Editors Select: October 2026

Ghosts never stay buried

I've always been fascinated with how Louise Penny keeps the Three Pines series fresh and entertaining time after time. After getting a glimpse of Miss Wolcott's Ghost, I'm convinced this might be the most ambitious Chief Inspector Gamache novel yet. A body dressed in century-old clothing, lying atop a nameless grave dated 1914. A forgotten maritime disaster lurking beneath the surface. And threading through it all, a mysterious, possibly extinct plant growing through the body that could be humanity's salvation, or its undoing. Penny brilliantly weaves together past and present, turning Three Pines into a place that feels genuinely haunted. What excites me most is Clara Morrow stepping into the fire after 20 books, and the return of a disgraced protégé, forcing Gamache into an uneasy alliance. With Alfred Molina (who also starred in the Three Pines TV series) narrating, this is fall’s must-listen.

Possession horror à la Stephen Graham Jones

My head is still spinning from this book, though in terms of The Exorcist, think the third movie, not the first! Also key: the 1988 film War Party, Standing Rock, superglue, and a 1980s Sundancer RV. A loose sequel to The Only Good Indians, which you don’t need to have listened to (or in my case, more than fuzzily recall), Off the Reservation follows four Blackfeet Indians on a spooky mission to bring home a 9-year-old boy’s bones from the infamous Carlisle School in Pennsylvania. As always, I’m amazed by how much SGJ can DO in a novel: craft a deeply character-driven story made for a talented multicast, led by TOGI’s Shaun Taylor-Corbett; write prose and ideas that sing and sting; and deliver a fresh take on possession horror that scared the daylights out of me. The second-person chapters are some of the most frightening I’ve heard, while the story’s emotional and historical weight knocked me flat. Every detail matters by the end, and for any lingering questions, the author’s self-narrated acknowledgments are the exquisite nail in the coffin.

The best type of book club book

Since the age of seven, all Batter Gray has ever wanted to do is discover poetry. Not to write it. Just read it. This does not a career make, he’s told repeatedly by his off-kilter parents (his mother’s obsession with typefaces is a charming throughline), his exasperated college counselor, and his slick and ambitious college roommate, Paul. Yet Batter persists. And in a scene that recalls Dorothy arriving in Oz, this dreamer finds himself at the glowing doorstep of the poetry magazine Peck & Peck on a magical snowy night. It’s a moment that will make word-and-type nerds giddy for the story that follows. Lovingly narrated by Seth Numrich, Peck & Peck is a vivid, whimsical, and melancholic fairy tale of a creative coming of age.

Is this her best one yet?

My adoration for Ali Hazelwood runs deep—I've listened to and loved everything she's written since The Love Hypothesis. So, it feels extreme even to my own ears to say, but I think this one is actually my favorite. As is classic for Ali, there is a lot of pining from a distance in Bad in Bed, but it also has such amazing, witty banter I was LOLing my way through the slow burn. You can always count on Ali Hazelwood to deliver a robust cast of well-developed and extremely loveable side characters, which is part of what makes this book so great. Not only do we have Teddy Hamilton (the GOAT) as Max, and Brooke Bloomingdale as Billie, for the first time ever we have a full multicast. You'll feel totally immersed in the quirky friend group. I can already tell this is going to be one of my comfort listens for a long time to come!

An ode to horror’s Haitian roots

As the daughter of Haitian immigrants, I’m always eager to devour stories that highlight our Caribbean culture in any way possible. Marie Arnold’s paranormal tale spotlighting the origins of the zombie genre in Haiti is exactly the kind of fare that sates me. They Will Not Save Us follows Lena, a brave young heroine descended from a line of Voodoo priestesses called Mambos, as she fights to save her village from the supernatural order. Framed in Lena’s battle to save her friends and family, the story explores the complexity of spirituality and mysticism in Haiti, while not shying away from the real-life horrors of slavery, loss, and colonization in a haunting, bone-chilling way. A perfect spooky listen as fall settles in.

