An Elin Hilderbrand book used to be a reliable indicator of summer, but now it means…back to school? As a fan of campus novels from David Lodge’s Small World (1985) to Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House (2019) and Hell Bent (2023), I was thrilled to hear that Hilderbrand was starting a series set at a Massachusetts boarding school, using inside information supplied by her daughter and co-author, Shelby Cunningham. The first novel, The Academy, came out last year, and this year’s installment, The Thoroughbreds (Little, Brown, Sept. 15), follows the adventures of several members of the new senior class, including a scholarship boy from Queens whose mother is dating the billionaire president of the board of directors. Our starred review says, “The campus series scratches this author’s proprietary itch as effectively as the island set did. We’ll follow her anywhere.”
Meanwhile, Bardugo has completed her Alex Stern series, and Dead Beat will be published on Sept. 15 by Flatiron. As I’m writing, the book is still embargoed, but you’ll be able to find our review online by the pub date.
R.F. Kuang’s last novel, Katabasis (2025), was set in the world of magical academia, but with Taipei Story (Morrow/HarperCollins, Sept. 8), she examines a Chinese American college student’s strictly nonfantastical summer abroad in Taiwan studying the language. “Lily’s experiences and emotional journey are deeply real and often uncomfortable,” says our review. “Her narrative flits between rumination on the nuances of language and what’s lost in translation, worries about how others perceive her, and where to go for lunch.”
After a series of speculative novels, Cadwell Turnbull has produced his first story collection, All the Hidden Places (Blackstone, Sept. 1), and he uses horror, SF, and fantasy to examine intimate relationships between parents and children, siblings, and couples—people who have trouble communicating whether they have one soul or many, live on Earth or a faraway space colony. Our starred review says it’s “rich and strange, while going straight to the heart.”
Kate Atkinson publishes a lot of books, but her last two have been a Jackson Brodie mystery and a story collection, so we haven’t had a new standalone novel since 2022. Fans of her historical fiction will be excited to see what she does with a post–World War II setting in Our Noble Selves (Doubleday, Sept. 15): It’s 1951, and in Britain, the trauma of the war is still fresh while the sense of common purpose has faded—so the government decides to launch the Festival of Britain, where Harry Flynn will get a job that leads to his becoming a murder suspect. “Another exquisitely humane novel from one of contemporary fiction’s finest writers,” according to our starred review.
Ingeborg Bachmann was a renowned Austrian writer who died in 1973 at age 47; The Complete Stories (New Directions, Sept. 29) is a wonderful opportunity to discover her multifaceted work in a new translation by Philip Boehm and Tess Lewis. “Themes of class tensions, borders, displacement, and homesickness recur,” according to our starred review. “One of the great pleasures of this excellent collection is the chance to watch her talent develop and her originality come into its own.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
