A new month means new books on the horizon. These are some notable new releases for the month of October in my favorite categories: Fiction, Young Adult, History & Biography, Mystery & Thriller, Science fiction, Fantasy, and Historical fiction. My pick for this month is “The Gilded Page: The Secret Lives of Medieval Manuscripts” by Mary Wellesley because I would love to read more about Medieval Manuscripts. (amazon, Goodreads, 2021)

Fiction
“The Book of Magic” by Alice Hoffman
Release date: October 12, 2021
Master storyteller Alice Hoffman brings us the conclusion of the Practical Magic series in a spellbinding and enchanting final Owens novel brimming with lyric beauty and vivid characters. The Owens family has been cursed in matters of love for over three-hundred years but all of that is about to change. The novel begins in a library, the best place for a story to be conjured, when beloved aunt Jet Owens hears the deathwatch beetle and knows she has only seven days to live. Jet is not the only one in danger—the curse is already at work.

A frantic attempt to save a young man’s life spurs three generations of the Owens women, and one long-lost brother, to use their unusual gifts to break the curse as they travel from Paris to London to the English countryside where their ancestor Maria Owens first practiced the Unnamed Art. The younger generation discovers secrets that have been hidden from them in matters of both magic and love by Sally, their fiercely protective mother. As Kylie Owens uncovers the truth about who she is and what her own dark powers are, her aunt Franny comes to understand that she is ready to sacrifice everything for her family, and Sally Owens realizes that she is willing to give up everything for love.

Young Adult
“Kingdom of the Cursed” by Kerri Maniscalco
Release date: October 5, 2021
From #1 New York Times bestselling author of “Stalking Jack the Ripper,” Kerri Maniscalco, comes the sizzling, sweepingly romantic sequel to “Kingdom of the Wicked.” One sister. Two sinful princes.
Infinite deception with a side of revenge. Welcome to Hell.

After selling her soul to become Queen of the Wicked, Emilia travels to the Seven Circles with the enigmatic Prince of Wrath, where she is introduced to a seductive world of vice. She vows to do whatever it takes to avenge her beloved sister, Vittoria even if that means accepting the hand of the Prince of Pride, the king of demons. The first rule in the court of the Wicked? Trust no one. With back-stabbing princes, luxurious palaces, mysterious party invitations, and conflicting clues about who really killed her twin, Emilia finds herself more alone than ever before. Can she even trust Wrath, her one-time ally in the mortal world, or is he keeping dangerous secrets about his true nature?

History and Biography
“The Gilded Page: The Secret Lives of Medieval Manuscripts” by Mary Wellesley
Release date: October 12, 2021
A breathtaking journey into the hidden history of medieval manuscripts, from the Lindisfarne Gospels to the ornate Psalter of Henry VIII. Medieval manuscripts can tell us much about power and art, knowledge and beauty. Many have survived because of an author’s status. Part of the reason we have so much of Chaucer’s writings, for example, is because he was a London-based government official first and a poet second. Other works by the less influential have narrowly avoided ruin, like the book of illiterate Margery Kempe, found in a country house closet, the cover nibbled on by mice. Scholar Mary Wellesley recounts the amazing origins of these remarkable manuscripts, surfacing the important roles played by women and ordinary people—the grinders, binders, and scribes—in their creation and survival.

Mystery and Thriller
“These Silent Woods” by Kimi Cunningham Grant
Release date: October 26, 2021
A father and daughter living in the remote Appalachian mountains must reckon with the ghosts of their past. No electricity, no family, no connection to the outside world. For eight years, Cooper and his young daughter, Finch, have lived in isolation in a remote cabin in the northern Appalachian woods. And that is exactly the way Cooper wants it, because he has a lot to hide. Finch has been raised on the books filling the cabin’s shelves and the beautiful but brutal code of life in the wilderness. But she is starting to push back against the sheltered life Cooper has created for her—and he is still haunted by the painful truth of what it took to get them there.

