As my favorite video game character, Mario, says, “Wowey zowey!” August has some seriously good releases. I am desperately trying to get through my back catalogue, not to mention my 26 Classics in 2026 challenge, but then I work on this post for you guys every month, and my TBR blows up.
This month, there are a ton of good books coming out, so gird your loins! I didn’t include Romance this month because, honestly, only one book stood out to me. I really focus on making these posts books that I myself have/would put on hold, so month to month the genres will vary.
PS: Just a reminder that you can tag upcoming releases as “notify me” within the Libby app. Then, when the book becomes available, you can place a hold and get a great spot in line. That’s how I got Whistler the day after it came out!
Table of Contents:
Note: I’ve also decided to turn on paid subscriptions. Paid subscribers will have access to exclusive posts, reading challenges, printables, and locked portions of paid posts. From now through August 1, you can sign up for 60%, or $1.67 per month (less than the price of a cup of coffee!).
I hope to have you at the smaller table in the back, where we get to know each other a little better.
A note on links: I’m an advocate for library books, but I also love to buy a book or audiobook sometimes. If you want to support indie bookstores and my work, consider using the affiliate links in this post. Thank you!
In this dual-timeline novel, Margery arrives in Saltmarsh in 1665 looking for her mother and instead finds a very closed-off group of villagers. After the Plague ravages the community, rumors of a demon dog and a girl who brought a curse begin to fester. Centuries later, an opera singer comes to the same marsh and starts digging into the old story. (book / audiobook)
Release date: August 7
Eliza May Drayden writes a dark, cryptic novel that everyone calls immoral. After she dies, it takes on a life of its own. 11 interconnected stories then spiral out across 3 centuries, each generation offering a competing version of her life, her curse, and how exactly she slipped out of her coffin. De Standaard called it the Best Book of the Century. (book)
Release date: August 18
Beddou is 6 when he’s sent from his Moroccan village to apprentice far from home, his mother pressing 6 amber beads into his hands to help him find his way back. The same month, an Arabian filly is born in the Sultan’s palace, and when a soldier steals her and takes her into France as the Great War begins, Beddou vows to find her. (book / audiobook)
Release date: August 25
Lisbon, 1954: someone steals the Last Will and Testament of Garoto Bárbaro de Castro. The thief is Nuno, Garoto’s descendant, an artifact hunter, grave-robber, conman, fake veterinarian, and agent of Angolan independence. He sets off to track down all 13 bequests and accidentally starts collecting the distant relatives of everyone named in the will, most of whom do not want to be collected. A darkly funny revenge saga that runs between Angola, Cuba, and Louisiana’s Angola prison. (book / audiobook)
Release date: August 29
Annie grew up on a sailboat in the Pacific Northwest, navigating by stars and swimming with sea creatures. Then, a tsunami takes everything and strands her on land, where she pulls a wordless man out of the wreckage who hums at a frequency only she can hear and whose touch shows her an underwater world she has been homesick for her whole life. (book / audiobook)
Release date: August 4
Val and Milly met as the only two Black students on a study abroad trip in France and became each other’s person immediately. A decade later, they’re both pregnant, and Val moves to New York so they can raise their daughters together. The only catch is that Milly is now an influencer married into restaurant money and Val is a journalist who can’t afford the block her best friend lives on. There’s also the secret they thought they left behind in France… (book / audiobook)
Release date: August 4
Maggie Brandt is 3 seasons into a small organic farm in rural Colorado when the 2008 crash hits. Her unemployed husband takes a job with an oil and gas company, which is roughly the worst possible move in a house where his wife and daughter are both committed environmentalists. Meanwhile, a billionaire is quietly buying up the county’s water rights. Appraisals tells the story of 4 generations of women, one piece of land, and what you’ll actually do to preserve it. (book / audiobook)
Release date: August 4
A plane crashes, and Nina crawls out alive with a few snacks and no signal. She looks for the pilot, her missing boyfriend, but instead finds Sunrise, an Old West town that is perfectly maintained and yet completely empty. Inside Sunrise, she discovers the pieces of a mystery 100 years in the making. 3 timelines, 1 ghost town, and a gunslinger everybody has a different story about. (book / audiobook)
Release date: August 11
Aubrey Trail was an aging Nebraska con man who convinced people he was a centuries-old immortal being. Bailey Boswell called herself his queen. Together they used Tinder to pull vulnerable young women into a world of sex, theft, and total psychological control, until someone ended up dead. Hardin, who helped expose NXIVM, spent years going in and out of prisons to report this one out. Reads like a Stephen King novel, except that it really happened. (book / audiobook)
Release date: August 4
Lepore’s argument is that rule by machine is not the future arriving. Instead, it’s a very old idea with a long paper trail, running from the technocracy movement straight to the tech billionaires and the neo-monarchists currently redesigning your government. Shocking and ultimately a case that anything built by people can be taken apart by them. (book / audiobook)
Release date: August 25
It’s 90 degrees in August 1978, and 18-year-old golf prodigy Mira Winston drives a ball straight through a practice net at her Westchester country club, killing a caddy. A freak accident, except the club wants a scapegoat, the detective remembers she has a history, and the dead boy’s father has seen her with her married lover. (book / audiobook)
Release date: August 4
Time travel exists. It’s legal, obscenely expensive, and approved for exactly one destination: London 1941, so that the very rich can stand in the street and watch the Blitz. A documentary filmmaker is on hand to film a tour group’s triumphant return, and instead films them staggering back bloodied, with one woman missing, a woman she recognizes, a woman who had every reason to hate her. (book / audiobook)
Release date: August 4
In 1964, 4 young women at an elite university were tested for precognition, telepathy, psychokinesis, and clairvoyance in a basement lab, until all 4 disappeared and the program was scrubbed from the record. 60 years later, a broke, newly divorced woman takes a caretaking job for an elderly widow, Betty, the last of the 4, who wants to find out what happened to her friends. (book / audiobook)
Release date: August 4
Unnur lives under a fake last name and does not think about the summer that ended with the disappearance of her friend Freyja. When her ex comes back to Iceland with a girlfriend who knows far too much about her, the cold case cracks open, and Unnur has to go back and retrieve a memory she has spent her whole life refusing to have. (book)
Note: I read an advanced copy of this and loved it. I want to read more from this author ASAP.
