Take a look at our really helpful reads for the month of September …
This month’s alternatives discover love, legacy, and identification with highly effective resonance. Bolu Babalola returns with Candy Warmth, a scorching second-chance romance filled with wit, heartbreak, and wedding ceremony drama. Nikki Giovanni presents a remaining reward to readers with The New Ebook, a daring and lyrical mix of poems, letters, and reflections that confront injustice whereas celebrating life’s quieter joys. And Malik Al Nasir’s Looking for My Slave Roots takes us on a deeply private journey by colonial historical past, household heritage, and the untold legacies of the transatlantic slave commerce.
Candy Warmth by Bolu Babalola
Twenty-eight-year-old Kiki Banjo hosts the favored podcast The HeartBeat, fixing romantic conundrums and doling out life recommendation. However behind the mic, profession setbacks and a devastating breakup have left her hanging on by a thread. As she’s getting ready to be the Maid of Honor in her greatest good friend’s wedding ceremony, every part begins to unravel, and Kiki is left questioning if she ever had the solutions.
Then Kiki finds herself face-to-face with the Finest Man, her ex-boyfriend, Malakai—the smooth-talking, absurdly good-looking, annoyingly perceptive man who stole her coronary heart after which shattered it. Whereas Kiki’s approaching all-time low, Malakai’s been on the rise as a filmmaker, and now they haven’t any alternative however to play good till the marriage is over. Each are hell-bent on ignoring the smoldering chemistry between them, however as they navigate the chaos of wedding ceremony plans, profession ambitions, and Kiki’s rising fears in regards to the future, they will’t ignore the spark that’s solely getting hotter.
They only must get by the summer season. So why does it really feel like enjoying with hearth?
“Candy Warmth is a reminder that Bolu Babalola understands the trivialities of not solely romantic relationships, but in addition the complexities of human behaviour in each lovely, unusual and typically painful circumstance. With each a lightness of contact and a depth of feeling, Candy Warmth is in regards to the love that retains searching for you irrespective of the associated fee, and with Babalola’s signature humour, a narrative you’ll need to learn again and again.” — Ore Agbaje-Williams
“Epic! A basic within the making. Bolu delivered—and with additional spice! Followers of Honey & Spice will Eat. This. Up.” — Lizzie Damilola Blackburn
“Perfection briefly story type, I’m in love with each single phrase Bolu Babalola has written. So hardly ever is love expressed this richly, this vividly, or this artfully.” — Candice Carty-Williams, worldwide bestselling creator of Queenie
“Oh however Bolu Babalola is intelligent…she finds the right new twist for each story that you just assume you realize. Her assortment of reimagined fairytales and basic tales is a real delight.” — Dorothy Koomson, worldwide bestselling creator
Publication date: 2nd September 2025
Imprint: Hachette
The New Ebook: Poems, Letters, Blurbs, and Issues by Nikki Giovanni
Nikki Giovanni’s extraordinary remaining assortment, a landmark of American literature which speaks to the fury and upheaval of our time, in addition to the triumphs and delights of her exceptional inventive life.
For many years, Nikki Giovanni’s poetry has been on the forefront of American tradition. The New Ebook is a towering work of protest in opposition to the divisions of our time, leavened with moments of pleasure and reflection about her indelible legacy, her household historical past, and the small pleasures of her richly lived life.
In The New Ebook, Nikki Giovanni slashes on the ridiculousness of our cultural and political local weather: “We’ve no secrets and techniques/because the world shrunk/and the icebergs melted/and all of the yr books/are digitized./… and we press Like/or No Like/as if it mattered.”
She remembers 2020 and its cataclysmic reckoning with police brutality and white supremacy: “I do perceive that republicans/Are cowards and so are these nazis/Cheering/And people kkk we now name police killing/To not point out father and sons chasing unarmed Black males/and operating their automobiles into crowds/Pretending they’re courageous or one thing/They don’t seem to be solely cowards/And nazis however evil fools/And who go to mattress white/Get up American/And hate themselves for having/To share this earth/They won’t overcome/And we won’t love them.”
But in addition in the identical poem: “However what does 2020 imply to me/An opportunity to study to open oysters/Discuss to my buddies/Compensate for my studying/Inform myself I’m going to mud the home/Lie about it/…Take pleasure in my very own firm to not point out soccer/And keep in mind there can be tomorrow/As a result of there can be/And evil will go and good will come/I’m Black/We’ve seen a lot worse.”
With this assortment, which incorporates transient letters and quick prose from her life in addition to poetry, Giovanni reaffirms her place as a large of literature, a canny truth-teller, an indispensable radical orator, and certainly one of America’s preeminent cultural critics. It’s a e-book to be savored, and shared.