The only people who know they exist are a mysterious local hermit named Scotland, and Cooper’s old friend, Jake, who visits each winter to bring them food and supplies. But this year, Jake does not show up, setting off an irreversible chain of events that reveals just how precarious their situation really is. Suddenly, the boundaries of their safe haven have blurred—and when a stranger wanders into their woods, Finch’s growing obsession with her could put them all in danger. After a shocking disappearance threatens to upend the only life Finch has ever known, Cooper is forced to decide whether to keep hiding or finally face the sins of his past.

Science Fiction
“Perhaps the Stars” by Ada Palmer
Release date: October 19, 2021
The final instalment in Ada Palmer’s award-winning, critically acclaimed Terra Ignota series. The long years of near-utopia have end abruptly. Peace and order are now figments of the past. Corruption, deception, and insurgency hum within the once steadfast leadership of the Hives, nations without fixed location.

The heartbreaking truth is that for decades, even centuries, the leaders of the great Hives bought the world’s stability with a trickle of secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction could ever dominate. So that the balance held. The Hives’ facade of solidity is the only hope they have for maintaining a semblance of order, for preventing the public from succumbing to the savagery and bloodlust of wars past. But as the great secret becomes more and more widely known, that facade is slipping away. Just days earlier, the world was a pinnacle of human civilization. Hives and hiveless, Utopians and sensayers, emperors and the downtrodden, warriors and saints scramble to prepare for the seemingly inevitable war.

Fantasy
“The Lighthouse Witches” by C.J. Cooke
Release date: October 5, 2021
Two sisters go missing on a remote Scottish island. Twenty years later, one is found–but she is still the same age as when she disappeared. The secrets of witches have reached across the centuries in this chilling Gothic thriller. When single mother Liv is commissioned to paint a mural in a 100-year-old lighthouse on a remote Scottish island, it is an opportunity to start over with her three daughters–Luna, Sapphire, and Clover. When two of her daughters go missing, she is frantic. She learns that the cave beneath the lighthouse was once a prison for women accused of witchcraft. The locals warn her about wildlings, supernatural beings who mimic human children, created by witches for revenge. Liv is told wildlings are dangerous and must be killed.

Twenty-two years later, Luna has been searching for her missing sisters and mother. When she receives a call about her youngest sister, Clover, she is initially ecstatic. Clover is the sister she remembers–except she is still seven years old, the age she was when she vanished. Luna is worried Clover is a wildling. Luna has few memories of her time on the island, but she will have to return to find the truth of what happened to her family. But she does not realize just how much the truth will change her.

Historical fiction
“Small Pleasures” by Clare Chambers
Release date: October 5, 2021
In the best tradition of Tessa Hadley, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ann Patchett—an astonishing, keenly observed period piece about an ordinary British woman in the 1950s whose dutiful life takes a sudden turn into a pitched battle between propriety and unexpected passion.

1957: Jean Swinney is a feature writer on a local paper in the southeast suburbs of London. Clever but with limited career opportunities and on the brink of forty, Jean lives a dreary existence that includes caring for her demanding widowed mother, who rarely leaves the house. It is a small life with little joy and no likelihood of escape.

That all changes when a young woman, Gretchen Tilbury, contacts the paper to claim that her daughter is the result of a virgin birth. Jean seizes onto the bizarre story and sets out to discover whether Gretchen is a miracle or a fraud. But the more Jean investigates, the more her life becomes strangely intertwined with that of the Tilburys, including Gretchen’s gentle and thoughtful husband Howard, who mostly believes his wife, and their quirky and charming daughter Margaret, who becomes a sort of surrogate child for Jean. Gretchen, too, becomes a much-needed friend in an otherwise empty social life. Jean cannot bring herself to discard what seems like her one chance at happiness, even as the story that she is researching starts to send dark ripples across all their lives with unimaginable consequences.