By Tim Spalding in Top Titles
September 3, 2026
As seasons change, so too are the books, with seven of the top twenty titles in US public libraries new this month. Three were published on the same day, August 4. Riley Sager’s The Unknown strands a film crew on a Vermont island where five women vanished during a séance in 1926. Lisa Gardner’s You’ll Be Sorry moves a pair of newlyweds into a remote New Hampshire lodge where an entire family disappeared thirty years earlier. And Chris Bohjalian’s The Amateur, set in 1978, opens when an eighteen-year-old golf prodigy’s errant shot kills a caddy at an exclusive country club, and what everyone takes for an accident ends in a trial.
The other new titles include Karin Slaughter’s The Secrets We Hide, her second North Falls novel, sending Sheriff Emmy Clifton and her sister, a former federal agent, after whoever shot a woman in her own home and left her daughter for dead. In Shari Lapeña’s Getting Away with Murder, a New York couple run out of money and settle on a wealthy relative as the solution. And James Patterson has two books on the list, The Country Road Murders, written with Mike Lupica, and Delusional, a Michael Bennett novel written with James O. Born.
Unlike the last six, the final newcomer is neither crime nor thriller. It is also a departure for its author, Kristin Harmel, known for World War II novels like The Book of Lost Names. Meet Me in Paris follows nine Americans through a single week in present-day Paris, in seven interlocking stories.
Apart from these titles, little moved. Positions one through five are identical to July’s, in the same order—The Calamity Club, Theo of Golden, Yesteryear, Whistler and The Correspondent. Sally Hepworth’s Mad Mabel has gone from fifteenth in June to ninth in July to sixth now, and Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl has ascended from twelfth to eighth to seventh. Finally, Homer’s Odyssey, which entered at seven last month on the strength of Christopher Nolan’s film, held on at ten—a full month after the July 17 opening, and longer than these film-tie-in bumps usually last. The Odyssey’s staying power tracks the film’s—it just crossed $1.5 billion at the box office, the biggest of Nolan’s career. The only nonfiction title this month, the Trump-administration account Regime Change, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, slipped from twelfth to fifteenth.
Here’s the full list:
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