August is a month when publishers release some of their flagship autumn titles, hoping to get ahead of the September-October crush and optimise their chances of attention. This August we can expect new novels from Rachel Cusk, Meg Mason, Irvine Welsh, Bella Mackie, Freida McFadden and Liane Moriarty, with a hotly anticipated sequel to Big Little Lies. Alas, I have not yet actually clapped eyes on most of these heavyweights, as the final flourishes are still being applied, so I can spill no beans.

I have read and enjoyed Mason’s novel, Sophie, Standing There (Bloomsbury), which is set around a literary festival, but I thought I would take the opportunity this month to highlight some interesting translated titles and a particularly strong month for historical fiction.

Appropriately, given the state of our world, historical novels are engaging with the ravages of conflict and displacement: Kevin Powers’ Children of the Wild (Atlantic), Bora Lee Reed’s Song for Another Home (Serpent’s Tail), Gaël Faye’s prize-winning Jacaranda (Chatto) and Paul Yoon’s Etna (Scribner). Two books centre on witch trials – Cathryn Kemp’s They Can’t Burn Us All (Bantam) and Mairi Kidd’s Newes of Witches (Black & White Publishing). Both feminist retellings unfold in small, isolated communities where fear destroys from within. This connects to a broader pattern of historical fiction recovering silenced women’s stories, such as Julianne Edwards’ Odette Rising (W&N), Jennifer Lindsay’s The Editor (Monsoon) and Louisa Treger’s A Fatal Love (Bloomsbury).

Identifying as both historical wartime fiction and translated fiction, Philippe Collin’s The Barman of the Ritz (Doubleday), about a celebrated Jewish bartender working at the Ritz Paris during the Nazi occupation, is another one for your radar; and in other translations, Dahlia de la Cerda’s Medea Sang Me a Corrido (Scribe) and Ana Paula Maia’s Bury Your Dead (Charco Press) sound brilliant.

The horror market is still flourishing, with authors such as Jake Arnott and Natasha Pulley crossing over from other genres and an array of intriguing offerings including RA Marno’s What the Fog Conceals (Salt Publishing) and Chuck Tingle’s supernatural queer chiller Fabulous Bodies (Titan). Folk horror remains popular, with CN Vair’s Fawn (Bantam), Arnott’s Netherwood (Titan) and Pulley’s genre-bending The Salt King (Gollancz), which I was sad not to get my mitts on in time. Meanwhile, Max Doty’s The House That Eats the Dead (Tor Nightfire) continues a literary obsession with the home, a theme we see explored very differently in Sussie Anie’s In Meadowlight (Phoenix), about a house-sitter, and Natalie Sue’s You’ll Love It Here (Borough Press).

This month also speaks to the growing importance of literary archaeology, with rediscovered or retranslated gems including Ruth Rehmann’s Illusions (Faber), Colette’s The Pure and the Impure (WW Norton), Jonathan Trigell’s Boy A (Serpent’s Tail), which has been reissued with a new introduction by Colin Walsh, and René Goscinny’s The Golden Menhir, a 1967 Asterix being published in English for the first time.

Romantasy continues to thrive, with highlights such as Carissa Broadbent’s The Lion and the Deathless Dark (Tor Bramble), Katherine Quinn’s The Golden Huntress (Mayhem Books) and Taylor J LaRue’s mega-debut, Steelborn (Wayward TxF), In romance, the Formula One subgenre is revving up, with Simone Soltani’s Crash Into You (Pan) and JK MacLaren’s Full Throttle (Penguin) keeping the petrolheads panting.

If the pace of modern life is getting too much, retreat into cosiness with fantasy titles such as J Penner’s A Fellowship of Curses & Cats (Poisoned Pen Press) and Sylvie Cathrall’s The Art of Charming a Changeling (Orbit); and commercial titles including Takuya Asakura’s Every Bookshop Needs a Cat (HarperFiction) and Giddens Ko’s Taiwanese modern classic Café. Waiting. Love. (Wildfire). Put the kettle on, grab a willing cat and approach your TBR pile not like an epic fantasy quest but like a manageable hillock, surmountable with the correct alchemy of community, optimism and baked goods.

August 2026: Fiction Previews