Buzz Books 2025: Fall/Winter

Welcome to Buzz Books 2025: Fall/Winter, the 27th edition of our celebrated sampler series. This collection offers readers an exclusive preview of some of the season’s most anticipated releases, curated to showcase both established voices and emerging talents across fiction, debut fiction, nonfiction, and young adult categories.

Readers will discover new works from beloved bestselling authors including Jane Hamilton, whose coming-of-age novel The Phoebe Variations follows a seventeen-year-old adoptee’s journey of self-discovery. Catherine Newman returns with Wreck, continuing the story of Rocky and her family two years after their Cape Cod vacation, while Ann Packer’s first novel in over a decade, Some Bright Nowhere, delves into the complex choices that arise at the end of our lives.

Other standout fiction includes Emma Stonex’s electrifying thriller The Sunshine Man, Olivie Blake’s darkly fun novel about power and wellness trends in Girl Dinner, and Terah Shelton Harris’s Where the Wildflowers Grow, a tale of redemption on a secluded Alabama flower farm. Readers will also be captivated by Clay Cane’s searing Burn Down Master’s House, inspired by true stories of enslaved people who dared to fight back.

Continuing our tradition of spotlighting the most promising new voices in literature, this edition introduces several remarkable debuts. Carson Faust’s mesmerizing Native American Southern Gothic If the Dead Belong Here examines what happens when a young girl goes missing and family secrets collide with the supernatural. Marisa Kashino’s darkly hilarious Best Offer Wins follows a desperate house-hunter whose tactics grow increasingly unhinged, while Molly O’Sullivan’s spellbinding The Book of Autumn weaves ancient magic through a New Mexico college campus where something sinister is stirring.

Other exciting debuts include Samantha Browning Shea’s Marrow, where a woman returns to her mother’s coven seeking magical help to carry a pregnancy to term, Zoë Rankin’s thriller The Vanishing Place set in the beautiful but unforgiving New Zealand wilderness, and Rosie Storey’s poignant Dandelion is Dead, where a woman impersonates her late sister on a dating app only to find an unexpected connection.

In nonfiction, powerful new releases explore diverse aspects of the human experience. Christine Kuehn's propulsive Family of Spies reveals the shocking story of one family's involvement as Nazi and Japanese spies during WWII and their role in the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Angela Buchdahl's stirring memoir Heart of a Stranger recounts her journey from an outsider to becoming one of the most admired religious leaders in the world, while Char Adams's Black-Owned examines Black political movements through the lens of Black-owned bookstores. Wharton economist Corinne Low offers a new framework for empowering women in Having it All, while Princeton professor Gerta Keller reveals how her research challenging asteroid impact theory of dinosaur extinction became the “Dinosaur Wars.” In Here We Go, Eleanor Hamby and Sandra Hazelip share wisdom from their global adventures as traveling grandmothers who began exploring the world in their eighties.

The young adult section showcases captivating titles spanning multiple genres, from The Sacred & the Divine, a mesmerizing tale of sisterhood and occult powers in 1848 Massachusetts, to contemporary drama Reasons We Break that brings high-stakes gang politics together with star-crossed romance. Mary E. Roach's thriller Seven for a Secret follows the story of the only girl who returned from a group of eight missing teens. Jihyun Yun's chilling And The River Drags Her Down explores what happens when a girl uses ancestral magic to resurrect her drowned sister, only to discover unexpected consequences.

Watch for Buzz Books 2026: Spring/Summer, arriving early next year, to discover next season’s literary conversations in the making.