September Monthly Essentials
September can be a busy time for libraries and readers alike, with back to school under way, Labor Day around the corner, and autumn on the horizon. Whether your patrons are trying to channel that productive fall energy into tackling a challenging read or managing their stress levels with something joyful and relaxing, our lists have something for everyone. Read on to find titles that celebrate the start of Hispanic Heritage Month, cozy reads for the changing seasons, and our most anticipated books of the month.
Hispanic Heritage Month
Featured Title
The Intrigue by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Buy the Intrigue ebook in Marketplace
Buy the Intrigue audiobook in Marketplace
From the publisher:
Handsome con artist Ulises has long charmed lonely women via letters in order to steal their money, but money is hard to come by in 1940s Mexico. Ulises knows his looks won’t last forever, and he’s desperate to get his hands on a real fortune.
He thinks he’s found it when he captivates his newest correspondent, Perla, the owner of a small-town boardinghouse in picturesque Veracruz. But when he meets her, he finds something he didn’t expect. The woman has a niece, Inés, who is as observant as she is desperate to escape her aunt’s household.
When Inés discovers Ulises’s true intentions, she wants in on the scheme. They’ll convince her aunt that Ulises is a great catch, Perla will marry him, and her money will vanish. Easy, fast, and clean. But Perla is not the desperate, silly spinster Ulises imagines. She harbors secrets. And although Ulises does not believe in true romance, Inés is more alluring than he bargained for. Suddenly, a simple plan may become perilously complicated.
Venture into the streets of a small town where a patina of convention and good manners conceals a cauldron of avarice and lust.
Pumpkin Spice & Everything Nice – Lighthearted Fall Reads
Featured Title
Disenchanted by Lucy Jane Wood
Buy the Disenchanted ebook in Marketplace
Buy the Disenchanted audiobook in Marketplace
From the publisher:
Sage Hemlock has no interest in embracing her witchy side. Magic has betrayed her before, bringing nothing but heartache, and she will not let something so foolish happen again.
Instead, Sage has thrown herself into her work and studies, running the local museum and largely preferring the company of her library and her cat to other humans. Her one goal is to fly under the coven’s radar so that she can finally shed her blasted powers forever.
But when a strange historical book accidentally sets off a curse, Sage’s quiet small-town life is suddenly overrun and magic is running rife. A beanstalk grows in her garden, and her friend and coworker Casimir starts to look an awful lot like a handsome prince. Fairy tales are coming true. . . .
Now, with the threat of the coven on her tail, Sage must confront the magic she’s always denied to solve the mysteries of the book and save everyone she’s come to love from being lost to a fairy tale forever. The question is, can she finally learn to be her own happily ever after?
Top Titles of September
Featured Title
Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel
Buy the Exit Party ebook in Marketplace
Buy the Exit Party audiobook in Marketplace
From the publisher:
The award-winning, bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility returns with a breathtaking novel of doubles, shadow worlds, and fractured timelines as a man disappears from a glittering Los Angeles party, and a woman—a gunrunner, an art collector, an operative of the State—searches for answers.
Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted. Ari Waker and her roommate pass the gauntlet of bomb-sniffing dogs, the shanty towns, and the Red Cross tents as they walk across Silverlake to a party. The mood is ecstatic inside the apartment, people drink and dance, a woman wears a silver dress, pleated like tinfoil. And then: A shift. A bewildered twin, an uncanny doppelganger stumbles through the crowd and out into the night, and Kareem, the party’s host, vanishes into thin air.
As Ari Waker unravels the mystery of this inexplicable night, Emily St. John Mandel unfurls a story that takes us from a future America splintered by civil war to the seaside cliffs of Greece where weapons dealers hide in an elegant resort, and from the domed city of Paris to a colony on the moon. An unforgettable literary feat, Exit Party is a novel about the price of safety, the perils of the surveillance state, a requiem for a world not unlike our own, and a breathtaking story of resilience in the face of cataclysmic change.
