WHAT’S PUBLISHING THIS AUTUMN AT ICON BOOKS
Posted on 2025/09/11 , tagged as
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Grab your blankets and order those pumpkin spice lattes because cosy season has officially begun! As the weather grows colder, it’s finally time to swap beach towels for woolly jumpers and update our Autumn TBR lists. In order to celebrate two of our brilliant September reads coming out today, we’re giving you the comprehensive list of everything we’re publishing this season. Get excited!
Just click on the links to buy or pre-order your favourites, and make sure that you follow us on X and Instagram @iconbooks to share what you’re cosying up with this Autumn.
WHAT’S NEW THIS SEPTEMBER
The African Emperor: The Life of Septimius Severus by Simon Elliott (11th September 2025)
Septimius Severus was Rome’s black emperor. Born in the blistering heat of a North African spring in Leptis Magna, AD 145, he died in the freezing cold of a northern British winter in York in AD 211. A giant of an emperor, whose career can be counted in superlatives, Severus was in power at the height of Rome’s might. He led the largest army to ever campaign in Britain, comprising 50,000 men, part of a Roman military establishment which peaked at 33 legions under his rule.
Born into the richest family, in the richest part of the Roman Empire, Severus monumentalised his rule across the empire. He visited – and often fought in – every region. Where he did, he left a mighty legacy in the built environment, for example in Rome where much of the forum Romanum and most of the imperial palaces are Severan. In North Africa, his hometown of Leptis Magna is all Severan, as are the Roman cities in the Atlas Mountains. In London, the land walls that still define the City’s Square Mile were delineated under his rule. Visitors to the undercroft at York Minster can stand where he died.
Septimius Severus was one of the greatest warrior emperors, a hard man who almost died in battle several times and whose attitude is reflected in his deathbed advice to two sons: ‘Be of one mind with your family, enrich the soldiers, and despise the rest.’
Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism by Thea Riofrancos (25th September 2025)
An in-depth investigation into the growing industry of green technologies and the environmental, social, and political consequences of the mining it requires.
In the fight against climate change, lithium’s role in reducing emissions by powering green economies is a mixed blessing. Drawing on groundbreaking fieldwork in Chile, Nevada, and Portugal, Thea Riofrancos explores the environmental and social costs of the global race to expand lithium mining amid supply chain concerns. With haunting descriptions of vulnerable ecosystems, she examines how mining harms landscapes, provokes protest, takes centre stage in national politics, and links countries on the peripheries of the world economy to huge corporations, commodity markets, and powerful investors. Riofrancos traces the history of global extraction from colonial conquest to the 1970s energy crisis to the still-uncertain green future.
While an unregulated mining boom could inflict irreversible harm, Riofrancos offers compelling ideas about how to harmonize climate action with social justice. Across the world’s extractive frontiers, we encounter the most brutal aspects of capitalism – but also witness inspiring visions for our future planet.
The Wireless Operator: The Untold Story of the British Sailor Who Invented the Modern Drug Trade by David Tuch (25th September 2025)
Government agencies and rival factions were closing in. His look-alike had already fallen victim to professional hitmen and his once-powerful allies in Cuban intelligence and the DEA could no longer guarantee his safety. How did a boy from Manchester revolutionise the criminal world and become the largest marijuana trafficker in American history?
This is the never-before-told story of Harold Derber, the debonair British Merchant Navy veteran who pioneered the modern drug trade with his groundbreaking invention: the drug mothership. Through his ghost fleet of drug ships, Derber eventually became the chief supplier of marijuana to post-war America. This gripping true tale follows Derber from humble beginnings in Manchester, England, to his assassination in the sun-kissed streets of Miami. Along the way, Derber’s story takes in some of the most significant events of the twentieth century – the Second World War’s Battle of the Atlantic, the Cuban Revolution and the murky shadows of the Cold War.
Based on newly declassified government files, undercover photographs, an unpublished memoir, and first-hand accounts from both Derber’s trafficking accomplices and the agents who pursued them, The Wireless Operatorreveals the astonishing origins of the modern narcotics trade. Bringing his extraordinary life into focus for the first time, this gripping transatlantic tale offers a complex portrait of a singular criminal mastermind who operated at the fault lines of state power, secrecy, and organized crime – and whose legacy still echoes in today’s global war on drugs.