Release date: August 4
A year ago, Lotte’s husband walked the Camino de Santiago and killed himself somewhere along it. This made no sense to anyone who knew him, so she sets out to walk his exact route. Along the way, she starts noticing someone is following her… (book / audiobook)
Release date: August 25
A clan of Neanderthals has been resurrected from scraps of ancient DNA and released onto a nature reserve to live as they once did. What they don’t know is that they are the cast of a hit reality show.
If you read my June 2026 Reading Wrap Up, you’ll already know I fell in love with this book. It brings so much more than the description hints at, and it was a 5-star read for me! (book / audiobook)
Release date: August 4
There’s a shopfront in Sydney that smells like coffee and sells trips to the past. You can visit any moment you want with no consequences and no butterfly effect. A single mother takes a job behind the counter, and her path converges with a man who books a trip to figure out where his marriage went. (book / audiobook)
Release date: August 4
When her husband dies, Katherine Fuller inherits an unfathomable fortune inside the Decurion Empire, a fascist galaxy-spanning regime where every day is endured rather than lived. She could buy a virgin world and build something fairer, which is exactly the kind of idea the state cannot allow… (book / audiobook)
Release date: August 4
Maeve Ryan was the strongest witch of her generation until she botched a spell. Her best friend’s research into what went wrong keeps pointing at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the $500 million in art that walked out of it in 1990 and never came back. (book / audiobook)
Note: I read the ARC and didn’t love this. But I think a lot of people will find the merging of art and witch lit interesting, so I’m keeping it on the list!
Release date: August 25
In 1926, 5 women vanished overnight from an island commune of spiritualists on a remote Vermont lake. A century later, a struggling actress arrives on that same island to film a movie about the disappearances, and they begin again. (book / audiobook)
Release date: August 4
1919: an isolated Vermont town still reeling from a mysterious sickness is hit by a new illness that starts in the horses and spreads to people. Patient zero appears to be the knackerman, the recluse who collects dead animals. 2016: two siblings dig into what really killed their mother and encounter the locals’ strange customs. (book / audiobook)
Release date: August 11
Claire’s fiancé Elias dies unexpectedly, and his estranged, obscenely wealthy family invites her to a 3-day wake at Harrow Point, the family home on a private island. She goes, and everything is fine until she notices that the house is built downward, that the living quarters sit below the waterline, and that nothing is quite what it seems. This is Whitten’s first horror novel after building a name in fantasy, which I’m hoping translates to a fantastically atmospheric read. (book / audiobook)
Release date: August 11
Morwenna finally goes to see her aunt, who has been wasting away alone in the family’s crumbling chateau on the French coast since her husband disappeared, a disappearance the locals have never stopped blaming her for. She brings her children and her new partner for a week, and the house begins to work on all of them. (book)
Release date: August 18
Actress Claire Davis, who has spent her whole life performing, falls for Reed Hart, the charismatic frontman of a fading band who is addicted to more than fame. She waits, she hopes, and tries to save him. When he finally gets help, though, it turns out to be her wake-up call. (book)
Release date: August 2
Katie is fresh out of college, broke, not speaking to her mother, months behind on rent, and perfectly content to let her wealthy boyfriend James make every decision for her. Then James takes her to his family’s seaside house and brings along Silver, his childhood cat, and Katie’s fascination with the life Silver has starts pulling her own life apart. (book / audiobook)
Release date: August 4
It’s 1985, and 13-year-old Clementine is living at a riverside campground, hungry, pregnant, and eating fried snake for supper. All the while, her charismatic alcoholic father peddles sermons by the water and promises a miracle is coming. (book)
Note: There is a lot of sensitive content in this book.
Release date: August 18
M is a film star who has been recognizable since childhood. When a writer tells M she has been thinking of writing her autobiography, M likes the idea. What follows is a season of close observation of her privileged life.
Now, the gossip. A July column in UnHerd argued that M is a lightly disguised Natalie Portman, right down to the closing pages, where M’s unhappiness with the finished book is said to be true to life. None of this is confirmed, and none of the parties involved have commented at the time I’m writing this. But it only adds to my desire to read this book! (book / audiobook)
Note: If you’re in our subscriber chat, you know I’ve already been talking about this book!
Release date: August 25
The book I’m most excited about reading this month is The Unknown by Riley Sager. I had my notifications off and missed the Libby notification, so I’m like 40th in line. While I wait, I’ll be reading Life of M, for sure! It’s going to be part of the Summer Book Flights post, so keep your eye out for that later in August!
Now I want to hear from you! Which August new releases are you most excited about, or are you going to focus on clearing your TBR this month?
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