AARP Hearing Center

Fall is always the best season for new book releases, but this one may be even richer with fantastic reads than most. Of the 10 or so I’ve read so far, the novels by Ian McEwan and Kiran Desai are my favorites. They’re both beautifully written and engrossing, with compelling older characters to boot. But each of these 32 books is worth a look. (And there are so many other worthy ones: the novels Pick a Color by Souvankham Thammagonsa; The Wayfinder by Adam Johnson, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Orphan Master’s Son; Crooks by Lou Berney and … I could go on.)
Fall also brings a slew of memoirs from seasoned celebrities, including Anthony Hopkins, Lionel Richie, Kenny Chesney, Patti Smith and many more, which we’ll highlight in a separate article coming soon on aarp.org.
(Meanwhile, don’t forget the many great books that came out last year: We’ve rounded up some that are now available in paperback.)
Mysteries/thrillers/crime

The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman (September 30)
Osman’s 2020 cozy mystery The Thursday Murder Club (read our excerpt here) was a massive hit, with a just-released Netflix adaptation starring Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan (on AARP’s new Movies for Grownups Hottest Actors Over 50 list!), Celia Imrie and Ben Kingsley. This is the fifth installment in the humor-filled series that follows a quartet of pensioners living in a posh retirement village in Kent. Here they team up on a strange case involving a missing man and murder. Expect madcap fun.
Remain: A Supernatural Love Story by Nicholas Sparks and M. Night Shyamalan (October 14 )
Sparks’ 26th novel is “a genre-bending, supernatural romantic thriller,” according to the publisher, by Sparks (1996’s The Notebook) and Shyamalan (director of the 1999 supernatural thriller — “I see dead people” — The Sixth Sense, among many others). New York City architect Tate Donovan meets a strange woman named Wren (she can see dead people!) while he’s living on Cape Cod while designing a friend’s beach house. Tate connects with Wren immediately but soon learns that she’s haunted by some dark forces. The coauthors are already at work on a film adaptation that’s set to star Jake Gyllenhaal, planned for an October 2026 release. Meanwhile, read our 2024 interview with Sparks, where we find out if he’s as romantic as his novels.
King Sorrow by Joe Hill (October 21)
Joe Hill happens to have a father who’s a master of the macabre: Stephen King. He’s a tough act to follow, but Hill has long stood tall apart from dad. His first horror novel, 2007’s Heart-Shaped Box, won the Bram Stoker Award for best first novel, and his latest, King Sorrow, has earned early praise: Library Journal notes, “Hill not only escapes the shadow of his famous father, Stephen King, but may even eclipse him” in this “outstanding tale.” A bit of an investment at nearly 900 pages, Hill’s story is about a college student who is threatened with danger unless he commits a crime. He and his friends decide to try to summon a supernatural force to save him. Alas, it works, and they’re forced to contend with the creature they’ve summoned: a dragon hungry for humans.
The Black Wolf by Louise Penny (October 28)
This is the Canadian author’s 20th novel in her bestselling detective series that features Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and is set in the quaint, if disturbingly murder-prone, Quebec village of Three Pines. Gamache and his deputies (Jean-Guy Beauvoir and Isabelle Lacoste) are now stumped by a character called the Black Wolf, who’d planned a terrorist attack in Montreal — which, they learn, is just one piece of a larger, far more destructive plot. Their few clues to the perpetrators include a notebook left by a murdered biologist and a cryptic phrase from the would-be terrorist: “In a dry and parched land where there is no water.” Trust Penny to offer another smart, well-plotted, suspenseful tale.
Also of note:
The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown (September 9): The sixth twisty novel in Brown’s Da Vinci Code series brings back Professor Robert Langdon, now romantically involved with an iconoclastic scientist who goes missing. He travels the globe searching for answers.
The Intruder by Freida McFadden (October 7): The wildly popular McFadden (The Housemaid, The Boyfriend, among many others) tells the tale of a woman alone in a remote cabin during a snowstorm who receives a mysterious visitor.
Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon (October 7): Pynchon (1973’s Gravity’s Rainbow) sets this novel in 1932 Milwaukee, where private eye Hicks McTaggart is hired to bring home an heiress who’s wandered off. He ends up entangled in an international stew of spies, counterspies, Nazis and more.
Gone Before Goodbye by Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben (October 14): Actress and book club host Witherspoon and the bestselling author Coben teamed up for this story about an Army combat surgeon hired to assist a wealthy man in need of medical help. When he dies, she gets caught in a conspiracy where her own life is on the line.
The Widow by John Grisham (October 21): The legal-thriller master introduces lawyer Simon Latch, hired by a wealthy widow to write her will, and later accused of murder. He needs to find the real killer to clear his name.
More From AARP
12 Fantastic Book Club Reads Now in Paperback
Your group will love these bestsellers and award winners
10 Classic Novels to Add to Your Reading List
Check out our list of iconic books from Austen, Woolf, Orwell and more
A Chat With the Writer of a New Springsteen Book
Peter Ames Carlin talks about how the Boss created the ‘Born to Run’ album in 1975