September 2026 Book Releases | Discover the Unkown

There are a lot of reasons to read indie books.

They’re good, first and foremost.

(Or they can be.)

They can be pretty cheap too. 

But to me, the best part is discovering the unknown. 

My brother came to my new house this weekend. To visitors, books are usually a pretty popular topic of conversation. Since they surround the front door and touch the ceilings in the rooms we hang out in, it’s kind of hard to ignore them.

Taking a look around, he said something I didn’t think I’d find a lot of joy in. But boy did I feel it.

“Do you think I’ve read even one of the books in this house?”

And so I sprung into action. 

He had to, right? In school or something.

But my collection is almost all contemporary indie books. They’re not teaching these things in school. They’re not in bookstores and on TV. I had an overly large smile on my face realizing that he honestly might not have read any of them. 

I finally found a couple—Fahrenheit 451 & Slaughterhouse 5—but the process of searching made me appreciate my collection even more. Not only is this thing unique, but I can vouch for the quality of so many of them. Somebody come over my house, and I’ll hand you a personally curated paperback that you almost definitely haven’t read before–and that you could genuinely love.

How about you join me in curating a weirdly cool indie collection?

Add a book to your shelf that your friends definitely don’t have. Not only are they indie and awesome, but they’re brand spankin’ new—all coming out in September 2026.

It’s time to hop on the indie train. 

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#1. Book of Hours by Ellen O’Connell Whittet

A sometimes raw, always luminous exploration of motherhood, martyrdom, and women’s untold stories

As the novel observes, these are the kinds of stories that have traditionally gone unspoken. It is a testament to the deftness of author Ellen O’Connell Whittet’s prose that Book of Hours never feels like overcorrection. 

The novel is as much about joy as it is sorrow, but it is especially about joy and sorrow shading into one another in ways that make for both uncomfortable and incisive reading.

Whittet’s willingness to linger in the pain—to feel out its contours without fully resolving or explaining them—is what gives the novel its deep emotional power. Yes, much of what the woman goes through reflects the struggle to come to terms with her physicality in a society that surveils the female body. And yes, this struggle is nothing new.

But there is a tension between erasure and empowerment that the novel recognizes: “They learned holy women took up less, not more space—that their inner yearning was big enough to swallow their frail bodies. This was key to not being seen, and therefore not being subjugated.”

– Lily Beaumont, IBR

#2. Helium by Dave Kenney

A woman adrift finds timid faith in flying saucers and unfathomable encounters in this enthralling literary fiction.

Helium follows Joan as she attempts to trade her painful past for newfound faith in the impossible.This novel thrusts you into an unsettling world that will leave you questioning what is real, what is impossible, and who you can trust.

“The telescope helped astronomers see, but it probably blinded them, too. Look too long through a tube at the universe, and you lose your perspective. Maybe there are things you’re not meant to see that way. Maybe it takes an amateur to look with new eyes.”

Helium has a gravitational pull, luring you into its orbit that’s riddled with impossibilities. It keeps you close with its peculiar, flying saucer-obsessed characters, its collection of universal and personal uncertainties, and all-around uneasy mysteriousness. Author Dave Kenney carries you through the story slowly, letting you build in anticipation of when you will drop and find solid ground again. And just like Joan’s own journey, the reader must have faith that the story will bring them exactly where they need to go. They will see clearly if they hold out just a little bit longer.

It’s wonderfully unexpected that a book so taken with flying saucers and alien contact would be so literary, yet Helium effortlessly melds the genres of sci-fi, historical fiction, and literary fiction together. 

Helium highlights the humanity in the universe’s uncertainty and, in seamless prose, depicts the messy truth of faith and hope. This is the kind of book you devour to quench your ever-growing, cultish, out-of-this-world curiosity.

-Shelby Zwintscher, IBR

#3. The Sea-Glass Shore by Julie Salmon Kelleher

A lyrical grounded fantasy that characterizes the American spirit of folklore in both fresh and familiar ways

Folklore is the people’s history: it is how a community comes together to assert their truth to the world, no matter what shape that truth takes. In Julie Salmon Kelleher’s The Sea-Glass Shore, both the history of the Pacific Northwest and the very real questions about its future are embodied in an array of characters living in the seaside town of Higginson, Washington—and more literally than one might think.

Spanning a generation, the narrative follows Jack, a young man fresh off of a whirlwind of travels who is trying to finally settle himself down. He does so in the typical way of salmon: he returns home to spawn. How he meets who he chooses to settle down with, however, is as atypical as the catalyst of any grounded fantasy novel should be. 

Rona washes ashore at Jack’s feet. A woman holding a velveteen grey bundle, she captivates Jack, who has made his career in the academia of folklore. He recognizes her for what she is immediately: a selkie. A seal who is also a woman, who can pull her skin off and live on two legs. A woman who was made for the sea but instead found a reason to stay ashore.

“Don’t fall in love, Rona. But she is falling in love: with the grip of her fingers, the air so cool against the thin, thin skin of a face exposed to sky, to mist, to a kiss of cloud above the sea. She is falling in love with the simple gravity of flesh on stone.

“The body she wears now is made to fall.”

An earnest tribute to the Pacific Northwest and its complex geographic, historical, and political climate, the work captures a woman, a family, and a town in transition, alongside the questions that pockmark their road forward. It is a lens into nonconformist families, the joys and challenges of parenting and growing up, and the processing of enormous loss.

-Savannah Brooks, IBR

#4. The Ended World by Libbie Grant

This one’s so unique we haven’t even read it yet.

Galiot Press has been publishing some really stellar books of late. They’re a new small press with serious swinging power. They published Backstitch, which you might remember got a starred review from us and was part of our giveaway at the Bucks Book Fest. Sex of the Midwest was in NPR’s “Books We love 2025” and received a starred review from Kirkus. They’ve been killing it.

That—and the premise—is what makes me so excited about The Ended World by Libbie Grant. It’s billed as “a sentient AI connects an ex-nun, an atheist programmer, and a medieval saint on a fateful road trip.”

Bruce Holsinger, author of the Oprah Book Club book Culpability, called it “a dazzling work of imagination, a sweeping intergenerational parable of belief, selfhood, and love in the epoch of artificial intelligence.”

I’ll meet you in the checkout line.

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