Paperbacks to Look Out For in October 2026: Part Two

This second batch of October paperbacks begins with one I’m in two minds about. Anna North’s Bog Queen sees a homesick forensic anthropologist called to a coroner when a perfectly preserved body is found, buried in a bog in the north of England for thousands of years. Agnes finds herself trying to disentangle the puzzle of this Iron Age woman. ‘Rich, wild and shimmering with mystery, Bog Queen weaves together the lives of two young women separated by many centuries – and connected by a landscape more mysterious than either can imagine’ says the slightly fey blurb.

Issa Quincy’s Absence follows a man haunted by the poem his mother read to him as a child, resonating throughout the many stories of those he encounters, from the beloved schoolteacher whose death reveals a dark secret to the woman whose son will never return, a young man whose letters from his aunt offer comfort in his isolation to a family photograph hinting at tragedy. ‘With fierce imagination, Issa Quincy has constructed a transcendent portrait of humanity, deftly illuminating a symphony of memories, murmurs and phantoms that add up to an ordinary human life’ says the blurb which sounds intriguing.

A little outside my usual reading, Finnish author Iida Turpeinen’s Beasts of the Sea straddles several centuries. In 1741, an expedition is shipwrecked on a remote island, despairing of survival until they discover an enormous kelp-eating sea mammal. In 1859, with the Alaskan Russian colony on the brink of collapse, the governor looks to the hoped-for discovery of an intact skeleton of Stellar’s Sea Cow, thought to be extinct. ‘A tribute to an iconic lost creature, and an adventure through three centuries of scientific exploration, Beasts of the Sea charts the unseen consequences of grand human ambitions and the urge to resurrect what we, in our ignorance, have destroyed’ says the blurb soberingly.

October’s paperback short story collection, Pulse, comes from Cyan Jones whose work I’ve been meaning to read for some time. Not a huge amount to go on from the blurb which tells us that ‘fear, vulnerability, tension and resolve course through these arresting and indelible stories from one of the finest British writers at work today’. Enough there to make me want to read it.

That’s it for October. A click on a title will take you to a more detailed synopsis should you want to know more, and if you’d like to catch up with part one it’s here. New fiction is here and here.