September Blockbusters
Featured Title
American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee
Buy the American Hagwon ebook in Marketplace
Buy the American Hagwon audiobook in Marketplace
From the publisher:
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.
Top Sci-Fi of September
Featured Title
Under Story by Chloe Benjamin
Buy the Under Story ebook in Marketplace
Buy the Under Story audiobook in Marketplace
From the publisher:
At the edge of the world, biologist Laurel Salter is hiding from everything she’s ever known. For ten hours a day, six days per week, she works as a dishwasher at McMurdo Station, an isolated research base in Antarctica. She tells no one that before she arrived, she was a renowned young scientist with a promising career and a family.
But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can’t escape her past. When a strange light appears across the ice—and draws a group of physicists to McMurdo—her former husband, Eli, won’t be far behind. Laurel is captivated by the Arc: its surreal glow; the way it seems almost alive. And though Eli is reluctant to test her wildest theory, Laurel is convinced that the Arc leads down a rabbit hole and into a world they can barely imagine. Can she persuade him to risk everything to fix the burden that hangs between them—to turn back the clock and live their story a second time?
A breathless page-turner and a love letter to our planet, Under Story grapples with the great questions of our time: human hubris, the precarity of the natural world, and the mysterious webs of consciousness that bind us. A modern epic of science and soul, of bravery and redemption, it offers a vision of the future that demands we reckon with what we owe to one another, and to the earth itself.
Top Historical Fiction of September
Featured Title
Mazywood by Tanarive Due
Buy the Mazywood ebook in Marketplace
Buy the Mazywood audiobook in Marketplace
From the publisher:
When Johnny—a filmmaker and grandson of the famous Black actress Mazelle Washington—brings his family to Mazywood, the secluded California mountain lodge left behind by his grandmother, he expects a quiet retreat. Instead, he uncovers a legacy of rage, secrets, and terror that has haunted his family for generations.
Set primarily in the present day, with haunting flashbacks to Hollywood’s Golden Age, Mazywood explores three generations while following Johnny as he pieces together the true story of his grandmother. As a young Black actress whose career spanned from the 1920s to the 1940s, Mazelle brushed shoulders with giants like Lena Horne, Clark Gable, and Hattie McDaniel. But beneath her public appearance, she carried a secret she had kept and nurtured since she was a child, when a dark wish came true and changed the course of her life forever.
Now, fifty years after Mazelle’s death, Johnny finds himself confronting the truth she buried—and the consequences she left behind. For a monster lurks outside Mazywood, hidden for generations, and Johnny brought his family to its hunting grounds.
Top Kids & Teens of September
Featured Title
Anger Is Only a Shadow by Elizabeth Acevedo
Buy the Anger is Only a Shadow ebook in Marketplace
Buy the Anger is Only a Shadow audiobook in Marketplace
From the publisher:
Lil is anything but small. She’s rebellious, she’s loyal; she’s figuring out what kind of good person she wants to be, or if she wants to be a good person at all. But more than anything? Lil wants to be free.
When her instinct for freedom leads to another stay in D.C. juvenile detention, Lil knows she’s lucky to just be on probation. But judgment, guilt, and an ankle monitor weigh heavily on her, and she can’t shake that pinned-down feeling.
The only person who might understand is her big brother, Aldwin. Except he’s more distant now than just the hundred miles where he’s away at college. Something’s been off with him for a couple of months, but only Lil seems to realize how important it is to get to him.
As her court hearing ticks closer, a question looms over Lil as the missed phone calls and strange texts from her brother pile up: will she follow the rules until her sentencing, or put her future freedom on the line?
More Recommended Lists You Don’t Want to Miss
September is Classical Music Month
Are You Ready for Some Football?
If you ever need help shopping, you can always email your Digital Content Librarian! Find your DCL in the SUPPORT tab of Marketplace.
About the author: Holly is a Digital Content Librarian at OverDrive. Her favorite genres are fantasy and science fiction, as well as anything with a touch of humor. In addition to reading, her hobbies include crafting, doing puzzles, and doting on her two cats.