COMING IN PAPERBACK IN SEPTEMBER 2025
To Catch a Spy: How the Spycatcher Affair Brought MI5 in from the Cold by Tim Tate (11th September 2025)
The Spycatcher affair remains one of the most intriguing moments in the history of British intelligence and a pivotal point in the public’s relationship with the murky world of espionage and security. It lifted the lid on alleged Soviet infiltration of British services and revealed a culture of law-breaking, bugging and burgling. But how much do we know about the story behind the scandal?
In To Catch a Spy, Tim Tate reveals the astonishing true story of the British government’s attempts to silence whistleblower Peter Wright and hide the truth about Britain’s intelligence services and political elites. It’s a story of state-sanctioned cover-up plots; of the government lying to Parliament and courts around the world; and of stories leaked with the intention to mislead and deceive.
This is a tale of high treason and low farce. Drawing on thousands of pages of previously unpublished court transcripts, the contents of secret British government files, and original interviews with many of the key players in the Spycatcher trials, it draws back the curtain on a hidden world. A world where spies, politicians and Britain’s most senior civil servants conspired to ride roughshod over the law, prevented the public from hearing about their actions and mounted a cynical conspiracy to deceive the world. It is the story of Peter Wright’s ruthless and often lawless obsession to uncover Russian spies, both real and imagined, his belated determination to reveal the truth and the lengths to which the British government would go to silence him.
The Vagina Business: The Innovative Breakthroughs that Could Change Everything in Women’s Health by Marina Gerner (25th September 2025)
WINNER OF THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD
This tech could change everything for women – here’s how.
From periods and childbirth to menopause, female pain has been normalized, as society shrugs and says ‘welcome to being a woman’ instead of coming up with better solutions. But it doesn’t have to be this way. In The Vagina Business, award-winning journalist Marina Gerner takes an eye-opening look at the innovators challenging the status quo to deliver the healthcare solutions women need.
With interviews from 100 entrepreneurs, researchers and investors across 15 countries, The Vagina Businessexplores the future of women’s health, where female-focused companies are developing products to help women at every stage of life. From a life-saving bra to non-hormonal contraception and new takes on fertility and menopause, it shines a light on innovation that matters. Women should not be denied solutions to health issues just because people are embarrassed to talk about vaginas. We deserve much better.
WHAT’S NEW THIS OCTOBER
From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads: A Bowie Odyssey by James Briggs (9th October 2025)
James Briggs had never known what David Bowie’s Life on Mars? meant. And twenty-five years later with a career stealing his soul, a relationship in stasis and a hairline in furious retreat, life on earth had him cornered.
So when a lightning bolt of inspiration strikes, he leaves everything behind to cycle one of the song’s lyrics, ‘From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads’ to discover what life, love and Life on Mars? really mean.
What followed was life-affirming, inspirational and often hilarious. Criss-crossing Europe, he visited French chateaus where Bowie recorded, Spanish Olympic stadiums he played, former communist states where his music was banned, and the Berlin Wall he helped topple – all while navigating angry Soviet ballerinas, suspicious village mayors, and an irate Cliff Richard fan.
James found kindred spirits and a new love (and occasionally hatred) for cycling as he discovered what happens when, instead of following the crowd, you follow the lyrics and music of the greatest artist of the 20th century. As the world reconsiders its priorities, From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads is a clarion call to embrace the strange, blaze your own path, and live as fearlessly as the Starman himself.
Bible Stories: Fact, Fiction and Fantasy in Scripture by Gavin Evans (23rd October 2025)
Beginning with the rise of modern Pentecostalism before tracking back 2,500 years, author and academic Gavin Evans traces the history of the Abrahamic faiths, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In this book he explores the New Testament, Hebrew Bible and the Qur’an.
