More of the Best October Releases for Your Book Club

I haven’t tried this yet, but it sounds like an interesting twist on a favorite. You’ll need:

caramel vodka, apple cider, lime, ginger beer, cinnamon sticks, and apple slices for garnish.

For a full list of measurements and instructions, go here.

This funny and insightful memoir follows Chin, a gay American-born Chinese kid growing up in Detroit in the ’80s. Though the city has its issues — like segregation, for one — the Chinese restaurant his grandfather opened is a safe haven for many. All of Detroit — from drag queens to the city’s first Black mayor — are welcomed and gather around Chin’s family’s sweet-and-sour pork and scooch into their vinyl booths.

True crime lovers! I know I don’t usually have many suggestions for you, but today I’ve got you. Host of the true-crime podcast The Fall Line, Norton guides us through the vast world of forensic science, taking us from its (first recorded) beginnings with the ancient Roman death masks to our modern-day 3D facial reconstruction technology. We’re also walked through a case she solves in real-time alongside forensic anthropologist Dr. Amy Michael.

Two women undergo IVF, but only one conceives. Katherine, with her type A personality, finally has the perfect life once she has a baby. Thing is, the baby’s complexion is a little too different from her own, and it’s throwing her off…Then there’s Tess, who visited the same fertility clinic as Katherine but whose baby was stillborn. Two years later, she’s struggling with depression and a dead-end job, but a call from the clinic puts things on the upswing for Tess: they tell her that her and Katherine’s eggs were switched.

All of the people in Iris Kelly’s life are in love. Her parents, her friends, her siblings, and she really hates — *is happy for them*. Truly. Tear-soaked Lyft rides home notwithstanding. Her lack of love is especially confounding since she’s a romance writer, and it’s probably partially why she’s been out of ideas since her debut. To distract herself from her pitiful state, she goes out to a bar and hooks up with the sexy stranger Stefania. Only, the one-night stand has made the hottest of messes when vomit and crying both make appearances. To distract herself from that, she tries for a local play and meets Stefania, or Stevie, again, who wants Iris to play as her fake girlfriend for reasons. Of course she goes along with it, and sparks fly, but neither is trying to make the first move to make it official.

Due has been killing the Black horror game for a minute now. In her latest, 12-year-old Robbie Stevens is sent to the Gracetown School for Boys reformatory in Florida in 1950 for defending his sister from a rich white kid. If you got shudders thinking of a Black kid being sent to a reformatory in Florida in the ’50s, I did too. The horrors are just as real as you’d think, and the haints (ghosts) Robbie sees show him the terrors that were met upon the boys who have gone missing from the reformatory and worse things that have yet to come. Hopefully, his sister Gloria can get him out before it’s too late.