7 new books you should read in October
every month, Emma Alpern and Yasmine Fajdani Recommending new fiction books and stories. You should read as many of them as possible. See their picks from last month here.
Mind rollersby Frederick DeBoer
Deboer’s debut novel traces the mental history of Alice, who, when the book opens, is a student living in a college dorm where she “was going crazy first.” At first, she has trouble completing her school work, and her antics cause her to walk out on her roommate; Later, they are amazingly productive, hardly sleep, watered and weighed. Over the years, despite concerns about her behavior and her parents’ pleas for help, Alice’s brushes with health care professionals are fruitless until she is institutionalized. DeBoer, who has written elsewhere about his own battles with mental health, tells the gripping story of a young woman’s descent into illness. – Jasmine Fajdani
Shadow ticketby Thomas Pynchon
Shadow ticket It is Pynchon’s first book since 2013 Bleeding edge. At less than 300 pages, it’s an accessible novel about a private eye named Hicks McTaggart who works for the Non-Centennial Detective Agency. There are motorcycles, fascist youth, and a mental phase who collaborates with Hicks for a while; There is a thread about the cheese pole. The story begins in Prohibition-era Milwaukee, where things are “tense” because a bomb has just gone off. It then moves to New York, Tangiers, Fiume, and eventually Hungary as Europe explodes into World War II. As the plot thickens and characters appear, step off stage, and reappear, things get strange, realism flashing in and out to startling effect. -Emma Alpern
Next of kinwritten by Gabriel Hamilton
From a James Beard winner and former chef at pruning A second memoir comes, this one a brutally honest account of the separation of her family due in part to her brother’s suicide. The book opens with Hamilton in touch with her mother, after years of silence, in the process of fact-checking a piece she wrote for her The New Yorker. Throughout, Hamilton is an assured narrator: “There will be plenty of time in the introduction to retrace the steps, to study how an entire family is stranded in mists and shipwrecks—all of us like lost silverware and bone china, strewn across the ocean floor.” Next of kin Primus with razor-blade vision and self-awareness. -JV
A guardian and a thiefwritten by Megha Majumdar
After 2020 burnMajumdar’s second novel—a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award—tells the story of two families in a version of Kolkata, India, where the city’s food supply is disappearing and crime is raging. Ma, her young daughter, and her father, Dado, are a week after joining Ma’s husband in Michigan, where he has immigrated, when the food supply is raided and passports are stolen. In flashbacks, the book reveals what led the thief, a young man from out of town named Boomba, to his despair. Majumdar delightfully and gracefully reveals how the destinies of two families intertwine in order to uncover the many petty thefts needed to be a guardian. -JV
ten year case, Written by Erin Somers
There have been a lot of books about divorce lately, and many others about open relationships. Why not float straight? Somers’ second novel, which began as a short story in the magazine Joyandthe long-running take on the crush between new parents Cora and Sam, who live in a small town. Each is in an unsatisfying marriage: Cora’s husband has low libido, and Sam’s wife is a bit mean. Their attraction is immediate, then instantly suppressed. But in an alternate reality—a sophisticated, elaborate fantasy of sorts that Cora conjures alongside her real life—the version of Cora and Sam they experienced has sex, meets repeatedly at a secret local hotel, and keeps her from their wives for years. It’s hard to stop reading, and Somers has several tricks up her sleeve. -EA
Dead and Alive: Essayswritten by Zadie Smith
Written between 2016 and 2025, these compelling essays are divided into five sections: Resisting the Eye, Looking, Reconsidering, Mourning, and Recognizing. This means cutting out visual artists like Kara Walker and films like… tarMonument to Wolf Hall Author Hilary Mantel’s new essay on technology is one of the high points of the book. In it, Smith, who doesn’t have a smartphone, lays out what she thinks the tech giants’ algorithms did to us and considers how it compares to the nine or so hours a day she spent watching TV as a child. Smith leaves room for disagreement and still maintains her high humanist ideas. -EA
And unboolwritten by Cameron Crowe
Before writing Fast times at Ridgemont are high and Almost famous and Say anythingCrow was a mostly obedient younger brother who grew up in the desert of Southern California, then San Diego. His mother was an intelligent person. His sisters, who had mental health struggles that the family mostly buried, were at odds with the world around them. Crowe’s autobiography goes into his youthful attempts at journalism and his near-fame, including the time he called out Cary Grant (who responded with “delicious good humor”) and Lucille Ball (who yelled at him). It’s deeper than the typical Hollywood memoir, insofar as it’s about the fears and loneliness that defined those early years, what he describes as “racist human pain,” like the people who cleaned it up. -EA