Delving into recent archaeological research, Bible Stories presents evidence that tales such as those of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and also Moses, Joshua and the Exodus, were entirely mythological. Robust interrogation of the evidence allows Evans to go further still, casting doubt on the Jesus story and arguing that even if he did exist as a historical figure, we know next to nothing about him.
As well as examining these key religious texts, Bible Stories also holds modern atheism to account. Critiquing the work of some of its most ardent advocates, Evans rejects a militant approach and makes a compelling argument for a softer, more tolerant atheism.
The Multiverse: When One Universe Isn’t Enough by Brian Clegg (23rd October 2025)
The universe was supposed to be all there was – the whole of existence. For centuries the size of the universe and whether or not it is finite fascinated scientists and philosophers.
But however big the universe may be, there being only one gave astronomers and cosmologists a headache. Existence as we know it is contingent on so many constants in nature which, if altered only slightly, would make life impossible. This seems so unlikely to happen by chance. What if, instead, there is in fact a vast range of different universes, with many variants of the universal contents, making ours just one of many that happens to be viable for life?
In this illuminating exploration, Brian Clegg delves into the endless possibilities of the multiverse. Investigating questions of expanding, parallel and communicating universes, this accessible guide takes the reader into one of the weirdest and most exciting areas of modern physics and cosmology.
COMING IN PAPERBACK IN OCTOBER 2025
The Frighteners: Why We Love Monsters, Ghosts, Death & Gore by Peter Laws (9th October 2025)
From the mind behind YouTube sensation Into the Fog with Peter Laws.
The Frighteners follows the quest of Peter Laws, a Baptist minister with a penchant for the macabre, to understand why so many people love things that are spooky, morbid and downright repellent. He meets vampires, hunts werewolves in Hull, talks to a man who has slept on a mortuary slab to help him deal with a diagnosis, and is chased by a chainsaw-wielding maniac through a farmhouse full of hanging bodies.
Staring into the darkness of a Transylvanian night, he asks: What is it that makes millions of people seek to be disgusted and freaked out? And, in a world that worships rationality and points an accusing finger at violent video games and gruesome films, can an interest in horror culture actually give us safe ways to confront our mortality? Might it even have power to re-enchant our jaded world?
Grab your crucifixes, pack the silver bullets, and join the Sinister Minister on his romp into our morbid curiosities.
A Very British Cult: Rogue Priests and the Abode of Love by Stuart Flinders (9th October 2025)
A secluded country house. A rogue Anglican priest. Ceremonial sex and mislaid fortunes.
This is the almost-forgotten story of Victorian Britain’s strangest religious sect and its wealthy, mostly female, followers who believed they could ascend directly to heaven. Henry James Prince was a rogue Anglican priest with a flare for the dramatic, and the founder of the Agapemone, or ‘Abode of Love’. He also claimed to be the immortal conduit of the Holy Spirit and purportedly engaged in free love and ceremonial sex with his female followers. But Prince’s eventual death didn’t mark the end of this strange sect… he was promptly replaced by another: John Hugh Smyth-Pigott – otherwise known as the Clapton Messiah.
The Abode transformed a sleepy, rural corner of Somerset into one of England’s most notorious locations. While the followers shut themselves away and waited patiently for the end of the world, outrage grew – the word ‘Agapemone’ became a byword for licentiousness or idleness, used by Charles Dickens and Ford Madox Ford. The reclusive Clapton Messiah became a fixture in the nation’s papers, with frenzied efforts to discredit the organisation and undermine its leader. And still the cult grew.
Expertly drawing on primary sources to tell the story of the Agapemonites in detail for the first time, Stuart Flinders shines a light on the people drawn to the cult – the forced marriages; the swindled fortunes; the women condemned to asylums; and those who managed to escape from the Abode. It is also the story of two extraordinary men, whose claims of divinity were at the heart of this very British cult.
How to Rob the Bank of England: Keith Cheeseman Reveals the True Story of Britain’s Biggest Ever Robbery by Clifford Thurlow (23rd October 2025)
On a sunny May morning in 1990, a bank courier strode out of the Bank of England and, minutes later, was robbed at knifepoint of 301 bearer bonds valued at £292 million. It was the biggest theft in British history.