Portrait of an artist overtaken by a love affair

I was shamefully late to the Barbara Kingsolver party, having only first cracked open one of her books with 2022’s Demon Copperhead—a novel I haven’t stopped recommending to people since. I love when I fall for an author with a big backlist to swim around in, and a versatile one at that. But her latest is particularly alluring: Partita’s protagonist, Livia Bohusz, echoes Kingsolver’s own biography in some ways—a young woman from Appalachia who goes to college in Indiana on a piano scholarship while navigating a difficult relationship with her mother. The writing pulses with musical imagery as desire and regret overtake Livia’s life, her ambitions turned upside down by an all-consuming love affair. Decades later, she’s still picking through the wreckage. The writing feels effortlessly lyrical, the characters are relatable and complex, and the themes are knotty and important: all reliable features of a Kingsolver novel, I’m learning. And Megan Tusing inhabits it all in the flow of her soulful narration.

A sequel 23 years in the making

I was in high school when The Time Traveler’s Wife came out, and I still viscerally remember all the ways it broke my teenage heart. Some people don’t drive behind log trucks because of Final Destination 2 (also a 2003 throwback); I don’t do it because of Audrey Niffenegger (iykyk). I yearned for normalcy for the book’s protagonists, Clare and Henry, almost as if I were them, and the pinnacle of that normalcy was the birth of their daughter, Alba. In Life Out of Order, we get Alba’s story, in which she navigates the same abnormality that allows for involuntary time travel as her father. Infused with dystopian elements and performed by a full cast, this sequel has me eager to get lost in time once more (and ugly cry, to be sure).

Nothing but good words here

I have too many good words to say about how amazing Bad Words was, but I’ll start with just how much fun I had listening to it. An author falling for the critic whose review helped tank his debut is already my kind of bookish chaos, but Ríoghnach Robinson gives Selina and Parker so much more to work through than one very bad review. Their banter made me laugh, their vulnerability caught me off guard, and I loved watching everything I thought I knew about these two shift as they got to know each other beyond the noise online. Katharine Chin and Major Curda only made me fall harder for them, and that audio-exclusive bonus scene was the perfect cherry on top.

An emotionally gripping tale of redemption

What, if anything, do we owe the people who hurt us? What ultimately defines us in this life, and how, if at all, can we truly forgive others—and ourselves? The sweeping plot of this novel, which centers on the loss of a great and true love, serves as the backdrop for the interrogation of existential questions such as these, which are pulled apart and then skillfully put back together again. Within the confines of this poignant novel, the reader is free to explore their own complex humanity by way of the deeply flawed characters who refuse easy answers and who instead expose the beauty in the breadth of our nuanced lives.

An AI history lesson for the skeptics and the optimists

Depending on who you listen to, AI could be saving or dooming us, but one thing is for sure: It’s quickly being woven into many everyday experiences, and there are more questions than answers. As a longtime consumer of former New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose’s podcasts (Hard Fork and Rabbit Hole), The AGI Chronicles is a must-listen for me, or anyone who is even tangentially invested in staying informed on Big Tech’s biggest opus, artificial superintelligence. Roose’s narration makes the dense history of this technological arms race digestible and at turns entertaining. He recounts having his marriage in the crosshairs of Bing’s AI chatbot Sydney, which tried to convince him to leave his wife, a funny incident until you ponder what would happen if it was a more sophisticated bot with the capability to generate fake evidence of infidelity. Roose balances the utopian claims, fury, fear, excitement, and utter confusion endemic to the proliferation of this technology with clear-eyed precision, genuine curiosity, and healthy skepticism, making it human-centered and anything but artificial.

