New Vintage books this week

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The latest fiction, non-fiction, paperbacks and classics

Looking for your next great read? Every week, Vintage publishes new books that inform, entertain and spark conversation, from award-winning fiction and thought-provoking nonfiction to beautifully produced classics.

This regularly updated guide brings together the latest releases from across the Vintage list, helping you discover standout new books from established authors and exciting emerging voices. Whether you’re searching for literary fiction, memoir, history, science, politics or culture, you’ll find the newest Vintage books to add to your reading list right here.

What are the best new books to read right now?

This week’s new Vintage books move between old buildings, urgent cultural arguments and lives shaped by history. Rachel Morley’s Church Crawling opens the doors of England’s rural parish churches; James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages defends reading in a screen-saturated age; Peter Moore’s A Dangerous Game follows the life of naval hero and political radical Thomas Cochrane; and Emmanuel Carrère’s Kolkhoz turns family history into a meditation on Russia, communism and inheritance.

In paperback, Anne Enright collects three decades of essays in Attention; Margaret Atwood reflects on writing, feminism and an extraordinary literary life in Book of Lives; Hannah Ritchie offers clear answers to climate questions in Clearing the Air; and Asta Olivia Nordenhof’s The Devil Book brings fierce, formally adventurous translated fiction to the list.

New in non-fiction

Church Crawling by Rachel Morley

Rachel Morley takes the apparently modest act of visiting a village church and turns it into a way of reading English history. A building conservator and church rescuer, Morley moves through wall-paintings, monuments, graffiti, plaques and curious survivals to show rural parish churches as records of communal memory, folk culture and everyday life. The result is heritage writing with a strong sense of human drama: not only an argument for preservation, but an invitation to look more closely at places too often passed by.

Read if you like: John Betjeman, Simon Jenkins’s A Short History of British Architecture, Simon Schama’s A History of Britain, or BBC heritage documentaries that uncover the human stories behind historic buildings.

The New Dark Ages by James Marriott

James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages is a polemic about what happens when a culture loses the patience and depth that reading makes possible. The book argues that screen-based entertainment, declining literacy and the erosion of long-form attention threaten creativity, critical thinking and democratic life.

Drawing on history, literature and theory, Marriott frames reading not as a private hobby but as a public good: one of the habits that helps societies think carefully, remember collectively and resist the noise of the present.

Read if you like: Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism, Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home, or the documentary The Social Dilemma.

A Dangerous Game by Peter Moore

In A Dangerous Game, Peter Moore returns to adventurous historical biography with the life of Thomas Cochrane: naval hero, radical MP, political scandal-magnet and model for some of the great characters of Age of Sail fiction. The book follows Cochrane from the Napoleonic Wars and British politics to revolutionary campaigns across Latin America and Greece, using newly uncovered materials to sharpen a story already charged with risk, reinvention and defiance. It is history for readers who like real lives that outstrip the novels they inspired.

Read if you like: Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin novels, C.S. Forester’s Hornblower books, Master and Commander, or Caroline Alexander’s The Bounty.

Kolkhoz by Emmanuel Carrère

In Kolkhoz, Emmanuel Carrère turns inward, beginning with the public ceremony at Les Invalides honouring his mother, the historian Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, and widening into a family history shaped by Russia, exile, Soviet power and silence. With John Lambert translating, Carrère works through letters, archives and contested memories, asking what can be told truthfully about family without betraying the people within it. The book’s scale is historical, but its pressure is intimate: a reckoning with inheritance, ambition, ideology and the complicated love between parent and child.

Read if you like: Emmanuel Carrère’s Limonov or The Adversary, Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time, Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, or Philippe Sands’s East West Street.

New in paperback

Attention by Anne Enright

Anne Enright’s Attention gathers thirty years of essays from a writer whose criticism is inseparable from close looking. The collection ranges from Ireland to Canada and Honduras, and from Enright’s family history to writing about women’s bodies, voices and lives in fiction and society. Alongside reflections on Alice Munro, Toni Morrison and James Joyce, these pieces show Enright thinking in motion: exacting, funny and alert to the ways art and ordinary life expose one another.

Read if you like: Joan Didion’s essays, Zadie Smith’s Feel Free, Rebecca Solnit, Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography trilogy, or the fiction of Anne Enright.

Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood looks back across the many lives inside one literary career. Childhood in the forests of northern Quebec, feminism, school bullies, love, bears, Berlin in the 1980s and the making of The Handmaid’s Tale all enter the frame, alongside the habits of imagination that have fed more than fifty books. The result is not a neat monument, but a characteristically Atwoodian self-portrait: witty, watchful and alive to the strange routes by which experience becomes writing.

Read if you like: The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood’s Burning Questions, Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Ursula K. Le Guin’s essays, or literary memoirs with a sharp eye for culture.

Clearing the Air by Hannah Ritchie

Hannah Ritchie’s Clearing the Air is built around 50 questions that often stall climate conversations. Rather than treating climate action as a matter of slogans or despair, Ritchie answers doubts about emissions, land use, nuclear power, plant-based diets and whether it is 'too late' with a clear, evidence-led approach. Fully updated for paperback, it is for readers who want to move beyond argument fatigue and understand which climate solutions are already available, what trade-offs remain and why measured optimism still matters.

Read if you like: Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World, Hans Rosling’s Factfulness, Mike Berners-Lee’s How Bad Are Bananas?, or David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet.

The Devil Book by Asta Olivia Nordenhof

Asta Olivia Nordenhof’s The Devil Book, translated by Caroline Waight, is the second book in the Scandinavian Star series after Money to Burn. A woman meets a man on a train in Copenhagen, goes to London and begins to reveal the story of a past bargain with a man called T., whose gifts and cash came with the demand for control over her body. Sharp, intimate and politically charged, the novel circles money, sex, violence, betrayal and the difficult work of choosing life, freedom and love.

Read if you like: Nordenhof’s Money to Burn, Olga Ravn’s The Employees, Jenny Hval, Rachel Kushner, or experimental European fiction about sex, power and capitalism.

New in classics

Ten new titles join our Vintage Collector's Classics. Gathering together masterworks that span genres, eras and styles, these editions showcase some of literature’s most memorable voices.

The September additions expand that range further, from Victorian futures and underwater voyages to island adventures, fairy tales and childhood worlds that continue to shape readers’ imaginations.

Anne of Green Gables

L. M. Montgomery (Author)

Buy from:

Amazon
Blackwells
Bookshop.org
Foyles
Hive
Waterstones
TGJones

New Vintage books this week

The latest fiction, non-fiction, paperbacks and classics

What are the best new books to read right now?

New in non-fiction

New in paperback

New in classics

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