This cusp of seasons affords a spectrum of recent books from fiction bestsellers, a media maven and style icon, a great, and even a tea company.
15 Books to Take You From Summer to Fall
Hopefully by the time of this writing or your reading, The Mysterious Bookshop won’t be sold out of just-signed copies of the Lisa Unger classic holiday chiller Christmas Presents. And you will have Gloria Steinem’s final book in reach.
2026 was a beast for books and we aren’t deep into the fall. These recent thrillers with a thrilling array of nonfiction sweep this year before as ones not to miss. At list’s end is a novel idea I never imagined could make reading tea leaves make sense.
FICTION
Christmas Presents by Lisa Unger (The Mysterious Press, October 2023)
I love the New York City staple and true model of a bookstore that is simply “the Mysterious.” Its Lower Manhattan placement at 58 Warren Street couldn’t be more prescient. Any visit tumbles you into what feels like a blissful warren of a million books.
That the bookstore shows fans of all things spooky and puzzling what a true relationship with writers looks like is the secret to its success. Who expected Lisa Unger to pop up last week to sign Christmas Presents, a chilly weather read if there ever was one?
I suspect this newer oldie but goodie will circle back every holiday season. Unger’s knack for reading the culture that reads her books puts us in mediaholic heaven. This head scratcher is anchored by a male true crime podcaster and soon dead female bookshop owner, with a deranged jailbird and missing women to worry about too. Demand since its release 3 years ago has necessitated a blitz each Christmas. Lisa signed away for what will be a coveted stocking stuffer or IRL copy for fans to get while it’s hot and I don’t mean the temperature outside.
Blues for the Dead by Aaron Phillip Clark (Severn House, October 6, 2026)
The prolific Clark brings us a fourth Trevor Finnegan novel to continue what Walter Mosley started for those like Clark, S.A. Cosby and K’wan to exist today. A breakneck speed propels his Los Angeles-set Blues for the Dead, a decidedly of-the-moment crime thriller. Clark drops his mainstay ex-cop character into a dirty swamp of billionaires, tech moguls and AI to solve a federal prisoner’s death. Even if you missed the first three books, you will catch on and up fast by the time Trevor’s agency and pregnant wife are at risk.
Children of the Wolf by Abby Geni (Ballantine Books, September 2026)
The always ingenious Abby Geni backstories Children of the Wolf with a fascinating concentration on the Viking history, Norse mythology, and both’s signature archery and swordplay imposed by her protagonists’s Swedish-born father: a demented descendant of Erik the Red, living out delusions through his kids- until he is jailed in an FBI raid. Geni helps us through. Liv is the author’s signature Winter’s Bone-level heroine enveloped in her rich 3D writing. In the challenging novel’s present day, now beekeeper Liv finds her idyllic life and yearslong relief shattered, in the ironically named Haven, Michigan, where she and her brother built new lives with new identities. Her father’s possible release from prison for the violence that ripped her childhood apart coincides with men in town going missing, to oscillate a dizzying narrative from past to future in this latest by an imagination to treasure.
The Velvet Knife by Margaret Johnson (Harper Collins, September 29, 2026)
Dubbed “a love letter to New York City,” this follow to Nine Liars yet standalone novel drops us into a Manhattan that natives or transplants can see their reflections in. Fans of mature YA or recurring heroine Stevie Bell will recognize the pizza haunts, bodegas, and banality or shocks behind infinite see-through windows in this Nancy Drew 2.0 delight, The Velvet Knife. And its Central Park or other dog walker crowds will love seeing the real East Village dog café featured in the book, Boris & Horton (Johnson worked on the book’s edits and adopted her dog Dexy there).
This time, teenage Stevie’s skip from London to the Big Apple for the summer leaves her looking for her first no contact then certainly disappeared boyfriend. Before you know it, this twister drops you into feeling a nearly new novel and the terror of a very busy cult.
Freyja by Margrét Ann Thors (Spiegel & Grau, August 2026)
The American-born Thors’s newly minted lit PhD past a Columbia M.F.A. and University of Iceland lit professor role may account for the perfect pitch of her cinematic, Hitchcockian Freyja. It is not only the rich world of Reykjavík, a discreet heroine Unnur and her off guarding daughter Lilja that set the book apart in the exhausting “missing girl” novel space. Or the dark humor most at expense of Unnur’s cringey ex-husband and his grating new girlfriend, around the same time a cold case investigation jerks Unnur back to reckon with what exactly happened to her disappeared childhood friend, Freyja.
It is all that plus Thors’s precision with words and relentless chisels at character which make this a cold case that legions will warm up to. Freyja is memorable and satisfying in its own class of mystery that I enjoyed as a reader and learned from as a writer.
