If you’re anything like me, the back-to-school season has got you feeling nostalgic about receiving your fall semester reading list.To satiate this lingering routine desire, I’ve made one for you. Here are 10 new books you can get your hands on now, including the much-anticipated sequel to Margaret Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale, YA novels that approach issues adults should be thinking about, and intriguing historical novels with fierce female characters.
Happy reading!
Who Put the Song On?
By Morgan Parker
If you loved The Hate U Give, then this one’s for you. This YA novel is based on award-winning poet Morgan Parker’s own life and diaries and tells the story of a young black teenage girl who struggles to live by her own terms.
Buy it here: Amazon / Indigo
Crow Winter
By Karen McBride
This debut novel from Algonquin Anishinaabe writer Karen McBride tells the story of Hazel, who, ever since returning home to Spirit Bear Point First Nation, keeps dreaming of an old crow that offers to help her. As she tries to determine what he is there to help her with, she must uncover family secrets and deceipts, and navigate old magic.
Buy it here: Amazon / Indigo
This Little Light
By Lori Lansens
This novel propels readers forward, to the year 2024, when the religious right is in power and a group of teenage girls are accused of setting off a bomb at their high school’s “virtue ball.” Tackling complex issues like abortion, birth control, virginity oaths, Dreamers, and authoritarian politics, this book is a glimpse into a terrifying not-so-distant potential future.
Buy it here: Amazon / Indigo
The Familiars
By Stacey Halls
Meanwhile, this novel draws readers back in time to the year of 1612, when the witch hunt craze is in full swing in England. It follows the friendship that develops between a woman with a history of difficult pregnancies and the midwife that promises to help her deliver her first healthy baby, and the circumstances that sweep them into the famous Pendle Witch Trials.
Buy it here: Amazon / Indigo
The Witches Are Coming
By Lindy West
Speaking of witches, this upcoming release from writer Lindy West turns complaints that feminism has gone too far and that the #MeToo movement is a witch hunt against powerful men on its head. She accepts the label and declares that if witches are what they think feminists are, then a witch she will be. In a scathing cultural critique, she calls out the misogyny she sees in the media, culture, and politics. You’ll have to wait till November for this one, but be sure to add it to your pre-order list in the meantime.
Buy it here: Amazon / Indigo
The Testaments
By Margaret Atwood
More than three decades later, Margaret Atwood is bringing the fictional Republic of Gilead back to life in a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Dubbed the “literary event of the year,” this book dives into the inner problems of the theocratic regime as it begins to crumble and tells the story of three fascinating women caught up in it all.
Buy it here: Amazon / Indigo
Slay
By Brittney Morris
In this YA novel, a teenage girl named Kiera develops a video game inspired by Black Panther. She is the only black kid at her high school, is an honours student, and math tutor, and nobody knows she is the one behind the video game. The story follows Kiera as she navigates online trolls, racism, and fights for the safe community that her game provides.
Buy it here: Amazon / Indigo
The Secrets We Kept
By Lara Prescott
This new historical novel follows the stories of two female CIA secretaries who find themselves caught up in a world of risk, intrigue, and art in Cold War-era Soviet Russia when they are given an unexpected assignment: to smuggle the love story Doctor Zhivago out of the USSR where it’s publication is repressed and help to release it into the world.
Buy it here: Amazon / Indigo
Ponti
By Sharlene Teo
Set in present-day Singapore, this novel looks at the lives of four women and the complex relationships between them. It is a dark and funny debut novel and explores female friendship, modernity, and loneliness.
Buy it here: Amazon / Indigo
No Judgments
By Author
Fellow early-2000s babies: rejoice! The author of The Princess Diaries series, Meg Cabot, is back with a brand new novel. No Judgments is a rom-com that is sure to bring you out of the winter-is-coming blues of the fall, telling the story of a young animal-loving woman who becomes determined to save all the pets on her island after a brutal hurricane separates them from their owners and the bad-boy that she asks to help.
Buy it here: Amazon / Indigo
