What’s Pubbing in September

Returning to print after nearly 50 years, Survivor completes Octavia E. Butler’s thrilling Patternist series, including a short story from the Patternist saga and new historical essays from a major Butler scholar. This deluxe edition includes:

The Patternist books (Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay’s Ark, and Patternmaster) comprise Butler’s longest, most complex series, stretching from late 17th century Africa to outer space in the far future, as rival factions of humanity develop incredible powers—only to use them to subjugate others. For nearly half a century, the fourth volume, Survivor, has been out of print at Octavia E. Butler’s request. It tells the story of Alanna, a colonist fleeing a plague-scarred Earth. But the planet she lands on is inhabited by the alien Kohn, whose battling tribes soon trap Alanna in their war. She must make alliances—while plotting betrayals. She must protect her heart—while putting it at risk. And she must decide if the best way to retain her humanity … is to leave it behind. Now, Survivor is put into its proper historical context thanks to contributions from scholar and Octavia E. Butler Fellow Alyssa Collins. This long-awaited volume also contains “A Necessary Being,” the only short fiction set in the Patternist universe, to finally, fully bring together and complete the Patternist series for readers everywhere.

In this stunning and compulsively readable memoir, the Oscar-winning star of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The Goonies, and Everything Everywhere All at Once, Ke Huy Quan, tells the story of his journey from Vietnamese refugee to 80s child star to the most inspiring comeback in Hollywood history. 

“A monumental work of self-discovery and the power and grace of communal survival. Quan’s voice is crystalline and luminous, and his Odyssean journey to the screen is, in itself, a triumph of storytelling.” –Ocean Vuong

Ke Huy Quan’s Hollywood adventure began when he was twelve years old, a mere five years after his family escaped Communist Northern Vietnam and settled down to a relatively peaceful life in L.A.’s Chinatown. After attending an open call audition on a whim, he was unexpectedly swept up in the wild world of filmmaking: learning to swim from Harrison Ford on the set of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, receiving trucks full of toys from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas for his birthday, meeting Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker, and making lifelong friends on the set of The Goonies.
 
A star of two of the most beloved movies of the ‘80s, there appeared to be no limit to Ke’s rise. But just a few years later, the roles had dried up and it seemed like Hollywood no longer had a place for him. He eventually left acting to work odd jobs behind the scenes for directors like Wong Kar Wai. His confidence was badly shaken, but his love of performing never abated. It wasn’t until decades later, when he was 49 years old, that he stepped back in front of the camera to star in a strange little indie film called Everything Everywhere All at Once, which surprised everyone with its incredible box-office and awards season success. To call Ke’s Oscar-winning performance a triumphant return would be an understatement.
 
In this moving, inspirational memoir, Ke paints a vivid self-portrait, telling both heart-wrenching and funny stories of his early rise, slow fall from the spotlight, the resilience that kept him going through his darkest times, and his eventual resurrection on one of the biggest stages in Hollywood. Never Say Die is the story of Ke’s extraordinary life, a love letter to the movies and people that shaped him, and a powerful testament to never giving up on your dreams.

The National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Pachinko returns with a breathtaking contemporary epic: a masterpiece by turns sweeping and intimate, that reckons with ambition and moderation, lust and loyalty, personal dreams and familial duty.

Min Jin Lee brings grand ambition, fierce heart, and the tenderest hope to a novel I didn’t want to end.” —Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger

In schools and churches, hotel rooms and nail salons, law firms and fried-fish shops; in cramped, dingy apartments and luxury, gated communities, the men, women, and children in American Hagwon struggle to find satisfaction and meaning in a world that seems to grow less forgiving with each passing year. Once comfortably middle class in Korea, John and Helen Koh and their three children—Bo, DH, and Mido—find their lives upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

Desperately striving to regain their footing, they leave Seoul for Sydney and eventually settle in Southern California—where new vistas of opportunity open up for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, must adjust to a new life in which their experience and education mean little, and they set their sights on whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. The Kohs, their friends, relatives, and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate new courses across the years, always nursing the almost all-consuming faith that education will lead the next generation to success and security.

In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted an unforgettable, panoramic novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions, where the bonds of family and of memory twist and fray but rarely break, and where willful self-sacrifice—for the benefit of loved ones and even strangers—is a kind of prayer.

An immersive, engrossing novel … this is panorama told in brilliant detail.”—Colm Tóibín, bestselling author ofLong IslandandBrooklyn

This debut novel from a former NFL player is a hard-hitting, heart wrenching crime novel that brilliantly blends elements of jazz, football, and a gritty portrait of a city divided—perfect for fans of S.A. Cosby and Walter Mosley.

Coltrane Davis is at once a knight and a hustler. He has risen to wealth and success, graduating from San Diego’s back alleys to the halls of power through his partnership with Saul Sollman, a crooked kingmaker among the city’s elite. Running multimillion dollar scams with Saul, he has been Saul’s fixer, but now he wants out of the hustle so that he can focus on his teenage daughter’s burgeoning tennis career and finally be the dad he has always wanted to be.

But when the Los Angeles Chargers’ star running back vanishes one evening before a big game, Coltrane is drawn into an investigation of what happened by Saul and his protégé, the player’s agent; the stakes escalate with a gut-punch when the trail leads into San Diego’s underworld of drugs and prostitution and reveals clues to the disappearance of his daughter’s best friend, whose loss has haunted him.

Torn by the unreconcilable demands of the life he can’t seem to quit and the fierce desire he has to protect his own, Coltrane brings himself and his loved ones to the brink of destruction in his quest to free himself once and for all of Saul’s control—and focus on what really matters: family.

