October New Releases 2025

‘Searing politics by storytelling.’ Siri Husvedt
‘A writer whose antennae are attuned to subtle connections and strange cross-currents.’ Colm Tóibín
‘This is Chris Kraus’s masterpiece.’ Constance Debré

An unforgettable new novel from the author of the modern classic I Love Dick — a witty, probing journey into a fractured America, culminating in the investigation of a teenage murder.

On the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, at the end of the last decade, three teenagers shot and killed an older acquaintance after spending the day with him. In a cold, rundown town, the three young people were quickly arrested and imprisoned. No one knows why they did it.

At the time of the murder, Catt Greene and her husband, Paul Garcia, are living nearby in a house they’d bought years earlier as a summer escape from Los Angeles. Undergoing a period of personal turmoil, moving between LA and Minnesota — between the urban art world and the rural poverty of the icy Iron Range — Catt turns away from her own life and towards the murder case, which soon becomes an obsession. In her attempt to pierce through the mystery surrounding the murder and to understand the teenagers’ lives, Catt also finds herself travelling back through the idiosyncratic, aspirational lives of her parents in the working-class Bronx and small-town, blue-collar Milford, Connecticut.

Written in three linked parts, The Four Spent the Day Together explores the histories of three generations of American lives and the patterns that repeat over lifetimes, and is piercing commentary on the pressures of lives lived on the edge.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 URSULA K. LE GUIN PRIZE
A FINALIST FOR THE LOCUS AWARD FOR BEST TRANSLATED NOVEL

Equal parts bone-chilling, wryly funny, and deeply political, The Midnight Timetable is a masterful work of literary horror from one of our time’s greatest imaginations.

In a labyrinthine research facility, where those who open the wrong door might find it’s disappeared behind them or that the echoing footsteps they’re running from are their own, an unnamed protagonist begins their night shift under the watchful eye of the building’s enigmatic senior guard.

Each evening, as the fluorescent lights hum and the silence grows heavier, the guard shares another tale of cursed objects and lives unspooled by vengeance, sorrow, or revelation. But these are not mere ghost stories. They’re warnings. Lessons. Or, perhaps, confessions ...

As the nights stretch on and reality frays, our protagonist starts to suspect that the building itself is alive with malevolent intent and that the objects they guard aren’t just cursed.

They’re waiting. Watching.

The story of the most audacious serial heist in the history of Australia’s museums — and the British gentleman adventurer who pulled it off and got away with it — in a scientific true crime caper stretching around the globe.

In January 1947, a chance discovery rocked the world of natural science: over 3,000 rare and precious specimens of butterflies had vanished from Australia’s most prestigious museums in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide. Alarmingly, the missing insects included many priceless ‘holotypes’ — the first specimen of a given species to be identified, against which all others are compared.

On the other side of the world, New Scotland Yard descended on a country house in Surrey, where they found a trove of over 40,000 butterfly specimens. The culprit was Colin Wyatt, a Cambridge-educated ski champion, mountaineer, wartime camouflager, artist, and amateur naturalist whose high-flying exploits cut a path from the Alps of Europe to a London court room to a final expedition to the jungles of Guatemala.

Drawing on unpublished case files, dossiers, and private archives, The Butterfly Thief pieces together Wyatt’s enigmatic life story and his decades-long impact on the world of natural history. Along the way, award-winning journalist Walter Marsh reveals a deeper history of gentleman explorers, scoundrels, and grave-robbers that begs an uncomfortable but vital question: What if Western museums were crime scenes all along?

How key concepts in modern physics came from the work of a New Zealander whom Einstein labelled ‘a second Newton’.

By the mid-nineteenth century, physicists believed they had discovered the last secrets of the universe. Then a new world opened up: one of waves, particles, and new, fundamental forces. This mysterious world swiftly captured the public imagination, not least because of the technical revolution that emerged from it, giving the world everything from radio to TV, X-ray machines, smoke detectors, and more.

One of the key movers of this new world was Ernest Rutherford, a no-nonsense New Zealander who became as popularly known as the ‘father of the atom’ in recognition of his pioneering role in particle physics. But he was far more than that. Through his roles at Manchester University and then the Cavendish Laboratory in England, he steered a new generation of highly influential physicists such as Niels Bohr, helping to shape much of the way we understand physics today.

This book explores the discovery of that science, using Rutherford’s life as a vehicle to steer the journey. It explains just why this science seized the public imagination of the day, and why Rutherford’s contribution was integral not just to the technical revolution of the twentieth century, but to the way we now understand the nature of the universe. And it explains how that science works, in terms clear to the widest readership.