24 of September's Sexiest New Books

Lena Dunham's highly anticipated memoir, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned," has finally arrived — and the collection of personal essays are sure to be just as funny, smart, and honest as the talented writer, actress, and general jill-of-all-trades.

Out Sept. 30

Therapist Susan Pease Gadoua and journalist Vicki Larson pair up to investigate the modern marriage in The New "I Do": Reshaping Marriage For Skeptics, Realists and Rebels.

Out Sept. 23

You'll want to read Julie Lawson Timmer's heartrending love story with a box of tissues. Five Days Left follows two people discovering they have fatal illnesses. "Sometimes loving someone means holding on, and sometimes it means letting go."

Out Sept. 9

Tyler Knott Gregson's Chasers of the Light: Poems From the Typewriter Series is a collection of insightful poetry and haikus as well as art, as the poems are typed onto found scraps of paper or created via blackout method.

Out Sept. 2

Rebecca Alexander (with Sascha Alper) inspires us all with her harrowing and heartbreaking memoir, Not Fade Away: A Memoir of Senses Lost and Found, about persevering as she's losing her sight and hearing.

Out Sept. 11

Anatomy of a Misfit, Andrea Portes's sad, funny, and romantic YA novel (based on actual events), is described as "Mean Girls meets The Perks of Being a Wallflower." What's not to love about that?

Out Sept. 2

Four unmarried French women — Anne Berest, Audrey Diwan, Caroline de Maigret, and Sophie Mas — share their frank and funny life advice in How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are: Love, Style, and Bad Habits, a collection of stories.

Out Sept. 2

Screwdrivered is the third erotically charged romantic comedy in Alice Clayton's Cocktail series. This novel follows a software engineer who's a closeted romance-novel junkie as she travels across the country to a new home she inherited and finds herself caught between a librarian and a cowboy.

Out Sept. 2

Peggy Webb's historical fiction The Language of Silence tells the story of a woman who joins the circus to escape her dark past. "Following in the footsteps of her tiger-taming grandmother, a woman flees her abusive husband to join the circus in this masterful, heartfelt work of women's fiction."

Out Sept. 9

Emily Liebert's novel When We Fall follows a widowed single mother as she befriends a woman whose life only looks perfect on the outside. Described by Booklist as "an emotionally honest novel, full of nostalgia for old friendships, the struggle of reconciliation, and the everlasting power of female friendship."

Out Sept. 2

Sway by Kat Spears is a biting, tender YA romance about a high school senior who's asked by the popular jerk to win over a girl, but ends up falling for her (and befriending her brother with cerebral palsy) along the way. It's "a Cyrano de Bergerac story with a modern twist."

Out Sept. 16

Anyone who saw the groundbreaking Catfish film and subsequent MTV show is sure to be intrigued by
Nev Schulman's nonfiction book In Real Life: Love, Lies & Identity in the Digital Age. James Franco writes, "Nev's book begins as a fun journey into the world of lying on the Internet, but it extrapolates into the larger phenomenon of avatars — everybody has one on social networks."

Out Sept. 2

The King's Curse is the final novel in Philippa Gregory's Cousins' War series that inspired the Starz miniseries The White Queen. The historical romance follows lady-in-waiting Margaret Pole as King Henry VIII rises to power in Tudor England.

Out Sept. 9

Karen Abbott's Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War follows the little-known true story of four courageous women — a socialite, a farm girl, an abolitionist, and a widow — who worked as spies during the Civil War.

Out Sept. 2

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters is a historical fiction novel with intrigue and passion. Set in 1920s London, the story follows a widow and her "spinster daughter" as they take in a young couple as tenants.

Out Sept. 16

Chained by Night (Moonbound Clan Vampires) by Larissa Ione, the second paranormal romance in her Moonbound Clan Vampires series, is about a vampire clan leader who agrees to mate with a rival clan leader's beautiful daughter in order to have an ally against the humans. The only issue? He's in love with her identical twin sister.

Out Sept. 30

The third book in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay follows up with the two girls in the first novel — one who left the man she married at 16 and now has a young son, the other who published a successful novel — as they struggle to make a way for themselves as women in the 1970s.

Out Sept. 2

Randy Susan Meyers explores the darker side of marriage, family tragedy, and emotional abuse in the novel Accidents of Marriage. Told from the perspectives of a husband, his wife, and their 14-year-old daughter, this story is about a spouse whose temper leads to a tragic accident.

Out Sept. 2

Hester Browne's chick-lit romance Honeymoon Hotel takes place at a charming old hotel in London where a wedding planner in the midst of planning a high-profile big day finds her career and her sanity threatened when the hotel owner's free-spirited son begins working with her.

Out Sept. 16

In her debut novel, How to Build a Girl, Caitlin Moran — described by Marie Claire as "the UK's answer to Tina Fey, Chelsea Handler, and Lena Dunham all rolled into one" — writes a humorous yet touching coming-of-age tale about a teenage girl in 1990 working as a music reviewer, living promiscuously, and recklessly attempting to reinvent herself. "Imagine The Bell Jar written by Rizzo from Grease."

Out Sept. 23

A girl and her gay twin brother deal with "first love, family, loss, and betrayal" in Jandy Nelson's poignant novel I'll Give You the Sun. Fans of John Green, David Levithan, and Rainbow Rowell will want to check this one out.

Out Sept. 16

Historical romance meets fairy-tale fantasy in The Prince Who Loved Me, the first book in The Oxenburg Princes by Karen Hawkins. In this Scottish twist on the classic Cinderella story, "a handsome, rakish prince who doesn't believe in true love meets a stubborn lass who will settle for nothing less."

Out Sept. 23

Set on the cliffs of Portofino, Italy, during World War II, Alyson Richman's historical fiction The Garden of Letters follows a cello prodigy who bravely joins the resistance and finds shelter with a young doctor with his own painful past. It's a hopeful, suspenseful, and "epic intertwining story of first love, great tragedy, and spectacular bravery."

Out Sept. 2

A.J. Betts's YA romance Zac & Mia is told through the perspectives of two teen leukemia patients who — although they couldn't be more different in their tastes in music and beyond — forge an unlikely friendship after meeting in an Australian hospital.

Out Sept. 2