September New Releases 2026

When I think of my hell days, I think of crime scenes. Familiar sites, made uncanny with violence.

In the fluorescent tedium of a call centre in 2018, acclaimed novelist Laura Elizabeth Woollett finds herself meticulously plotting her own death. Until her period arrives, and equilibrium with it. After years of dismissing these monthly turns, she’s diagnosed with premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). Then, at 33, she falls pregnant and experiences a reprieve — but will it last?

Through case studies, interviews, extensive medical research, and forays into history, true crime, and algorithmic rabbit-holes, Woollett looks beyond herself to assemble a chorus of PMDD sufferers, along with dedicated scientists and clinicians. Navigating the impossible terrain between a potentially fatal disorder and treatments that can be almost as dangerous, Hell Days is a testament to the precarity and dignity of life as a periodically suicidal person in an often-brutal world.

i had been a male model since i moved to london and initially i was making lots of money and then suddenly i wasn’t making any.

Xander is ageing out. A former high school jock turned model, he’s spent a decade in London riding a carousel of validation and success. Now the ride is slowing down.

When his much-more-successful actor girlfriend, Tessa K, buys him a plane ticket home to New Zealand for the first time in ten years, Xander returns as a stranger. The family farm is for sale. His mother is overbearing. His high school ex wants to reconnect. And his life is unravelling. 

Then he meets someone younger, someone vibrant and unburdened, who makes him fall back in love with the small town he fled. But is she the cure for his problems or just another symptom of how empty his life has become?

In the long cloud, newcomer Hector MacKenzie captures the anxious rhythm of life in the 20s — a tender, often funny meditation on masculinity, beauty, and mortality that proves you might be able to go home, but you can never truly go back.

A report from behind the front lines of the war over the world’s most important technology.

A new Cold War is being fought for control over the world’s most powerful technology — semiconductors, the tiny chips that power everything from iPhones to AI supercomputers to military drones. At the heart of this war is ASML, a long-obscure Dutch firm that has become Europe’s most valuable technology company by building the only machines on Earth capable of manufacturing the world’s most advanced semiconductor chips.

The US is fighting relentlessly to keep these machines out of Chinese hands. US-led export controls have cut China off from the technology, and despite investing billions of dollars and espionage, it has yet to build a viable alternative. Which raises an unsettling question: if China cannot buy them or build them, could it one day decide to take them?

Taiwan, an island of 23 million people that Beijing claims as its own, is the beating heart of the global semiconductor industry and home to many of these irreplaceable machines. As tensions in the Taiwan Strait continue to rise, the US, Taiwan, ASML, TSMC, and their allies are preparing for a confrontation that could trigger a major war, upend the world economy, and mark a tectonic shift in the global balance of power.

The Machine and the Microchip takes readers behind the scenes of this extraordinary struggle, from the White House and prime ministers’ offices to sealed cleanrooms, private dinners, and tense negotiations across three continents. Whoever wins may well control the future.

A deeply reported journey into the scarred landscapes of global extraction.

Humanity has remade the Earth with astonishing speed. In the last fifty years alone we have taken more out of the planet than in all prior history combined. Across every continent lie the immense wounds left behind by extraction: the mines, quarries, poisoned rivers and hollowed-out towns that now form the true map of our civilisation and our age.

Everything we touch — rock, metal, sand, water, even thought itself — feeds the reckless dream pursuit of limitless economic growth. Born into a family and landscape steeped in fossil fuels, James Crawford travels through the living ruins of extraction and meets the people living within its extremes: exploring the radioactive fertiliser-ziggurats of Florida’s Bone Valley, the lithium flats of the Atacama, Greenland’s collapsing melt-edge, the desertified shores of Spain’s Sea of Plastic, and the resource-hungry cloud centres birthing new artificial intelligences, to expose the true cost of this hollowed-out dream.

Yet within these same landscapes lie radical alternatives. Hope emerges in the communities waging legal battles to leave oil untouched beneath the rainforests of Ecuador and the wildfire-stricken plains of Montana; technologists attempting to reverse extraction on Iceland’s tundra; and architects raising wooden skyscrapers amid Scandinavia’s felled forests — finding the path to repair for a world pushed to the brink.

Incisive, immersive and visionary, The Vanishing Earth exposes the ideological forces that have shaped the planet and charts the essential pathways that could yet save it.