Rachel is a writer from Arkansas, most at home surrounded by forests and animals much like a Disney Princess. She spends most of her time writing stories and playing around in imaginary worlds. You can follow her writing at rachelbrittain.com. Twitter and Instagram: @rachelsbrittain
Appropriately for October, these new fall historical fiction books are full of ghosts, cults, seances, and terrible mysteries. I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of reading I crave this time of year, so all eight of these books have my full attention. Not that a book has to be creepy to be a good fit for fall, but, well, it doesn’t hurt. I prefer my historical fiction a bit on the strange side, anyway.
Capitalists Must Starve by Seolyeon Park, translated by Anton Hur
Release date: October 7, 2025
Capitalists Must Starve tells the fictionalized story of a real-life labor activist who led a strike for workers’ rights in 1930s Pyongyang. The novel, set in Japanese-occupied Korea, follows a woman willing to risk everything to fight for better conditions for working-class women in a world determined not to hear what they have to say. It’s a story that can find comparisons the world over through the struggle for humane working conditions within the unrelenting capitalist machine.
All access members continue below for more of the best new historical fiction out this month
Rachel is a writer from Arkansas, most at home surrounded by forests and animals much like a Disney Princess. She spends most of her time writing stories and playing around in imaginary worlds. You can follow her writing at rachelbrittain.com. Twitter and Instagram: @rachelsbrittain
The High Heaven by Joshua Wheeler
Release date: October 7, 2025
Loosely inspired by a UFO cult in New Mexico, The High Heaven follows a child named Izzy, taken in by a rancher when the doomsday cult she was raised in collapses on the night of the Apollo I disaster. Space Age milestones continue to align with her life in surprising ways as she grows from childhood into adolescence and adulthood until she winds up in New Orleans counseling people who have lost the ability to see the moon.
The Hong Kong Widow by Kristen Loesch
Release date: October 7, 2025
A massacre that the police say never took place. A woman haunted by the past. In 1950s Hong Kong, a young Chinese refugee still trying to put her past behind her is recruited into a strange seance competition in a notoriously haunted house. She’s not the only one. Six mediums are invited to take part in six seances over six nights. But on the last night, police are called in to handle the aftermath of a brutal massacre—one they find absolutely no proof of.
Mothers by Brenda Lozano, translated by Heather Cleary
Release date: October 7, 2025
Two women in 1940s Mexico City, one an upper-class mother of five children, the other a working-class woman struggling through horrific fertility treatments to try to get pregnant, are forever linked when a kidnapping rocks the capital. For one, whose daughter has just been kidnapped, it’s a tragedy; for the other, who finally gets to be a mother, it’s a terrible blessing. Just how far will these mothers go in the name of protecting their children?
The Salvage by Anbara Salam
Release date: October 7, 2025
When marine archeologist Marta Khoury is called to a remote Scottish isle to explore a recently uncovered Victorian shipwreck, she expects salvage to be the most interesting thing she finds. Instead, she’s snowed in as the Cuban Missile Crisis rages halfway across the globe and becomes convinced a shadowy figure stalks her every step, even as she searches for the ship’s artefacts, which have, mysteriously, disappeared.
The Missing Pages by Alyson Richman
Release date: October 14, 2025
When books begin falling off the shelves of the Harry Widener Memorial Library at Harvard, built in honor of a voracious reader and book collector lost aboard the Titanic, sophomore Violet Hutchins, still reeling from her own tragic loss, suspects a ghost is haunting her. The ghost of Harry Widener, to be specific. But is this just a random haunting, or is the dead man trying to tell his story?
Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen
Release date: October 21, 2025
In this autobiographical fiction novel (sometimes referred to as “autofiction”), author Gish Jen explores her mother’s experiences being raised in a wealthy Shanghai family in the 1920s before leaving for a PhD in the United States on the eve of the Communist Revolution in China. But despite her mother’s own experiences being seen—and referred to—as a “bad bad girl” by her parents, Aggie soon begins saying the same about her own strong-willed daughter. It’s a portrait of double standards, intergenerational trauma, and generations of headstrong women tangled together by love, misunderstandings, and DNA.
Sonora by Jenni L Walsh
Release date: October 28, 2025
Based on the life of one of the first female horse divers who took the carnival scene by storm, Sonora captures the essence of a quintessential time in America, when the Great Depression laid almost everyone low, but daring women like Sonora still dared to carve out a place for themselves. Tireless work and determination propel her to the top, but when an accident threatens to end her career, she’ll have to decide whether the risk she takes every time she dives is still worth it.
It may be fall, but these historical fiction new releases from summer never go out of style:
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