The thing is… when Keith Cheeseman received a call from a disbarred lawyer connected to London’s underworld and attended a meeting on the night of the robbery, he counted £427 million in bonds – £135 million more than the Bank of England had reported.
As Keith set out to launder the bonds, Scotland Yard and the FBI were always one step ahead in tracking them down. Over the next eighteen months, two gangland figures were shot dead and more than eighty people were arrested. Keith was the only man ever jailed for the crime.
Keith Cheeseman is the last of the old-time gangsters, a con man who detests violence, wears Savile Row suits and gold watches, and loves classic cars and good dining. He bought non-league Dunstable Town football club and signed Manchester United star George Best to play for the team. He knew the legendary Kray twins and killer Frankie Fraser once threatened to snuff him out over a game of chess.
So what happened to the missing £135 million?
In this breath-taking adventure, featuring colourful characters from showbusiness alongside royalty, the IRA and even Pablo Escobar, Clifford Thurlow reveals Keith Cheeseman’s incredible true story for the first time.
WHAT’S NEW THIS NOVEMBER
Another Bone-Swapping Event by Brad Fox (6th November 2025)
Brad Fox takes us on a wild exploration of plants and people, imagination and matter, over an unexpected year-long waylay in the high jungle of northeastern Peru.
In Another Bone-Swapping Event, Brad Fox tells the story of a year he spent stuck in the high jungles of Peru living with a family of Quechua-speaking curanderos responsible for a hundred-hectare stretch of jungle four hours’ walk from the nearest dirt road. In the care of local maestro Miguel Tapullima, Fox gets a crash course in traditional medicine and takes readers on a labyrinthine tour, in turn contemplative and comic, navigating the coexisting realities of the human and more-than-human world.
Through it all, the lush prose that made The Bathysphere Book so distinct turns this book into its own rich and multi-layered experience, because with Brad Fox as our guide we’re able to stretch our minds to encompass histories and meanings, metaphysical questions at the base of phenomena, and the shattering ironies of the moment, all during peak COVID, when no one knew how our collective future might unfold.
Pregnancy and Birth: A Graphic Guide by Laura Godfrey-Isaacs, illustrated by Lilly Williams (6th November 2025)
‘A must-read for anyone navigating pregnancy and parenthood’
Sandra Igwe, founder of The Motherhood Group and author of My Black Motherhood: Mental Health, Stigma, Racism and the System
‘Truly brilliant’
Laura Dockrill, author of What Have I Done
Midwife and award-winning author Laura Godfrey-Isaacs, alongside illustrator Lilly Williams, celebrates the beauty and science of pregnancy and birth.
This accessible and approachable book is the perfect guide for expectant parents, as well as anybody interested in knowing more about how we are brought into the world.
Covering everything from contractions and fetal positioning to feeding and postnatal care, Pregnancy and Birth: A Graphic Guide emphasises the importance of the physical and mental health of mothers and babies while offering a clear and concise insight into the many issues that surround this exciting, but sometimes overwhelming, stage of life.
The Man Who Sold Honours: The First Modern Cash for Honours Scandal by Stephen Bates (20th November 2025)
Paying for a peerage – an illegal practice – feels like a very modern form of corruption, one that both the Labour and Conservative parties have been accused of indulging in at times during the early twenty-first century. Except, of course, it was happening almost a century ago.
Meet Maundy Gregory, actor, journalist, publishing proprietor, conman, embezzler, MI5 spy – and the man you went to see if you had the money to pay for a peerage in the post-First World War years.
Cutting a dash across high society of the 1920s – he was in attendance at the wedding of the future George VI – the immaculately oiled and overdressed Gregory would happily pocket thousands for playing Mr Fixit for wannabe knights and lords, and swell the coffers of Lloyd George’s Liberal Party to millions of pounds.
Business was brisk, and business was brazen. Visitors to his lavish office on Parliament Street, with a direct line to ‘Number 10’, would be wined and dined and, after paying up, leave satisfied that they would be next on the list for a knighthood or barony. Nothing could be guaranteed, of course, and it was a strictly no refunds business.
