New month, new books! Book Light is our Dandelion Chandelier curated list of the most-anticipated new book releases every month, and next up is September 2023. If you ask us, the ideal September read is a perfect balance of light and heavy; silly and serious; sweet and sour; escapist, and yet filled with hard truths. So what are the best new book releases of September 2023? Our intrepid team has been exploring and here’s what we found: the best, most anticipated new novels, poetry and essay collections and nonfiction books coming out in September 2023.
what are the most-anticipated new novels and nonfiction book releases for September 2023?
Wondering what to read in September 2023 among all the new novels and new nonfiction books coming our way? There’s a bountiful fall harvest of outstanding new reads on the way, and we’ve rounded up the most highly anticipated new book releases in September 2023.
The best releases and most anticipated new novels, poetry and essay collections and nonfiction books coming out in September 2023.
new novels and books of poetry September 2023
It’s a blockbuster month for new novels and poetry collections. September 2023 will see new works from J.M. Coetzee, Zadie Smith, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Lauren Groff and Kate Atkinson.
The best releases and most anticipated new novels, poetry and essay collections and nonfiction books coming out in September 2023.
new nonfiction books September 2023
The nonfiction aisle will see the arrival of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk. A collection of previously unpublished works written by Ntozake Shange. An inspiring new tome from Oprah Winfrey. An account of the untold story of six female astronauts in the early days of NASA. And a comprehensive pre-history of the Civil Rights movement.
27 of the best new novels and nonfiction books coming in September 2023
Here’s our pick of what to read from the crop of eagerly anticipated new book releases coming in September 2023: the best books from a range of genres, including novels, essay collections, poetry and nonfiction. You can pre-order them now if you like.
The most highly anticipated book releases: top new novels and nonfiction books coming out in September 2023.
new book releases on September 5, 2023
1. Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li.
A new story collection from the author of The Book of Goose, Wednesday’s Child “gathers tales of loss and longing from the past decade.”
2. The Lights: Poems by Ben Lerner.
The acclaimed author of the novel The Topeka School is also a poet. His new collection The Lights was written over the course of the past 15 years, momentous times for him personally and for the world.
3. The Fraud by Zadie Smith.
The publisher describes this new novel as “a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story — and who gets to be believed.” Smith’s first novel since Swing Time, The Fraud is based on the Tichborne case, a lengthy English trial in the 1880s over a man’s claim that he was the presumed dead son of a wealthy family—and thus entitled to a hefty inheritance.
4. Evil Eye by Etaf Rum.
Evil Eye is “a novel about a Palestinian woman who thinks she has finally constructed the perfect life—away from her conservative family, living in the suburbs, teaching at a local college, raising her two daughters much differently than she herself was raised. But things (as they tend to) begin to go awry, and Yara’s mother blames a family curse.”
5. Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002 – 2022 by Major Jackson.
Razzle Dazzle is a new poetry collection “bringing together the best of two decades of Jackson’s work, drawing from five volumes and including more than three dozen new poems.”
6. Do You Remember Being Born? by Sean Michaels.
Do You Remember Being Born? is a new novel about “what happens when an aging poet and longtime art monster agrees—for a great deal of money—to co-author a poem with an AI poetry bot named Charlotte.” Say no more. We’re in.
7. While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence by Meg Kissinger.
new book releases september 12, 2023
8. Normal Rules Don’t Apply by Kate Atkinson.
Normal Rules Don’t Apply is a new collection of eleven interconnected stories from the author of Shrines of Gaiety and Life After Life.
9. The Wolves of Eternity by Karl Ove Knausgaard.
The bestselling author is back with The Wolves of Eternity, “a new novel that questions the responsibilities we have toward one another and ourselves — and the limits of what we can understand about life itself.” “a novel in dual but intersecting timelines, revealing the lives of others—and how they are all connected—in mid 1980s Norway and present-day Russia.”
10. The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff.
The new novel from the bestselling author, The Vaster Wilds, is about “one spirited girl alone in the wilderness, trying to survive.”
11. Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson.
The author of Steve Jobs has written another biography about a tech visionary: Elon Musk.