Introducing an iconic investigative duo—a hapless detective and his capable cat—in this must-read by one of Japan’s most beloved novelists of crime fiction.

Detective Yoshitaro Katayama is afraid of many things: heights, dark spaces, blood and … women. When a young female student is found murdered, he’s given two choices—review the harrowing crime-scene photographs or head to Hagoromo Women’s College to investigate—and reluctantly opts for the latter.

But the threat escalates with additional murders, and soon Katayama has a different surprise on his hands: a calico cat named Holmes, orphaned when the dean himself falls victim.

Surely that’s the last thing Katayama needs. Until Holmes begins to display some uncanny investigative instincts of her own …

An elderly man has just a month to leave his home. A young woman from his neighborhood is soon to be unhoused. Slowly but surely, the two form an unlikely yet transformational friendship in this warm and funny novel about love and community.

Seventy-five-year-old Rey has lived on the same block in San Francisco’s Mission District for most of his life, watching his city transform. A widower for ten years, he spends most of his time volunteering at the library, but by the end of the month, Rey must move into a senior retirement and leave his neighborhood behind. It’s at the library during one of his last shifts where he meets Q, on probation, post breakup with her girlfriend and dealing with a troubled family. As Rey tries to decide what to do with the rest of his days, literally counting them off and cutting his remaining ties, Q begins to insert herself into his world in a way that he can’t deny.

A story about Latinx identity, intergenerational friendship, and chosen family, Moniz’s novel takes us on a journey through senior dance classes, illegal bike trips over the Bay Bridge, and fair housing rallies. And as the days tick down, Rey and Q find themselves leaning on each other for answers on how to find community and purpose, make amends, and process grief.

For readers of Steven Rowley and Claire Jimenez, equally funny and tender, The King of Aloe Vera delights in how we choose to live, and live out, our lives.

AN INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES‘ BEST ROMANCE NOVELS OF 2025

From World Fantasy Award-winning author Tasha Suri comes The Isle in the Silver Sea, a heart-shattering standalone romantasy of sapphic longing, medieval folklore and a love that spans the centuries.

★ “Beautifully inevitable and surprising at the same time.” –Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

In an England fuelled by stories, the knight and the witch are fated to fall in love and doom each other over and over, the same tale retold over hundreds of lifetimes. Simran is a witch of the woods. Vina is a knight of the Queen’s court.

When the two women begin to fall for each other, how can they surrender to their desires, when to give in is to destroy each other? As they seek a way to break the cycle, a mysterious assassin begins targeting tales like theirs.

To survive, the two will need to write a story stronger than the one that fate has given to them.

But what tale is stronger than The Knight and the Witch?

★ “A sensuous and haunting story of love beyond time.” –Library Journal (Starred Review)

A defining and uncompromising memoir from Super Bowl quarterback and renowned civil rights activist, Colin Kaepernick.

“A candid, observant, generous chronicle of his development as an elite, suddenly dispensable NFL quarterback and also of the relentless, high-profile civil rights warrior he’s become.” —Booklist Starred Review

On September 1, 2016, Colin Kaepernick took a knee during “The Star Spangled Banner,” but the world never fully understood the whole story. Not the “why” or the cost of his courage. That story begins in Turlock, California, where Kaepernick, a Black kid adopted into a white family, navigated constant resistance to His Blackness and sense of self. Sports became his refuge and his proving ground, where his talent could not be questioned. The extraordinary result? A quarterback whose arm and instincts would carry him to the Super Bowl and into history books. But with success came an education he hadn’t anticipated.

In the fraught world of sports politics, he saw the hidden powerhouses pulling the strings. Steeled with the readings of Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Huey P. Newton, and Angela Davis, he saw in the NFL, in Turlock, in the repeated, unpunished police killings of Black and Brown Americans, an undeniable truth revealed: this was not someone else’s fight. It was his. It is ours.

When Kaepernick knelt, the NFL blackballed him. But in the ten years since, the questions his protest raise have not gone away. In The Perilous Fight, Kaepernick delivers his story with the same unflinching conviction that defined his most-watched moment, a single act of protest that changed American sports and culture forever. And ultimately, it is a story about the future we are all still fighting to build.

Quaint Folk is a sharply satirical queer folk horror novel that peels back the idyllic veneer of a seemingly perfect island town to reveal the rot beneath, from Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author Bitter Karella. 

“The folk horror I always wanted: queer, funny, bloody, and outrageous in the best way.” —Laura Cranehill, author of Wife Shaped Bodies

From the outside, it looks like Jessica has the perfect life. She’s a stay-at-home mom, married to a man with a respectable job, raising a son they adore. Her family is as wholesome as all-American pie. But deep down, Jessica knows there’s something wrong with her; she knows she can’t escape her past.

When her husband’s job has them move abroad, Jessica thinks this is her chance for a fresh start. On the remote island of Hasenhurst, the modern world can’t get in. The people there grow their own herbs, make their own jam, and mind their own business. They believe in folk tales and the power of dreams. They tell visitors, we’re a quaint, quiet people.The right sort of family would do well here.

Jessica is determined to be the right kind of person for a family—and a life—like this. But as she tries to befriend the townsfolk and learn their ways, she soon realizes that beneath the town’s cozy idyll, something sickly-sweet and rotten lays buried …

“To experience Karella’s cheerfully unhinged fiction is to surrender to a spectacularly fierce and uncompromising literary force. Quaint Folk astonished me with its charming, mythical weirdness threaded with genuine moments of pure tenderness. A bold, potent brew of all the best elements of folk and queer horror.” —Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke