandonment, forgotten passions, and the memory of the man who shattered her life and forever changed how she viewed love.

When the father of her young son leaves, Ada flees to her aunt Leigh’s lakeside home to raise him. But in the crumbling home, Ada can’t escape the feeling that her death is nearing. 

She invites three of her closest friends for a long weekend to talk about who can raise her son if she dies. The women find comfort and purpose in each other, and as Aunt Leigh’s memory fails and strange animal activity grows, they stay through the winter. 

But they can’t escape the threat of death that initially brought them together. When it does, it sparks a series of events that reveal buried secrets about Ada, her family, and the home they’ve all come to love.

Safinia never felt the urge to meddle in anyone else’s business. She was content to train as a warrior and provide for her sisters—until the women from powerful households began disappearing. 

Their fathers all have reasonable explanations for their absence, swearing they’ll return soon. Dissatisfied, Safinia takes matters into her own hands and begins searching neighboring villages for these women. 

But as her efforts are continuously thwarted, often by the fathers, and as war with Rome creeps closer to her home, it becomes increasingly obvious that the only person who can uncover the truth and bring them home is Safinia.

Three years ago, a horrible car accident took Wolo’s pregnant wife. In his grief, he trudges forward through his empty life, trying to rebuild it into something. 

He goes to work, maintains a small circle of friends, and fends off the matchmaking efforts of the well-meaning older women in his family. Just when his grief starts to lift, he receives a letter that threatens to shatter it. 

Victoria, the woman who was driving the other car, wants to meet him. No one thinks it’s a good idea. But the longer he sits with the letter, the more he wonders. 

And when he agrees to meet her, he begins to wonder if the grief and loss he’s been carrying alone might not be his alone.

By 1992, George Washington Jonson escaped his poor Atlanta housing project and served abroad in the US Army. When he comes back home, he joins the police force, patrolling the streets he grew up on with his new partner. 

Ten years later, Jonson has built himself a nice life in an affluent suburb with a white wife and stepson. But when a nightly patrol leads to a violent altercation with a white teen, one gunshot sets off a series of lies that threatens to destroy everything. 

As the investigation turns to his past, his life is cracked open, exposing two contradictory versions of life in America and all the ways history has forced him to compromise as a decent man in a broken system.

Nine days after Sarah Perry’s father-in-law was diagnosed with cancer, he died. Until his diagnosis, he had been seemingly healthy and outwardly happy. 

Sarah and her husband Robert nurse David through his final days, bathing him, dressing him, comforting him, and learning that though he appeared to be just an ordinary man, he was actually extraordinary. 

As every day brings death closer, Sarah and Robert witness all the ways the body and soul prepare for death and ultimately leave this world behind.

After his wife is struck with early-onset Alzheimer’s, Barr Pennington discovers a manuscript she had been writing. In it, she describes what he realizes is a fictional account of an affair she had with a colleague when they were both professors at a Midwestern university. 

For two years, he rewrites it and then publishes it—under his own name. As the acclaim over the novel grows, so does his guilt. When he finally confesses his sin to one unlikely party, it leads others down their own path toward the heartbreaking truth decades in the making.

When Batter Gray is hired by the most prestigious poetry journal, Peck & Peck, he’s elated. He and the other thirty-nine editors believe poetry holds the key to humanity’s survival. 

But Batter’s life has never been that clear-cut. Named after his mother’s heroic dog and carrying the ghost of the twin brother he lost at birth, he faces life’s dualities every day. Right and wrong, truth and lies. 

And as he finds himself torn between two editors in particular at a place that is proving to be wonderful, secretive, and utterly dysfunctional, he is forced to remember that there are always two (or three) sides to every story.