Women Who Travel Book Club: The Best New Books to Read This Fall
All products and listings featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
We're often reminded of the places we visit by the books we read while we were there. As you pack your bags for that upcoming fall trip, be it a cozy cabin getaway upstate or a cross-country drive, make sure you include a good book or two. That's where the Women Who Travel book club comes in, a quarterly list of new and trending books, written by women authors, that we can't stop talking about. As always, we asked our editors, contributors, and the well-traveled bibliophiles in our Women Who Travel network to share which exciting new reads they can't wait to dig into this fall. They delivered a mix of new titles, from beautifully raw collections of poetry and inspiring memoirs set in the Amazon to fun romance stories that will transport you to the South of France and beyond. We'd love to hear which you're reading—and which fantastic new books we missed—on Instagram or Facebook.
Below, 9 highly-anticipated new titles to read on your fall getaway.
I am just about to dig into climate activist Nemonte Nenquimo’s memoir after reading Katherine Gallardo’s interview with her. Nenquimo was also on the 2023 Women Who Travel Power List for her work defending the Amazon rainforest, so suffice to say, she’s well hyped in my mind. As Gallardo writes: “Born in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, Nemonte Nenquimo, an Indigenous Waorani woman and activist, traveled a long and arduous path to become one of the earth’s fiercest defenders. In her new memoir, We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People, released September 17, she shares the story of that journey, charting her experience growing up in the forest—a place where months are measured in moons, shamans and plant medicines heal, and dreams and intuition guide one’s path in life—as well as the pain and trauma inflicted by missionaries, oil companies, and governments that have long attempted to erase Indigenous culture and exploit their homelands. Nenquimo’s book is also the first of its kind to be written by an Indigenous person from the Ecuadorian Amazon, where ancestral knowledge and wisdom about life in the forest have been passed down orally for millenia and the tradition of storytelling never manifests on paper. “For us, stories are living beings,” she writes in the introduction. “Our stories have never been written down. Not like this.'’ Sign me up. —Megan Spurrell, associate articles director
This is an honest and very engaging debut that chronicles the first few months of 26-year-old Emma Finley’s second year of sobriety. When the book begins, Emma’s still struggling with feelings of self-hatred, but makes tentative steps to reveal her true self to people like her cool co-worker Vanessa Zhao and Ben Nowak, the handsome and thoughtful IT director at her office in Manhattan. After fumbling her first conversation alone with Ben, the pair end up trapped together in a mandatory group that plans the office holiday party. They become close quickly, and rumors start to fly about them, even as Emma tries to guard her privacy. Tensions arise when Emma’s alcoholic father Robert visits her out of the blue, which leads her to suspect that something terrible is happening with him. Emma soon learns that he’s dying of liver cancer. The stress causes her to undermine her burgeoning connection with Ben.
The writer has a great voice and delves into Emma’s experiences at AA, her strained relationship with Robert, and her many battles with self-sabotage. You get to see Emma’s longing to be less guarded with others while also worrying about scaring them off and relapsing. There’s a lot to like here: An engrossing story with an honest voice, a detailed look into recovery, and a realistic but hopeful message. As a New Yorker, I also enjoyed the strong sense of place this book has. It’s fun seeing long-time local spots lovingly name-checked. —Alexandra Sanidad, research director
Home has never been as alive a place as it is in Ariane Koch’s Overstaying. In the narrator’s home, shadows have the gravity to shackle onto people, vacuum cleaner nozzles need to be bonked into obedience, and a shared cigarette brings the same euphoric torpor as a slow-bubbling pat of opium. Koch says of her writing process, “I don’t see my writing as chronological or classically narrative, but as spatial—a kind of architecture. I keep adding rooms, and readers can take different paths through the rooms.” I felt the thrill of this adult choose-your-own-adventure immediately: readers are thrown into the delightful momentum of the narrator’s strange mind and their obsession with “the visitor,” an all-consuming and enigmatic presence in the book who might be characterized as a leech, a wanderer, a pet, or a lover, depending on the light. Overstaying is a pinch of Dostoevsky’s neuroses, a little Beckett-ish in its absurdity, Sapphic in the generous white spaces between vignettes, and as easy to swallow as applesauce. If you’re looking for a reason to let your hair down, and you’re willing to lose your mind a little, step into a book that conducts itself like freeform jazz. —Kat Chen, editorial assistant, destinations
