September 2025 novels and biographies

I have loved Joan Silber’s fiction through the years, Ideas of Heaven one of my favorites, so I’m eager to read her new book. For me, Silber’s characters, relationships, and environments feel similar to the fictional worlds of Alice McDermott. To put it another way: I can depend on both these authors to tell heartfelt stories with meaningful insight about ordinary people.

Mercy begins in New York’s East Village during the 1970s with an emergency event that happens to best friends Ivan and Eddie resulting in a panicked, regretted decision. From the book’s description: “This one act of abandonment haunts Ivan his entire life. He keeps this secret from his friends and later his family, forever searching for mercy from ‘a remorse that never dies.’ Ivan’s decision also ripples across time through an extended community, affecting a host of other people unknowingly connected to that night.” I’m halfway through the book, loving it, and I can say I felt Ivan’s panic and regret in the core of me, which is a testament to Silber’s ability to capture emotions that feel real. This new novel is written in Silber’s signature style of interconnected stories, and it’s what I’ve come to savor in her poignant storytelling.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai comes out September 23, the day the 2025 Booker Prize shortlist is announced, and it’s on the longlist. All signs point to it landing a shortlist spot, given the gushing forecasts and blurbs. A whopping 704 pages, the story is by some considered a modern day Romeo and Juliet. From the book’s description: “Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India. She fears that she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.” Desai has spent 10 years writing this novel, since she won the Booker Prize for her last novel, The Inheritance of Loss.

The longlist for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, formerly the Samuel Johnson Prize, was announced September 4. It’s the annual British book prize for the best non-fiction writing in the English language. Twelve books are on the list, including this one, a biography of Muriel Spark, author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Loitering With Intent, Memento Mori, and the classic The Girls of Slender Means (to name a few). I’m intrigued by the “enigma” in the subtitle, and also this, from the book’s description: “Electric Spark: [The Enigma of Dame Muriel] explores not the celebrated Dame Muriel but the apprentice mage discovering her powers. It takes us through her early years, when turmoil reigned: divorce, madness, murder, espionage, poverty, skullduggery, blackmail, love affairs, revenge, and a major religious conversion. If this sounds like a novel by Spark, it is because her experiences in the 1940s and 1950s became, alchemically distilled, the material of her art.” To be released September 23.

Another biography published this month, Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, also intrigues me. I’m not sure why, other than I know nothing about Robert Louis Stevenson. He lived a short life, one of travel and adventure that makes me curious. From the book’s description: “Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) is famed for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but he published many other novels and stories before his death at forty-four. Despite lifelong ill health, he had immense vitality; Mark Twain said his eyes burned with ‘smoldering rich fire.’ Born in Edinburgh to a family of lighthouse engineers, Stevenson set many stories in Scotland but sought travel and adventure in a life as romantic as his novels.”

‘I loved a ship,’ he wrote, ‘as a man loves burgundy or daybreak.’

I am woefully lacking in my reading of Barbara Pym’s novels. I know I’ve read one or two of them, but I can’t remember which ones, it was so long ago, before I began my list-keeping of all-books-read. Barbara Pym (1913-1980) is a wildly popular British novelist, with Excellent Women being the top-runner of the starred reviews. NYRB Classics is bringing The Sweet Dove Died (1978) back into print September 16. The protagonist is Leonora Eyre, a beautiful, self-absorbed, aging woman attracted to the nephew of a widowed antiques dealer who’s courting her. She rejects the widower’s advances and sets her sights on a romance with the nephew James, who’s quite a bit younger. From the book’s description: “Leonora’s possession of James is challenged, however, first by Phoebe, a bookish young woman his own age, and then by the suave and seductive Ned, a visiting American professor with whom James quickly becomes infatuated. Pym’s sharp eye for comedy and shrewd observation of English manners are on full display in this finely wrought novel of love, loss, and all the hopes and disappointments that befall the human heart.”

Finally, I’m cheating here, but want to give a heads up that the legendary, reclusive, 87-year-old novelist Thomas Pynchon is releasing a new book October 7. Most say his greatest book is Gravity’s Rainbow, which I can’t imagine tackling but wish I would. Pynchon’s our current-day Salinger type. From this article in Kirkus Reviews, April 9, 2025:

Pynchon is notoriously media shy; few public photographs exist of the author, and he does not talk to reporters. He recorded guest spots on two episodes of the animated sitcom The Simpsons, in which he is depicted with a paper bag with a question mark over his head.

Set in 1932, Wisconsin and Europe, Shadow Ticket is about private eye Hicks McTaggart given a case to locate and bring back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s on a walkabout. From the book’s description: “By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with.”