Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives, Kiran Desai's Booker-shortlisted The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny and Richard Holmes's Tennyson biography The Boundless Deep lead this month's paperback round-up, published in time for the September reading season.

Atwood's Book of Lives covers 85 years. Blake Morrison, reviewing it, calls it "less a memoir than an autobiography, not a slice of life but the whole works". Where most backward looks are "cosily triumphalist or anxiously self-justifying", Atwood's is "sharp, funny and engaging". The book traces her path from a self-described "flat-chested weirdo" in the co-ed high school brain class to Harvard, where her research on the Salem witch trials fed into The Handmaid's Tale, and through her long relationship with the novelist Graeme Gibson, whose decline, dementia and death bring a sombre tone to the final pages. Atwood records her choices in her own words: "Ask yourself, Dear Reader: The busy schedule or the empty chair? I chose the busy schedule. The empty chair would be there when I got home."

Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny follows the on-off liaison between Sunny Bhatia and Sonia Shah, whose families are neighbours. Alex Clark praises an "immensely entertaining and generative novel" that darts between gothic horror — the monstrous artist Ilan de Toorjen Foss — and low-key bourgeois comedy among the pair's Allahabad relatives. At its centre sits a question: whether the form of the novel, "created in the European consciousness", can complexify itself for an accelerated, fractured modernity. Clark credits Desai with eliciting "apprehension, laughter, compassion and curiosity in the reader".

Mona Awad returns to the Bunnyverse with We Love You, Bunny, the sequel to her 2019 campus satire Bunny. Samantha opens the book bound and gagged in an attic, surrounded by the demonic sorority she once escaped. Sandra Newman finds the follow-up "baggier than the original" but redeemed by its closing voice and by Awad's insistence that "romantasy can be serious literature".

Patrick Ryan's Buckeye follows two married couples in the fictional town of Bonhomie, Ohio, from the 1920s onward. AK Blakemore praises a novel that "strips away the Bakelite glaze of the American dream to expose the raw flesh beneath", elevated by Ryan's short-fiction precision.

Olga Ravn's The Wax Child opens with a beheading in Copenhagen on 26 June 1621 — one instance of a Danish "witch" burned every five days between 1617 and 1625, according to one historian. Built around the real noblewoman Christenze Krukow, accused of witchcraft three times, the novel is narrated partly by a wax doll who sees everything. Aida Edemariam finds it "richly evocative, beautiful, creepy and visceral", though sometimes "elliptical, even baffling".

Joe Hill leans into his father's legacy with King Sorrow, in which six friends summon an ancient dragon from the Long Dark. Alison Flood calls it "huge, sprawling — and absolutely fantastic".

In non-fiction, Lea Ypi's Indignity investigates her grandmother Leman Leskoviku, born in Salonica in 1918, after a honeymoon photo from 1941 went viral in Albania and attracted accusations of fascist collaboration. Omar El Akkad's One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This responds to events in Gaza after 7 October 2023. Dina Nayeri calls it "a deft, broken-hearted, rhetorical savaging" of western liberalism's comfortable silence.

Holmes's The Boundless Deep reappraises young Tennyson — the "black-blooded" youth prone to "weird seizures" — rather than the laureate celebrity. Lucy Hughes-Hallett writes that Holmes "has given the great poet back to us".

Matthew Cobb's Crick captures the Nobel laureate as "loud-talking and charismatic, a philanderer, poetry lover and thrower of risque parties" who remade two scientific disciplines. Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares argue for halting AI development entirely in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies; David Shariatmadari notes their confirmation bias but concludes "everyone with an interest in the future has a duty to read" them.

Mark Ronson's Night People closes the list. Nosheen Iqbal finds a memoir driven less by hit-making than by crate-digging obsession — "for the accompanying soundtrack of deep cuts alone, Night People is well worth a spin".