NONFICTION
An Unexpected Life: A Memoir by Gloria Steinem (Random House, September 2026)
I haven’t read my copy. It just arrived. I have certainly cracked and perused An Unexpected Life, however. I feel it will be like Morrison’s Paradise or Gayl Jones’s Palmares: a tome to take for a disappearance or vacation for seclusion to assist my reading. On September 2, Steinem left us down here on our owns for a better place, where the hate and its companion powermongering she fought against don’t exist.
A perusal shows she covers so much of it, the same old same old to those who know her work and continue it, in new ways paying homage to others and her time in India learning nonviolent protest. I love when our giants remind us of their giants, to show they’re humans like us. And like all humans, they are mortal as Steinem sadly showed as well.
Engineer the Win by Monique Webber (MLWPR, July 2026)
STOP. If you are here, you are likely obsessed with, working in or trying to crack the beauty, fashion and style industry. I’ve been all three, including months temping at Essence Magazine in the early aughts. Yet even I’ve never seen transparency, knowledge and secrets like this offered to help people and brands get absolutely critical media- past mere hits and on to distinctive editorial awards or feature. Click the link to get started on Engineer the Win‘s 50odd pages that will change your life, work or brand and come back.
Monique Webber gives this gift to outline “What Beauty Award Judges Actually Look For” like it’s nothing from her earned place at the helm of a rare uber-successful PR agency. MLWPR drives such regular legacy, new media and influencer placements for clients it’s hard to keep up. This slim but mighty handbook is a steal I’m shocked she offers to her basically competitors for media’s shrinking spaces and the public’s more shrunken attention spans.
Engineer the Win is an education not academic, but clinical and professional, with Webber’s 25-Point Editorial Readiness Framework™ and 300-Word Pitch Methodology included for free. She gives away what people pay thousands to learn and know as a female powerbroker who understands a rising tide lifts all boats.
The Flame Game by Paula Fontana (Best Seller Publishing LLC, July 2026)
Another priceless treasure from a female culture powerbroker dropped this July with The Flame Game: Master High-Stakes Environments, Transform Your Pressure and Forge a Lasting Legacy. Author Paula Fontana’s mission is to have known struggle so you won’t have to. Or, better yet, so you can rise above it if you do. You can thank her when you make your name and millions.
You likely already know her equally uplifting yet haters-be-damned philosophies if you’re an indie fashion, design, boutique, custom jewelry or eye-catching eyewear fanatic. Her joyous, at times raucous Instagram channel doubles as a take-no-prisoners transformative mantra universe and style showroom. Clotheshorse Fontana is its sole model and dubbed everything from “Queen Paula” to simply “Miss Paula” by her fans for it.
With chokehold advice in section titles like “Pressure is a Portal, Not a Punishment” and an interactive workbook to direct your “internal Thermostat,” The Flame Game compiles wisdom from Fontana’s years of short content and genius wordplays into an accessible Art of War for our times.
On Witness and Respair by Jesmyn Ward (Scribner, May 2026)
This collection of Ward’s written, spoken and never before published ephemeras is daunting not familiar reasons of dense syntax or poetic prose. However, like its unfamiliar if not unrecognized title word ‘respair,’ the foil to despair as recovery from it, On Witness and Respair: Essays confronts readers with what we hardly see anymore: resilience, pride and determination to joy as an antidote to everything including life made unbearable.
Ward sparkles most in printed speeches and new or old essays when she returns to her Gen X 90’s kid childhood in New Orleans, recollections of a sage grandmother she modeled herself after, and her loving battle to keep her Black son innocent and safe in an America it’s apparent she still loves too. It is this undergird of love which lesser people and writers would abandon that makes On Witness and Respair a book for all seasons.
The Grace of Black Mothers by Martheaus Perkins (Trio House Press, July 2025)
This text behind a work of art as cover looks like a volume of poetry. It is really a poetic memoir, perhaps even a premature autobiography from a young man whose public debut here promises he has very long and far to go in the arts and letters. The Grace of Black Mothers was not a book but an experience, my haphazard find at the American Library Association annual conference in Chicago this summer, after its author Martheaus Perkins was bolstered by an NAACP Image Awards nomination in Poetry last year.
I followed his life through the vast terrain of Texas circling Houston with a single mother who had the gifts I know personally of Black mothers, some fathers: to make hard times seem soft, stress give way to good times, and resources from coins to food multiply with prayers divided by sacrifice.
The book as a whole is jazz with the alphabet and punctuation as its notes. Perkins’s compulsive improv leads us to actual charts, diagrams, handwritten notes and graphics as part and parcel to words in poems like “Pros and Cons for Keeping the Baby,” and the cutting “The Dream is in the wrong neighborhood.” In The Grace of Black Mothers, Black lives matter, college applications and passport photos hook up with verse, and Perkins heads to Carrie Mae Weems status as an inimitable chronicler of Black American life in art.