“A becoming and electrifying remaining providing from one of the crucial important American voices.…pulses with emotional and political resonance, capturing the poet’s unflinching voice as she traces private historical past alongside broader struggles for racial justice. Charged with power and perception, these poems mix intimate moments with sweeping commentary. To learn this assortment is to witness a wealthy, defiant, and beneficiant life.” — Library Journal (starred evaluation)
Publication date: 2nd September 2025
Imprint: William Morrow
Looking for My Slave Roots: From Guyana’s Sugar Plantations to Cambridge – A New Historical past of the Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism Hardcover by Malik Al Nasir
Largely set in between Liverpool, Glasgow and Demerara and Berbice, Looking for my Slave Roots is a quest for identification, by the family tree of Malik’s household and of the barbaric transportation and abuse of people, all to feed our insatiable need for the candy stuff.
In Guyana, he discovers ancestors that had been each enslaved folks and outstanding slaveholders. He finds himself a part of a fancy lineage linking slaveholdings to excessive sheriffs, mayors, a British prime minister and bankers, whose firms and social enterprises fashioned main modern-day establishments, a few of whom have but to acknowledge their connections to the slave commerce.
“I believe that in ten years’ time, we’ll look again on the examine of slavery and attempt to keep in mind what it was like earlier than we’d heard of the Sandbach Tinne dynasty. That we’ll battle to think about how we tried to grasp Britain’s involvement in slavery and the slave commerce with out this large dynastic epic on the centre of it.” — David Olusoga
Publication date: twenty eighth August 2025
Writer: William Collins
Sluggish Burn by Oti Mabuse
For dancer Lira, Latin Ballroom is every part. While her desires of fame had been reduce quick aged 19, she’s by no means forgotten the connection she felt dancing with a stranger on the Paris World Championship afterparty 13 years in the past.
Now, together with her youthful sisters pursuing their very own profitable dancing careers, and the accountability of operating the household dance studio falling to her, Lira’s formidable flame is about to flicker out. Till an opportunity encounter sees her secretly auditioning for Sluggish Burn, a brand new dance present about to embark on a 6-week European tour, and coming nose to nose with a blast from her previous that sends her reeling.
Gabriele is the quintessential dangerous boy of the Latin Ballroom scene. Slim of hip, with lengthy, lean muscle tissue that pop, a chiselled jaw, darkish eyes, obscenely lengthy lashes, and a mouth that simply received’t give, it’s no shock when he lands the principal male lead function on Sluggish Burn. However, with just some weeks to go until the tour begins, he nonetheless hasn’t discovered his feminine co-star. All it takes is one audition to set his world on hearth…
“An excellent deal with of a novel full of warmth and glamour. With scorching chemistry, household tensions and a peek on the behind-the-scenes world of dancing, I couldn’t put it down.” Laura Wooden, creator of Below Your Spell
“A blinding romance that swept me off my ft with scorching chemistry and fabulous dance-floor moments. Lira and Gabriele are richly drawn characters who peel again one another’s layers (and garments!) with tenderness and warmth. A flirty, enjoyable learn full of coronary heart.” Lizzie Damilola Blackburn, creator of Yinka, The place is Your Huzband?
Publication date: eleventh September 2025
Writer: Simon & Schuster UK
Homeward Sure by Hamza Yassin
Hamza has at all times cherished the outside. As a toddler who struggled with dyslexia at college, he longed to be on the earth exterior the classroom. Fortunately, on account of a forward-thinking trainer who inspired him to run spherical the sector earlier than a lesson, Hamza embraced his love of nature from an early age.
There he found that his dyslexia allowed him to see the world differently. Homeward Sure tells the story of Hamza’s love of the outside. From his day job filming wildlife to his beloved walks with Midge the canine – he likes to get exterior and expertise the surprise of the pure world.
Be a part of Hamza on a brand new journey as he shares his most valuable moments in nature. From the grasslands of Wiltshire to the Scottish Highlands, Hamza will educate you the way to have a look at nature with contemporary eyes, and to marvel at its magnificence. Full of charming private tales and engaging insights, Hamza is the right information that will help you see nature in new methods.
He reveals us wildlife in all its surprise and shares the right way to pay nearer consideration to the world round us. Residence could also be nearer than you assume.
Publication date: eleventh September 2025
Writer: Octopus Books
The Wilderness By Angela Flournoy
Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are of their early twenties and firstly. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Collectively, they’re discovering their method by the wilderness, that interval of life when the truth of up to date maturity—overwhelming, mysterious, and filled with freedom and penalties—swoops in and stays.