Irish writer Sally Rooney's first two novels, Normal People and Conversations With Friends, both hinged in part on holidays of great consequence taken by their protagonists to continental Europe. Away from Ireland, in the warming sun of Italy and the South of France respectively, our pale and morose heroes behave a little differently, take a few risks perhaps, argue and make love. Such is the potential effect of travel. Rooney has left behind the vacation plot for now, both in her third novel Beautiful World, Where are You? and in her lovely latest, Intermezzo. There's no shortage of travel in Intermezzo, however, it's all just of a more purposeful, domestic sort. Dublin-based brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek have just lost their father. The home in which the latter, a professional chess player in arrested development, lived with him sits empty in the suburbs, and their semi-estranged mother lives with her new family elsewhere. Ivan's chess takes him to competitions in small cities and towns around Ireland—the first chapter from his perspective actually opens at one such event. In this new place, he meets and falls in love with an older woman, herself coping with her own sort of loss, and away from his ordinary life he is able to grow in tandem with this new connection. This novel is as sad as it is ambitious, not only for its 452-page-count (Rooney's longest yet!) but also for its hard look at the incurability of grief and the feasibility of traditional romance. —Charlie Hobbs, associate editor
Ten years ago, when Milk & Honey made its way onto shelves, I simply devoured it. It’s a collection of Rupi Kaur’s very honest short poems, painfully describing some of the most difficult moments of her early life. From growing up with hard-working immigrant parents to sexual abuse to heartbreak, Kaur goes deep, and really walks you through her past. I was most impressed by how beautifully she describes her pain in such few words, and how she recalls these memories in a way that still feels inspiring. To celebrate the bestseller, Kaur is releasing a special collector’s edition, with more than 30 new poems. And to no surprise, they all have the same magic of the book’s original prose. —Meaghan Kenny, commerce editor
I love books that unfold in your head like a movie, and this is a pretty seamless debut. It follows former convict Blake Renato as she hopes to make a fresh start in Raker Harbor, Maine. Blake has inherited the ramshackle house where she happily lived as a teenager with her grandparents. She’s had a tumultuous life of abuse with her addict mother and a drug dealer who got her pregnant. While saving to repair the home, Blake takes a room in town with Nora Hayes, a sweet recently widowed waitress at the local restaurant. Nora introduces Blake to lobsterman Lee Savard, who reluctantly hires Blake to work on his boat. Lee’s family has a violent rivalry with the McDowell family, who are rumored to have spiked the drugs that killed his late brother Jonny. Lee tries to keep out of trouble for the sake of his nine-year-old daughter Quin, who takes a shine to Blake, though Lee often fails.
Blake learns that Nora is suffering from MS and soon becomes a comforting presence in her life, much to the chagrin of Morning Glory, Nora’s med-school daughter for whom Lee holds a torch. Lee knows about Blake’s past and gains respect for her as they work together, though he’s unable to convince Glory, who eventually takes steps to reveal Blake’s murder conviction to Nora. This converges with the McDowell rivalry in a pretty heart-wrenching climax. There’s a terrific cinematic quality that flows through the story, and readers will really get a feel for the lives of fishermen in Maine. —A.S.
I love memoirs because they let me see the world captured through a completely different and often unfamiliar lens, so I was surprised to see myself relating so deeply and in so many ways to Priyanka Mattoo's gorgeous essay collection Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones. I was familiar with her writing in The New Yorker and The New York Times, but it wasn't until I started reading that I realized how much our upbringings have in common—from vignettes of childhood memories with grandparents in India or expat life in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, to adapting to American suburbia in the early teen years (“did you have to ride camels to school? ” is a question I fielded verbatim when I joined seventh grade in Massachusetts). Chapters are vivid standalone essays jumping around between different eras and backdrops from Matoo's peripatetic life, and the format made for the perfect read for me to unfurl slowly as I skipped around continents myself during a busy few months of travel. While the world the book inhabits is expansive, taking Mattoo through Kashmir, Europe, Saudi Arabia, and America, at its heart it's about community, family, and a search for home. —Sarah Khan, contributor
I devoured this book in one sitting on a recent visit to French Polynesia—but it’s so much more than your typical beach-read romance. The Pairing follows Theo and Kit, a pair of queer exes who accidentally end up on the same food and wine tour around Europe. They challenge each other to hook up with as many people as possible—there’s so much sexual tension you could cut it with a knife—before, surprise, realizing they’re actually still in love with each other. Through it all, they’re eating and drinking their way through iconic destinations in France, Italy, and Spain, which Casey McQuiston expertly brings to life with vivid, immersive descriptions. This novel is a thought-provoking exploration of sex, gender, identity, and relationship evolution. But it’s also a story that's deeply rooted in travel—after reading it, I felt like I’d taken my own whirlwind trip through Europe. —Sarah Kuta, contributor
The Women follows Frankie, a 24-year-old nursing student aiding wounded soldiers during the Vietnam War. She’s inexperienced and totally unprepared for the reality of war, but finds strength among the women around her, tapping into their inner-hero. It’s gut-wrenching at times, with vivid images of war and descriptions of the wounded. So no, it’s no light beach read, but there are some light-hearted moments, and it's completely transportive. —M.K.