The TeaBook
I never used a coffee machine or even bought a cup of coffee after college all-nighter days ended…until I was facing 40. The milestone led me to abandon a long novel-in-progress I couldn’t make work to my standards. I went to substitute teach instead. A night owl writer gone to crack of dawn schoolkid hours made a teacher’s lounge free coffee hog.
And now two finished novels later I am tired, pun intended. I want my tea habit and its health benefits back. But alas, the joe is an addiction. “The World’s Punniest Tea Gift” may rehab me. Y’all, you just gotta see this. It’s a portfolio to organize your teas outside their individual variety boxes, starting at just $13.99 for a 20-pack “cube” such as Agatha ChrisTea Earl Grey.
The TeaBook was technically born in the South Bronx, as TheTeabook.com founder Noah Bleich credits inspiration to his mother, a native and a teacher there. His products specialize in a word nerd or tea drinkers dream: indie artists’ illustrations of famous figures and ideas on tea bags, puns and jokes to boot, and a portfolio to hold them like Polaroid albums of old. You know, so you don’t have to pull out a ton of half-open, empty or crushed lid tea boxes you have the class to offer your guests?
Get even higher class and neatly display them in an amusing gesture you and/or your guests can have fun with. Leave it to a teacher’s kid to be so selfless as to invent a means to organize any and all teas you have, not only his brand’s. I’m looking for a specific tea I want whilst writing this and newly miffed I can’t just flip to it in my uber-organized teacher mode.
But what about the tea? Is it good, healthy, dust in a satchel or legit? Bleich is committed to sustainable practices, USDA certified organic leaves, recyclable packaging, and a “charitea” model benefiting women’s rights and other causes. The tea’s reviews are rave for taste. The brand also offers totes, chocolate and “Beary Punny Honey Bears” as gifts. With names like “Teigo Rivera,” “MighTea Women of HerStory” and “LiTearary VariTea Pack” for staples like English Breakfast and Jasmine, it’s time to drink up.
Four More for the More Adventurous
Jefferson’s Wolf: A Founding Father’s Troubling Answer to the Problem of Slavery by Christa Dierksheide and Nicholas Guyatt (Belknap Press, May 2026)
If there was ever a time to interrogate what in the world America’s founding fathers were thinking to steep their new country in democracy and equality while holding on to their enslaved and tortured Black people who built it, it is now. Dierksheide and Guyatt go there in this unsparing alternative to a hagiographical biography that is Jefferson’s Wolf.
Voice of a Century: The Life and Artistry of Marian Anderson by Anthony Tommasini with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as series editor (Penguin Press, September 2026)
This charming series that has covered George Eliot and Leontyne Price in years past now zones in on still unmatched contralto Marian Anderson. Along the lines of Jefferson’s Wolf, Voice of a Century’s The Life and Artistry of Marian Anderson is an inconvenient reminder to hold the applause. At least long enough to sit with how one of America’s greatest divas, mastering Russian folk songs and German lieder with classics in her repertoire, had to find her most comfort and success abroad, given her homeland’s slight irritations like booking slow “Colored Only” trains to gigs or holding herself after concerts until she could find a colored bathroom. Tommasini’s work still manages a singing biography.
The Only Thing There is to Want: A Memoir by Sarah Hepola (Dial Press, September 2026)
Most of us are lucky to find love once, maybe twice. An enviably self-revealing Sarah Hepola unpacks at least three times Cupid’s arrow struck, what she learned each time and how each affair cut yet ultimately built her. The Only Thing There is to Want is the unabashed portrait of modern romance Steinem dreamed a woman would one day be able to write.
Up on Cove Mountain: Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail (Mariner Books, August 2026)
Up on Cove Mountain combines two indulgences that could be cause for my embarrassment were I prone to it: true crime murder mysteries and adventure enthusiast fights for life, whether in print or on screen don’t matter. The now-senior Swift’s 1990 chance encounter with a hiking couple he’d later learn was murdered on the trail shortly after is the sad, thrilling pulse of this reflective memoir. Swift exquisitely maps it, in both writing and setting, to explain the internal and external impacts of his two grueling attempts to surmount the 2,200 mile trail thus far in his life. This book should be taught.
Look back to Your 25 Books of Summer from Beauty News NYC to remember surprises we like, like David Kibbe’s Power of Style fashion guide and NFL veteran Andre Hardy’s first novel Tear the City Down, and forward to our official fall book appraisals, including voices from across the pond like London School of Economics grad Elizabeth Ese’s YA debut A Drop of Color and Charles Spencer’s long-awaited Swan Song: Diana, My Sister.
