The Most Anticipated Fall Books

The BookTok hit series Honey & Spice returns with a romantic sequel to Bolu Babalola’s era-defining college romance. Kiki Banjo wants to focus on being the greatest maid of honor for her best friend Aminah’s upcoming wedding. All she needs is a boyfriend who tries to schedule dates strictly through calendar invites, even if the chemistry isn’t there. But when her ex-boyfriend Malakai Korede becomes the best man, the forced proximity at events means suddenly the only thing on her mind is the college romance that taught her about chemistry and desire for the very first time. Honey & Spice was an immediate best seller when it first published in 2022, but Sweet Heat takes the best of Babalola and turns the heat all the way up, taking her most famous characters and shredding the trappings of college drama for the cool knowledge of adulthood.

Author of Priestdaddy, No One Is Talking About This, and famed foster cat tweet “jail for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!” is officially back with another treatise on the mind boggling thought anxiety of what it means to be a human in the digital age. Patricia Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You is more autobiographical prose than direct novel, but the author manage to imbue the sparse pages with a visceral look at how a migraine condition, a family health scare, and the Covid-19 pandemic all coalesced into a brain melting fugue state.

Sometimes nothing screams fall quite like a contemporary romance set among the leaves, trees, and idyllic quaintness of a Colorado bed and breakfast. Good thing The Heartbreak Hotel by Ellen O’Clover is just that. Louisa Walsh can’t afford rent when her boyfriend dumps her, leaving her not only heartbroken but in dire financial straits. Her answer to this problem? Renting out the spare rooms and transforming the house into a bed-and-breakfast, perfect for those running away from their own broken hearts. Her landlord should be thrilled at the idea of not having to find a new tenant and keeping his finances intact. But as someone also struggling in the romance department, Henry Rhodes can’t really keep up the recluse image he’s so carefully cultivated if he’s suddenly surrounded by teary-eyed singles. The Heartbreak Hotel is a romance that crawls but manages to drench readers in picturesque yearning that’ll have them scrolling Airbnbs before they’re even halfway through.

Even the best weddings are still weddings. It’s a party where you eat dry chicken, bumble through the same awkward line dances, and spend hundreds of dollars you don’t have only to devote the entire night to running away from awkward conversations. At least that’s how Julia Rosenberg feels. As a trans woman navigating her life in New York, Julia doesn’t have the fondest memories of her hometown of Boca Raton, Florida. But when her brother asks her to be his “best woman” at his upcoming nuptials, the stress of family interactions and the delight of reconnecting with a former childhood flame, Julia’s desire to keep the entire event kosher and nonchalant quickly goes off the rails. Part romance, part lit-fic, all wedding bells, Rose Dommu’s debut novel contains nostalgic nods to quintessential Nineties romcoms all while managing to revel in the joys of family and the messiness of a brand new life. 

Think finding the love of your life is hard? Try doing it during a worldwide zombie apocalypse. Former Doomsday prepper Casey Pearson left home to get away from her father’s continued insistence that the world was going to end. Too bad he was correct. When a zombie outbreak forces Casey back to the one place she swore she’d never come back to, an untenable situation is made even worse when she finds out that her high school nemesis and bully Blake Morrison is living alongside her dad and his scrappy group of troopers. Now, in addition to facing the undead, she’s gotta deal with this shit, too. Jeneva Rose manages to slide romance neatly next to an action-packed thriller with heart-pounding ending, making this the perfect transition from beach reads to fall classics. Dead men tell no tales after all, and if they’re undead, that’s even more fun. 

If soccer eventually dethrones hockey as the de facto leader in sports romances, people will probably have Ana Huang to thank. Best known for BookTok classics like Twisted Love and King of Wrath, Huang continues her reign over contemporary romance with the second addition to her Gods of the Game Series: The Defender. Blackcastle Football Club captain Vincent DuBois has enough to deal with. He’s making a fuck-ton of money, but with fame comes increased security risks. When he finds himself living with his coach’s daughter — someone he knows he can’t get involved with — some new emotions and an inescapable pull changes the two’s relationship forever. They were roommates, but can they become something else outside of their apartment doors?

Tears are a big part of author Jesse James Rose’s life. In 2023 a photo of the trans content creator and actress was used in an ad for President Donal Trump’s re-election campaign. The spot featured Rose next to her good friend, trans actor Dylan Mulvaney, calling the two threats on the same level as war, crime, and nuclear destruction. “I was on my way to rehearsal and I looked at [the link] and I had a breakdown in my friend’s car,” Rose told Rolling Stone after it aired. “I just started crying.” After a few days of distance from the ad, Rose was able to put it behind her.

Now, the creator is entering the literary world with the same determination and a humorous look at all the reasons those tears seem to keep coming. Sorry I Keep Crying During Sex doesn’t take the usual form of a memoir — Rose intersperses scripts, DMs from the hookup app Grindr, and random notes app lists between chapters on sexual assault and caring for her elderly grandfather with Alzheimers. But the cheeky title only begins to scratch the surface of the humorous and frank self-awareness that jumps out on every page of this non-fiction tell-all. Rose’s half a million TikTok followers might think they know the creator from her daily videos about Broadway, trans life, and politics, but they’ve never read her like this.

Romantasy thrives on two things: tropes and fiery, passionate, love — two things present in abundance in Tasha Suri’s lesbian fantasy epic The Isle in the Silver Sea. This Britain is different from the one readers might be used to. Magic abounds, but everyone knows the story of the witch and the knight. The two exist in every era, every iteration, every lifetime, and in each instance the outcome remains the same. They fall in love. And then they ruin each other’s lives. This is fate’s path, one witch Simran and knight Vina are more than aware of when they begin to fall in love. But while the two are guided by the magic that keeps their isle intact, can the love they build for each other be strong enough to rewrite a story their entire world claims is set in stone? Romantasy is one of the most sought after genres on BookTok, but often focuses on the same straight enemies-to-lovers trope, dousing the community in copycat after copycat. Suri’s sapphic fantasy tale isn’t perfect, but it’s a welcome relief from the utter siege of romantasy slop currently filling peoples TBR lists. 

Author of Lot, Memorial, and Family Meal, Bryan Washington is back with another queer novel about how food can connect even the most bristly of family members toward mutual understanding — and at least a few full bellies. A mother and a son have been estranged for years. He lives in Japan. She lives in Houston. But when the mother shows up on his doorsteps a few weeks before the holidays, the two are forced to share a space, counteract the silence that’s built over a decade of not speaking, and try to make sense of the choices that led them to this fraught relationship. Where did they go wrong? And can the language of food, cooked over burners, sweating in heaters at ready-to-go marts, plucked greasily out of bags late at night, offer a way forward? An award-winning author, Washington is at his best when drawing stark lines between distant cities and people. While Palaver drops readers directly into an argumentative and reeling household, the resulting novel is quiet, specific, and ultimately,  a uniquely beautiful read.

It only took a few months for Australian author James Islington’s new book The Will of the Many to become a sensation on BookTok, but since the book’s 2023 publication, readers have been anxiously awaiting the sequel of this mysterious fantasy epic. The Will of The Many threw readers headfirst into the world of Vis Telimus, a secret heir forced into poverty and hiding by a republic that absorbed his small island kingdom and razed his family line to the ground. After infiltrating the exclusive and dangerous Catenan Academy, Vis was forced to compete for the top spot while desperately keeping his life-threatening secret to himself. In this sequel, Islington resumes Vis’s quest, but continually raises the stakes, putting the future of this magic realm, government, and dimensions squarely into a young man’s hands. What could possibly go wrong?