Buckeye by Patrick Ryan review – behind the American dream

This luminous and tender 20th-century saga of wounded souls and small-town secrets has a deep melancholy

Kathleen Folbigg’s memoir, an ode to condiments and ‘a work of art’: the best Australian books out in September

Each month Guardian Australia editors and critics pick the upcoming titles they have devoured – or can’t wait to get their hands on

Shamiso by Brian Chikwava review – a globe-trotting coming-of-age story

Though audaciously told, this portrait of a young woman’s twisty journey from Zimbabwe to Brighton doesn’t quite hang together

The Two Roberts by Damian Barr review – lost story of a gay art duo

The lives of Scottish artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, who found love and fame and lost it all, are vividly reimagined

The Hallmarked Man by Robert Galbraith review – a terrific, tightly plotted romp

With four murder inquiries in play, JK Rowling’s eighth Cormoran Strike novel avoids the page-padding longueurs of previous volumes – but will he finally tell Robin how he feels about her?

Vilhelm’s Room by Tove Ditlevsen review – a portrait of catastrophic mental illness

Originally published a year before her death, the Danish author’s final novel is an autofictional suicide note

‘They had everything, then nothing’: the prodigies the art world forgot

Robert Colquhoun and Bobby MacBryde were once the golden boys of London’s art scene – photographed in Vogue, filmed by Ken Russell and lauded by Francis Bacon. So why did they vanish into obscurity?

‘I have no interest in the white gaze any more’: Randa Abdel-Fattah on Gaza, boycotts and her new novel

Discipline follows a journalist and an academic navigating censorship in the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza – an issue the author is no stranger to herself

Rebecca F Kuang: ‘A Tale of Two Cities is deeply silly camp – I love it!’

The US writer on being switched on to romance by Sally Rooney, the magic of David Mitchell and the joy of Jean-Paul Sartre

Hailstones Fell without Rain by Natalia Figueroa Barroso review – a funny and tender debut

This exuberant novel, set in western Sydney and Uruguay, celebrates matrilineal connection over three generations of one family

Seascraper by Benjamin Wood review – a story that sings on the page

A young shrimp fisher’s horizons are broadened by the arrival of a stranger in this atmospheric Booker-listed tale

Ruth by Kate Riley review – a very different kind of candour

This unusual debut explores the inner life of a woman in an insular American religious community

False War by Carlos Manuel Álvarez review – a new vision of migration

A novel of interlocking stories captures the ordinary lives and interior worlds of Cuban exiles seeking sanctuary in Miami

Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin review – grasping the essence of horror

The Argentinian writer maps a journey through fear, healing and the terrifying permeability of our boundaries

The best recent translated fiction – review roundup

Discontent by Beatriz Serrano; Hunter by Shuang Xuetao; Blurred by Iris Wolff; Cooking in the Wrong Century by Teresa Präauer