For her first foray into historical fiction since her breakout 2000 novel, White Teeth, the acclaimed British author delivers a sprawling Dickensian novel, this time primarily set in Victorian London and Jamaica. The story follows a sensational trial (based on the real-life 1860s Tichborne Case) whose outcome would determine the heir of a sizable English estate. Andrew Bogle, an enslaved Black man, popular novelist William Ainsworth, his Scottish housekeeper Eliza Touchet as well as Charles Dickens himself are part of the cast of this ambitious novel that deeply explores the nature of deception and authenticity. (Sept. 5)

The New Jersey writer calls her debut — part of Sarah Jessica Parker’s Lit publishing imprint — “a biomythography,” a term coined by the late poet and memoirist Audre Lorde to describe literature that combines biography, history and myth into a single narrative (in this case, Foote’s family experience of the Great Migration). The story follows two women who meet on a train bound for New Jersey from the Jim Crow South in the 1900s, and the tragic cycles of poverty, abuse and violence that bind them and their descendants together across decades. (Sept. 5)

Months into their strike, the Writers Guild of America is standing firm on, among other issues, regulating Hollywood’s use of artificial intelligence. Montreal-based Michaels (whose 2014 debut Us Conductors won the Giller Prize) offers a window into what that future might look like in this story centred around Marian, an impecunious Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who reluctantly collaborates with a Silicon Valley AI program (the poet is inspired by Marianne Moore; the plot seemingly by Indecent Proposal). Probing the relationship between corporate and creative work and the nature of art, the fact that algorithm-generated output from several language models and software is incorporated into the text (indicated with grey shading) adds a complicating layer to the novel. (Sept. 5)

Holly Gibney, a recurring character in King’s Bill Hodges trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers and The Outsider), is finally giving us main character energy! The eccentric private investigator has evolved from shy to tough in the decade since she first appeared and is now tackling the case of a missing daughter, while mourning her mother and dealing with a partner who has COVID-19. A seemingly harmless octogenarian academic couple hold the key to the string of disappearances in their midwestern town in this chiller with heart. (Sept. 5)

Groff follows up her 2021 triumph Matrix with this powerful exploration of the terrors of survival, experienced by a teenage servant girl who escapes the Jamestown settlement in 1609 colonial America and goes from a civilization rife with famine, barbarism and disease into the harsh winter wilderness. The suspenseful and violent adventure story of desperation, resilience and survival as she attempts to reach French settlers in Canada is told in visceral and at times luminous prose and was, according to Groff, partly inspired by Robinson Crusoe. (Sept. 12)

I’m looking forward to this literary page-turner from indie publisher NeWest Press, set against the intense backdrop of British Columbia’s wildfire season. It’s the second book by the Cape Breton-raised, North Vancouver-based author to be set during a natural disaster (her 2022 debut The Broken Places took place during an earthquake (and made the Globe and Mail’s  100 best books list). Here, she examines the aftermath of tragedy when an experienced firefighting pilot dies in B.C., as it affects his widow (a character drawn on the fact that Peck’s own husband is a private pilot), his protégé and the investigator looking into the accident. (Sept. 12)

Not to be confused with Warren Beatty’s historical biopic of Howard Hughes, the British writer of Life After Life and Shrines of Gaiety offers a collection of 11 funny, poignant and sharply observed interconnected stories. They’re delightful, even when veering from cosy English village to deeper and darker settings (like the jagged satire of late middle-age divorcées in ‘Shine Pamela Shine’), wonderfully populated by queens, soap opera producers and secretaries. (Sept 12)

The Los Angeles-based bestselling author (Luckiest Girl Alive) turns her lens on the Ted Bundy murders in this historical novel inspired by the real-life Florida State University sorority that was the serial killer’s apparent first target. Knoll engages with (and reframes) the infamous true-crime mythology to explore the fallout on the many women involved as they pursue justice over the decades. (Sept. 19)

The latest from the Irish Booker Prize winner (The Gathering) concerns the generational traces of trauma cast by a widely lauded Irish poet on the women in his family, who he has neglected and abandoned. Beginning in the 1970s, and vividly alternating between three narrator perspectives (including the fictional poet’s verse), the novel takes its name from the Celtic tradition of “hunting the wren” the day after Christmas; capturing, killing and triumphantly parading the small bird from house to house. (Sept. 12)

This horror-inflected fairy tale from the Boston-based Canadian author has Belle, a lonely dress-shop clerk, settling her estranged mother Noelle’s estate and cleaning out her apartment. As she visits her mother’s favourite transformative cult-like spa, things get strange. It’s billed as a “surreal descent” into grief and the dark side of the beauty industry. Critics are calling it a fever dream, so my recommended movie pairing is In Fabric, indie auteur Peter Strickland’s dressed to kill film noir. (Sept. 12)

Clark, a northern British writer on Granta’s 2023 Best of Young British Novelists list, sets her new novel on the Yorkshire coast, where a 16-year-old girl is set on fire by three of her classmates. This was pitched to me as a novel that unpacks our cultural fascination with true crime, because the story picks up a decade later, when a journalist revisits the notorious murder, and is told through a mix of interviews, podcast transcripts, Tumblr posts, fan fiction and prose. (Sept. 26)

This thought-provoking literary mystery is by the first writer from sub-Saharan Africa (and, at 31, one of the youngest) to win the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary award. The jury called it “a hymn to literature.” In it, a young Senegalese writer studying in Paris investigates what happened to the legendary 1938 book of an author who was dubbed “the Black Rimbaud” before disappearing amid accusations of plagiarism. The intricate and innovative story about the impact of colonialism and neo-colonialism is dedicated to Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem, subject of a similar scandal in the ’60s. (Sept. 26)

It’s been 11 years since the former lawyer’s last novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. This time, instead of a war novel, his interest in social justice and political themes yields a thriller about corruption and violence following the 1991 military coup in Haiti, which overthrew then president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The story, involving an American expat and an undercover CIA agent, springs from Fountain’s longtime fascination with and study of Haitian history: a microcosm of geopolitics, he told Publishers Weekly, with “strong vestiges of the Indigenous culture, African culture, all different strains of western culture, all banging together in this very intense way.” Early critics sing its praises, saying it’s “like an update of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, with some of the moral heft of Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise.” (Sept. 26)