The Best Book Club Books of September

The award-winning Locke is back with the conclusion to her amazing Highway 59 series. It follows Black Texas Ranger Darren Matthews as he contends with all manner of racism and effery while investigating murders. Here, his trifling mother has dropped a case in his lap that he’s hesitant to pick up, lest it ruin the life he’s reconstructing for himself. She tells him of a case in which a Black sorority member is missing while her sorority sisters insist she isn’t. As he follows leads, he finds out that her hometown—and even her family—have some rotten inner workings.

Nemonte Nenquimo had a traditional Waorani tribe childhood in Ecuador—she foraged and was about taught about plant medicine and shamanism. After she goes to study with an evangelical missionary group, dreams of her ancestors send her back to the forest, and she becomes one of the foremost voices in climate change activism in the world. With We Will Be Jaguars, she tells the true story of her people.

Lately, we’ve gotten plenty of great, feminist retellings of iconic women in literature and mythology, but Kiersten White’s (Hide, Mister Magic) Lucy Undying breathes fresh life into the tale of Lucy Westenra, Dracula’s first English victim. Since she was first bitten, she’s been trying to escape Dracula, but it’s in the 21st century that she finally meets a woman similarly trying to escape. Iris is charming, but her family—with their ill-begotten health empire—won’t let her out of their clutches. And Dracula, meanwhile, is back on his BS. Still, Lucy’s and Iris’s connection feels real and intense, and it might be a real chance at happiness.

And side, note, but the cover is amazing. I just got a copy and I noticed the wolves in Lucy’s hair. Ugh.

This is already doing numbers in the UK. It follows the Blue sisters, who are all so different—and who are all also messes in their own way. There’s Avery, the attorney who now lives in London with her wife after battling a heroin addiction; Bonnie, the former boxer who works as an L.A. bouncer; and Lucky, who parties hard as a model in Paris. There was a fourth sister, Nicky, who was the one thing holding them all together—but it’s been a year since she passed away suddenly. Now, they’re coming back together for the first time in a while to stop the sale of the New York City apartment they were raised in, even as the grief, addiction, and disappointment they’re dealing with still loom large over them.

A new Alexis Henderson for fall always bodes well, and An Academy for Liars is an especially fall-friendly dark academia novel that has a synopsis that kind of reminds me of Vita Nostra by Marina Dyachenko and Sergey Dyachenko. In it, Lennon Carter is invited to take the entrance exam for the mysterious Drayton College because of her innate gift of persuasion—which can be used on people and matter alike. Once she passes the test and gains entry to the school, she finds that she loves her studies and the moss-covered campus. Her alluring adviser, Dante, is kind of enjoyable, too, but she also becomes unnerved by the history of the college. And her mentor’s connection to it.

When was the last time you read a romance novel set in Việt Nam? Right, me neither, which is partially why Adam & Evie’s Matchmaking Tour sounds like so much fun. But let’s rewind a bit and get into Evie, who has just been fired from a poetry professorship by her secret boyfriend—which makes me want to hold her hand gently while I tell her some things. In any case, for a second, it seems like things are kind of looking up when her Auntie Hảo leaves her a memory-filled row house in San Francisco. But there’s a catch: to actually inherit it, she’ll have to go on a matchmaking tour in her family’s native Việt Nam. That’s where Adam comes in. He’s busting his you-know-what in order to prove himself as the CMO of his sister’s matchmaking business and joins the inaugural tour. It’s there that he meets Evie, and his grumpy uptightness is countered by her chaotic whimsy. As they keep getting thrown together in places like the busy streets of Hồ Chí Minh City and against the backdrop of the beautiful waterfalls in Đà Lạt, animosity turns into something sweeter.