Don’t sit too close

I’m both a television history and horror buff, so it feels like Jane Schoenbrun wrote this book just for me. It’s for all of us misfits who ever stayed up late enough to watch a channel turn to static, gobbled up urban legends like Halloween candy, or perused the creepypasta corners of the early internet. Not to mention anyone who enjoyed Schoenbrun’s horror films, to which this novel feels like something of a spiritual cousin, reckoning with similar themes of distorted reality, obsession, media, and identity. Gripping, at times wickedly funny, nostalgic, profound, and creepy as hell, Public Access Afterworld cements Schoenbrun as a multihyphenate talent with a vast, eerie pantheon inside their brain: one I can’t wait to experience more of, including the personal touch they will surely bring to the audiobook’s narration.

For recovering people pleasers

I recently came across an anonymous post that said, "So, you're a people pleaser? Name three people who are pleased with you." Ouch. Surely the people around me appreciate my efforts, right? Still, I have to admit that putting myself last has started to take a toll. So, on my journey to heal from the punishments of my good deeds, I'm starting with Vex King's You Can't Please Everyone, the long-awaited follow-up to his bestseller Good Vibes, Good Life. In his latest listen, King explores why people pleasing often begins where self-love has been forgotten, and offers practical tools for rebuilding self-trust, setting healthier boundaries, and quieting overthinking. This one will be replaying in my head the next time I feel compelled to “solve” someone else's problems.

Are you captivated or held captive?

As someone who learned to swim late in life, I’ve always had a healthy fear of what lurks in the deep sea, and the idea of falling in love with an eldritch sea god is both terrifying and endlessly intriguing. There is a desperation and suffocating sadness within CG Drews’s latest offering, Scorpion Deep, filled with characters who are not likable but deeply interesting— which is almost always more exciting. The solo narration work of Mark Sanderlin aids in the isolation that clings to our main character, who's haunted by a hunger for love, belonging, and the desire to be wanted that might be exactly what ends it all for him. It’ll be hard for anyone to surface from the depths of this one when they’re done listening.

Get thee to a queer horror story

I'm one of those Shakespeare aficionados who happily devours any spin on the folio—particularly creative adaptations of everyone's favorite sad son/nephew, Hamlet. That's why I am thrilled that fantasy author Kat Dunn decided to make bardolaters' spooky season even darker and gayer with a queer historical fiction twist on the Dane, Rottenheart. Perdita Weeks—who narrated Dunn's earlier historical horror, Hungerstone, as well as Audible perennial favorite Circe by Madeline Miller—brings Odette and Cecilia's forbidden love to life as revenge and tragedy stalk their Victorian manors. Alas, since brevity's the soul of wit and all that, I'll just say: You had me at "sapphic gothic horror inspired by Hamlet," Kat.

Another satisfying puzzle from Claire North

I am a huge fan of time travel narratives; I just love the way the plots twist over and around themselves only to tie you up in a knot and then sneak up behind you and tap you on the shoulder. "Surprise! Here’s something you absolutely didn't see coming." I think this may be the first novel where Claire North has delved into time travel, though The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August was very adjacent. As she did in that bestseller, she has such a way of enhancing a cosmic puzzle with irreverent humor. In her narratives, seismic quantum events are ridiculous and bothersome in the same way as wearing mismatched shoes. A nuisance that needs to be corrected, but the stakes are literally infinite in size. She makes the hard-to-understand understandable and emotionally resonant through how very human, flawed, and ultimately loveable her characters are. Peter Kenny—her go-to narrator—is once again equally quick on the draw with the witticisms and the heart-wrenching moments.

Prythian, we are SO back

After years of waiting, theorizing, and wondering what Sarah J. Maas had in store for us next, A Court of Splintered Harmony is finally here, and apparently SJM wants us stressed. Koschei the Deathless is stirring, old alliances are splintering, and the Night Court has some serious issues of its own to work through before anyone can start saving Prythian. I can't tell you if I'm most looking forward to the romance, the danger, the betrayals, or to finally getting answers to some VERY long-standing questions. Honestly, I’m ready for all of it. And with Elizabeth Evans back behind the mic? Headphones on. It’s go time!