12. Sing a Black Girl’s Song: The Unpublished Work of Ntozake Shange.
Sing a Black Girl’s Song is a posthumous collection of essays, poems, and plays—many being published for the first time.
13. Build the Life You Want by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey.
In Build the Life You Want, the authors aim to guide readers on a journey toward greater happiness. “Drawing on cutting-edge science and their years of helping people translate ideas into action, their aim is to show us all how to improve our lives right now, instead of waiting for the outside world to change.”
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14. Doppelgänger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Kline.
Doppelganger is a work of nonfiction that seems so unlikely that it should rightfully be a novel.
15. How Far to the Promised Land by Esau McCaulley.
From the New York Times contributing opinion writer and author of Reading While Black, the new nonfiction book How Far to the Promised Land is the intergenerational story of the one family’s search for home and hope.
16. The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts by Loren Grush.
new book releases on September 19, 2024
17. The Pole by J.M. Coetzee.
The Pole, the latest novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Disgrace “concerns a Polish pianist who falls in love (or in lust) with a married woman. Not interested at first, she soon finds herself drawn into her pursuer’s orbit.” And that’s when it starts to get interesting.
18. The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright.
We loved The Actress. So we’re keen to read the author’s new novel, The Wren, The Wren. In it, “Nell leaves her mother Carmel’s home to find her voice as a writer. But she seems to be living in the shadow of her grandfather, the celebrated Irish poet Phil McDaragh, who’s love poems are celebrated by the public, but paint a very different man from the father Carmel knew.”
19. Wellness by Nathan Hill.
The author of The Nix returns with Wellness, a story set in a very different milieu. “A novel about two people: their initial bond, their shared coming of age, their marriage, and their constant quest for a spiritual center. Jack and Elizabeth once led deeply urban, artistic lives, but now they find themselves married in suburbia, attempting to fill the creeping void with supplements, yoga, and self-betterment.”
20. All You Have to Do Is Call by Kerri Maher.
From the author of The Paris Bookseller comes All You Have to Do is Call, a new novel based on the true story of the Jane Collective.
21. Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation by Tiya Miles.
Wild Girls is “a meditative narrative-history of women outdoors; from Harriet Tubman who was forced to labor on a Maryland plantation, to Louisa May Alcott in New England, to an Indigenous women’s basketball team in Montana.”
22. The Book of More Delights by Ross Gay.
The follow-up to the author’s 2019 book The Book of Delights, early reviews declare that The Book of More Delights is . . . delightful.
23. Historically Black Phrases by jarrett hill and Tre’vell Anderson.
A tongue-in-cheek dictionary of “Black language,” Historically Black Phrases is “a love letter to the Black community and the ways it drives culture.”
new book releases september 26, 2024
24. The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism by Adam Nagourney.
The Times is a comprehensive, behind-the-scenes look at the last four turbulent decades of “the paper of record,” The New York Times.
25. Before the Movement by Dylan C. Penningroth.
A pre-history of the Civil Rights Movement, examining Black traditions of private law and “the rights of everyday use.” Before the Movement “makes the case that the underpinnings of 20th-century Civil Rights stretch back to the middle of the 19th century, and grew from Black legal acumen manifested in worship, scholarship, and the details of daily life.”
26. Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang.
In her latest novel since the widely-praised How Much of These Hills Is Gold, Land of Milk and Honey is “the story of a despondent young chef, in a near future where crops are rapidly disappearing, who escapes her dying career to take a job at a luxurious (and smog free) mountaintop colony peopled by the global elite and seemingly free of the world’s climate troubles.”
27. Devil Makes Three by Ben Fountain.
Fountain—author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk—”sets his second novel in the aftermath of the 1991 Haitian coup d’état, in which President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forcibly deposed by the military. In the turmoil, Matt, an American expat who has made his living taking tourists on scuba dives, and his Haitian best friend Alix, try to make ends meet by searching shipwrecks rumored to contain treasures.” Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t go as planned.
most anticipated releases of new novels and non-fiction books in September 2023
Those are our picks for what to read this month: nearly 30 of the best and most anticipated new book releases coming in September 2023. So many options to answer the pressing matter of what to read in September 2023 . . . What’s at the top of your list? Whatever you decide, have a great month, dear reader.
