Your Fall Reading List Is Here—20 Books We Can’t Stop Talking About

Full of small-town quirks, second-chance romance, and just the right amount of chaos, this novel is pure Gilmore Girls nostalgia. As Lauryn Harper’s perfectly laid plans unravel, she’s pulled back into the charm (and drama) of the hometown she once fled. Warm, witty, and brimming with fall festival vibes, it’s the kind of story that feels like a comfort watch in book form.

This long-awaited prequel to Chocolat captures Vianne Rocher at the very start of her journey, navigating new beginnings in Marseille and discovering the quiet magic of cooking. Lush and evocative, it’s a story of resilience, secrets, and transformation—woven through with the bittersweet allure of chocolate. Both enchanting and haunting, it’s a novel that invites you to savor every page.

Behind the ivy-covered walls of a New England prep school, ambition, secrets, and privilege collide. Co-written by Elin Hilderbrand and her daughter, it’s a sharp, propulsive novel about power and belonging—perfect for anyone who loves their fall reads with a dash of scandal.

Equal parts dark academia and fairy-tale slasher, this sequel flips the script on Bunny. With Sam bound and forced to hear her former frenemies tell their side of the story, we’re drawn into a wicked, surreal tale of creativity, power, and the bonds that both terrify and transform. Strange, sharp, and intoxicating, it’s a book you won’t stop talking about. (Trust me, I can’t.)

Lily King’s latest is a love story layered with the thrill of youth, the messiness of desire, and the ache of looking back. Following a charged friendship-turned-triangle from college into adulthood, it’s a novel about how early passions shape us long after they’ve passed. Smart, tender, and deeply moving, it’s a book that captures both the intensity of first love and the wisdom of hindsight.

Rocky is back, and this time we find her at home in Western Massachusetts, juggling grown kids, an aging parent, and the everyday dramas that make family life both maddening and tender. Full of sharp observations and laugh-out-loud moments, it’s a novel that finds beauty in the chaos of ordinary days.

Best known for The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo turns inward in her most personal book yet. She reflects on the Japanese traditions that shaped her philosophy—from tea ceremonies to the changing seasons—and reveals how these cultural touchstones continue to guide her life. Gentle and deeply grounding, it’s both a love letter to her heritage and an invitation to find joy in the rituals that shape our own days.

Spanning from 1920s Shanghai to postwar America, this powerful novel reimagines the life of Gish Jen’s mother, whose brilliance and ambition collided with cultural expectations at every turn. It’s a story of reinvention and inheritance—how resilience, hardship, and unspoken dreams pass from one generation to the next. Bold, compassionate, and deeply resonant, it’s a moving exploration of mothers, daughters, and the complicated legacies they share.

Part start-up guide, part spiritual manifesto, Betsy Fore’s Built on Purpose reframes entrepreneurship as both strategy and soul work. Blending hard-won business lessons with the practice of uncovering your “deep inner why,” she shows how manifesting isn’t just wishful thinking—it’s the foundation of building something that lasts. Energizing and unconventional, this book offers a blueprint for creating a business that feels as purposeful as it is successful.

Dark, provocative, and compulsively readable, this novel follows a young attorney whose entanglement with a magnetic couple forces her to confront the trauma she’s long kept buried. Exploring queer desire, family rupture, and the shadow of incarceration, it’s a story that pulls you in with its emotional heat and refuses to let go.

What begins as a polite friendship between an ordinary couple and a lonely widow slowly twists into something far more sinister. With shades of Shirley Jackson and Muriel Spark, this unnerving novel peels back the veneer of suburban respectability to reveal the greed and menace lurking beneath. A dark little masterpiece, it’s the kind of story you’ll race through with a shiver.

Equal parts funny and devastating, Nobody Asked for This follows a young comedian navigating grief, friendship, and the brutal realities of trying to make it on stage. Georgia Toews writes with a sharp, unpredictable voice that makes you laugh one page and wince the next—a raw, propulsive novel about the stories we tell to survive.

Part biography, part literary mystery, this portrait of Muriel Spark unravels the riddles and eccentricities that fueled one of the 20th century’s sharpest writers. Frances Wilson traces Spark’s chaotic early years—full of scandal, secrecy, and transformation—and shows how they alchemized into her singular art.

From Renaissance paintings to Instagram feeds, women’s bodies have long been framed through limiting archetypes. Catherine McCormack exposes those patterns and highlights the women artists who have reimagined how we see and understand the female form. Both eye-opening and empowering, it’s a read that will change the way you look at images everywhere.

Told almost entirely through conversations between women, this daring debut captures two decades in the life of a narrator restless for experience. With unflinching candor, Miranda Popkey dives into desire, envy, shame, and self-sabotage—rendered in prose that crackles with wit and intelligence. The result is a book as provocative as the late-night talks it evokes.