6 of the Best New Book Releases Out August 11, 2026

The bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife comes a novel of three lives, all involved in one ghost town. Most recently (in 2024), there’s Nina, whose boyfriend crashed her small-engine plane in the Wyoming mountains. He’s missing, and as she searches for him, she finds a seemingly abandoned Old West town called Sunrise. Then there’s Coll in 2003, who is finishing up Sunrise’s annual historical reenactment when an author’s questions threaten his entire worldview. Finally, 1902 sees legendary gunslinger Anton Vargas return to the town to help find a missing boy, but what he really knows about the disappeared boy and why he has returned at just this time are the real questions. The three people may be strangers to each other and separated by time, but their connection to the town—and its secrets–connects them over a century. —Erica Ezeifedi

Bestselling author Olivie Blake’s latest features an L.A. that is currently experiencing a “summer of exsanguination.” Or at least, that’s what the news is calling it. Someone is murdering girls, and an odd energy is blowing in from Santa Ana. Even with all that going on, Anya Morris is just trying to focus on an acting career that seems to grow more and more unlikely. But then she catches a break: she gets invited to work for the de Witts, a Hollywood film dynasty. It’s in their Hollywood Hills villa that she meets Jude, who keeps to himself, even though he is next in line to be the head of the family. Anya is naturally drawn to him, despite there clearly being something really wrong with him…there’s also the matter of the family’s occult curse and bloodstained villa. Question is: will she make it out alive, or make a deal with the devil? —Erica Ezeifedi

This thrilling fantasy takes readers all the way back to just before Y2K in 1999, when the world wondered if the changing of the calendar would cause the computers to crash. Zahara is a young woman navigating the anticipation as she searches for her missing twin sister…who only she believes ever existed. —Liberty Hardy

If you’ve ever longed to read a haunting ghost story from the perspective of the ghost, this is the novel for you. Delilah was a 19-year-old dancer in Wisconsin. Now she’s a ghost with no memory of how she got murdered. Delilah will not be able to pass on until she receives justice, but the longer she remains, the more she risks becoming a soulless poltergeist. She has until Halloween night to identify the man who killed her. She teams up with a spirit medium and a mysterious stranger who somehow can see her. Together, the three seek to restore balance by killing the man who murdered Delilah. —Emily Martin

Sometimes you need a book all about the depraved and obscene art that you just can’t look away from while visiting a museum. What was the artist trying to convey? How did this piece of art come to be? Philosopher Daisy Dixon is here to answer all of those questions and more with this deep dive into the strangest works of art around. She also examines what exactly makes a piece of art depraved, including which societal beliefs have determined those qualities make a piece of art seem so dangerous. —Kendra Winchester

In what world…is the question two high school rivals who reunite in their thirties ask themselves, when they are thrown through a series of alternate universes trying to find a beloved drama teacher who has gone missing. In what world would we be friends? Lovers? Something else? As they hop through realities and see just what they could have been, the hunt for their missing teacher takes them further and further away from their own lives. They can’t go back until they finish their mission, but what will life look like for them when that finally happens? —Jessica Pryde