Read the season’s most talked about stories of global espionage, secret superpowers and star-crossed love

The Secrets We Kept, Lara Prescott’s debut, is equal parts feminist espionage thriller and literary love story. It follows Russian novelist Boris Pasternak as he writes future classic Doctor Zhivago, and a pair of girls from a CIA typing pool in 1950s D.C. tasked with spinning propaganda to take down Communism. (September 3, $35.)

With A Delhi Obsession, two-time Giller winner M.G. Vassanji reimagines the Romeo and Juliet story in modern India. His Romeo is Munir, a Muslim widower from Toronto who takes a spontaneous trip to India, where he meets Mohini, a married Hindu woman and teacher who offers to show him the sights. (September 10, $30.)

Essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates’ first novel, The Water Dancer, is about Hiram Walker, born into slavery in antebellum Virginia. He has a secret superpower called Conduction, which allows him to travel instantaneously across bodies of water. It’s one of the heaviest books you’ll read this year, but also one of the most beautiful. (September 24, $37.)

Laetitia Colombani’s The Braid, already a bestseller in France, is a charming fable of three women—a lawyer in Montreal; a wig maker in Palermo, Italy; and a toilet cleaner in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh—whose stories are woven into, well, you get the idea. They overcome loneliness, illness, poverty and misogyny. (September 24, $22.)

Alice Hoffman’s The World That We Knew is about Lea, a young Jewish girl who gains an unlikely saviour in Nazi-occupied Europe in the form of Ava, a female golem bound to protect her. The book puts a magical, feminist twist on the traditional fairy tale, Jewish folklore and the hero’s journey. (September 24, $25.)

Postscript, Cecelia Ahern’s sequel to her massive hit P.S., I Love You, is fluff of the highest order. The new book finds Holly seven years later, when people who formed a group called the the P.S., I Love You Club ask her to help them create care packages for their families to find after they’re dead. (September 24, $35.)

With Frankissstein, Jeanette Winterson, who’s long been fixated on the dangers and opportunities innate in the human body, has revamped Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into a cyber-Gothic tale for the Brexit age. It features a cryogenics heist involving a transgender Ry Shelley and a Byron proxy who sells sex robots. (October 1, $32.)

In Grand Union, Zadie Smith experiments with form, characters and voice. In one tale, a drag queen grapples with mortality in a corset shop; in another, Smith reimagines the urban legend of Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando escaping post-9/11 New York on a cross-country road trip. (October 8, $34.)

One day, 13-year-old Karina refuses to go swimming with her little brother, Prem, in their backyard pool. Minutes later, she finds his lifeless body floating face down in the water. The Shape of Family is the latest heart-tugging saga from Shilpi Somaya Gowda, a Canadian author who specializes in the genre. (October 15, $25.)

Find Me, André Aciman’s sequel to Call Me by Your Name, revisits Elio, now a pianist in Italy, and Oliver, who’s an empty nester back in the U.S. This one might be worth consuming on audio—the narrator is the wonderful Michael Stuhlbarg, who stole the movie as Elio’s dad. A little late for peach season, but welcome nonetheless. (October 29, $36.)