Desiree and Danielle, sisters whose shared historical past has accomplished little to stop their estrangement, nurse bitter household wounds in several methods. January’s received a relationship with a “good” man she feels ambivalent about, even after her shock being pregnant. Monique, a librarian and aspiring blogger, finds sudden on-line fame after calling out the college the place she works for its plans to whitewash fraught historical past. And Nakia is attempting to get her restaurant off the bottom, with out counting on the largesse of her higher middle-class household who surprise aloud if she must be doing one thing higher together with her life.
As these buddies transfer from the late 2000’s into the late 2020’s, from younger adults to grown ladies, they have to determine what they imply to 1 one other—amid political upheaval, financial and environmental instability, and the growing volatility of recent American life.
“The Wilderness arrives like a miracle. Right here is the novel I’m at all times ready for, one which captures and explains and deepens the world round me. These ladies, these buddies — of their grief and loss, their dedication and their communion — are so achingly actual it’s laborious to allow them to go. A e-book of concepts, gorgeously written with clear-sighted imaginative and prescient by one of many wisest, most proficient authors working at this time. Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness is a e-book to get misplaced in.” — Justin Torres, creator of Blackouts
Publication date: sixteenth September 2025
Imprint: Mariner Books
That is Not a Small Voice: Poems by Black Poets, Chosen by Traci N. Todd, illustrated by Jade Orlando
An exquisite, daring and shifting assortment of 100 poems by Black poets for the entire household to treasure. Uncover basic favourites and new stars in a e-book that belongs on each youngster’s bookshelf. This gorgeously-illustrated kids’s anthology makes the right introduction to poets resembling Lucille Clifton, Langston Hughes, Benjamin Zephaniah, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou, Amanda Gorman, Caleb Femi and Joseph Coelho.
It additionally options model new work from celebrated writers resembling Nikki Grimes and Carole Boston Weatherford. Compiled by award-winning image e-book author and editor Traci N. Todd, this assortment touches a variety of themes – hope and battle, pleasure and satisfaction, house and meals, music and household.
Every poem is completely paired with vibrant, heartfelt illustrations from Jade Orlando. This can be a reward e-book to cherish – an excellent tribute to the wealthy literary historical past and shiny way forward for Black writing.
Publication date: eleventh September 2025
Imprint: Nosy Crow
Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite
No man will name your own home his house. And if they struggle, they won’t have peace… So goes the household curse, lengthy handed down from technology to technology, ruining households and breaking hearts.
And now it’s Eniiyi’s flip – who, on account of her uncanny resemblance to her useless aunt, Monife, is already used to her household’s unusual beliefs, in addition to their insistence that she is a reincarnation. Nonetheless, when she falls in love with the good-looking boy she saves from drowning, she will be able to now not run from her household’s historical past. Is she destined to stay out the ordinary story of affection and heartbreak, or can she escape the household curse and the mysterious destiny that befell her aunt?
“A haunting, twisty story of curses and romance.” Ayòbámi Adébáyò
“A sweeping love story… I misplaced myself inside its beautiful pages.” Jennie Godfrey
“Humorous and fearless, soaked in secrets and techniques, spirit, heartbreak, and love… Unattainable to place down.” Abi Daré
Publication date: twenty fifth September 2025
Writer: Atlantic Books
Actually by Lionel Richie
On this intimate, deeply candid memoir, Lionel revisits hilarious and harrowing occasions to encourage all who doubt themselves or really feel their desires don’t matter. Lionel chronicles classes discovered throughout his unlikely story of exceptional success—his dramatic transformation from painfully shy, ‘tragically’ late bloomer to world-class entertainer and composer of affection songs which have performed because the soundtrack of our lives.
Humorous, heat and riveting, Lionel recollects his childhood in Tuskegee, Alabama, the place he grew up on its college campus through the heyday of the Civil Rights motion, raucous adventures as a member of The Commodores, coming-of-age in late Nineteen Sixties Harlem, tradition shock enjoying gigs on the French Riviera, the massive break of being signed to Motown, his meteoric solo profession that included an Olympics efficiency witnessed by two billion across the globe, throughout to writing and recording ‘We Are the World’ and his present multi-generational fame as a decide on American Idol. Even with its turbulence, loss, and near-calamity, Lionel’s journey takes us on a thrill trip and delivers a memoir for the ages—reminding us of the ability of affection to raise our personal lives and our world. Lionel Richie’s memoir contains three eight-page picture inserts.
Publication date: thirtieth September 2025
Imprint: HarperOne