But Gregory was also suspected of being something else, to add to his impressive list of accomplishments: a murderer. As the political winds changed, the debts mounted up and the walls closed in around him, he somehow managed to inherit his mistress’s not inconsiderable savings when she scribbled a new will on the back of a menu and was suddenly taken ill …
In The Man Who Sold Honours, Stephen Bates lifts the lid on the truth about this long-forgotten character who remains the only person ever to be prosecuted under the sale of honours act of 1925. A powerful preview of the scandals to come in Britain in recent years, this is the story of the original honours tout – a riches-to-rags tale of greed, corruption and murder in the interwar years.
COMING IN PAPERBACK IN NOVEMBER 2025
The Baton and the Cross: Russia’s Church from Pagans to Putin by Lucy Ash (6th November 2025)
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2025*
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE PUSHKIN HOUSE BOOK PRIZE 2025*
*ONE OF HISTORY TODAY’S BEST BOOKS OF 2024*
*’A TIMELY AND IMPORTANT BOOK’ – ORLANDO FIGES*
*’SPELLBINDING’ – ANDREI KURKOV*
For more than a millennium, the Russian Orthodox Church has shown astonishing survival skills – from the Mongol yoke to tsarist demagoguery and enlightenment, from Soviet atheism to the chaotic 1990s. Now again, it is at the right hand of power, sanctifying Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
In this provocative new book, Lucy Ash reveals how, under Putin, religion is being stripped of its spiritual content and used as a weapon to control the population. Orthodox clerics and their acolytes distort theology as they preach Slav Christian supremacy and drag Russia backwards into a new Middle Ages.
Combining historical research with vivid present-day reportage, The Baton and the Cross explores the impact the Church is having on millions of lives – from the tower blocks of big cities to far-flung villages in Siberia. Delving into the underbelly of politics, state security and big money, Ash shows how these forces have formed an unholy alliance with Orthodoxy in the dystopia of twenty-first century Russia.
Conundrum: Crack the Ultimate Cipher Challenge by Brian Clegg (6th November 2025)
The ultimate trial of knowledge and cunning, Conundrum features 200 cryptic puzzles and ciphers. The solutions link throughout the book so you need to solve them all to get to the final round.
With a focus on ciphers and codebreaking, Conundrum contains twenty sections, each built around a specific subject from music to literature, physics to politics. To take on Conundrum you need good general knowledge and the ability to think laterally. But if you need help, there are plenty of hints to point you in the right direction.
Whether you attempt to crack it alone or work in a team, Conundrum will challenge you to the extreme.
Traitor’s Odyssey: The Untold Story of Martha Dodd and a Strange Saga of Soviet Espionage by Brendan McNally (20th November 2025)
‘A delicious, gossipy and thoroughly engaging romp … heartily recommended.’ Tim Tate, author of Hitler’s British Traitors and The Spy Who Was Left Out in the Cold
Ambassador’s daughter, Nazi love interest, Soviet spy, FBI most wanted.
Accompanying her parents to Berlin in the 1930s, Martha Dodd knew almost nothing about Adolf Hitler or the Nazis. Yet almost overnight, she stepped into the spotlight, and found herself at the over-heated centre of Hitler’s ‘New Germany’, befriending and dating several high-ranking Nazis, including the head of the Gestapo.
An affair with a dashing Russian diplomat saw her recruited as a spy, and so began a long and tumultuous career in both Berlin and America, including attempts to infiltrate First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s inner circle and playing a key role in Henry Wallace’s disastrous 1948 presidential campaign.
Betrayed by a Hollywood-hustler-turned-double-agent, Martha spent years under deep FBI surveillance – escaping twice – and went to ground in Cold War Prague, sad, lonely, rich and bored, living out her final decades in a Communist Sunset Boulevard.
Largely forgotten, Martha Dodd began to emerge as an iconic historical figure in the early 2000s. While her scandalous behaviour and pro-Soviet leanings were never much in dispute, the actual matter of her guilt remained unresolved. Now, using recently released KGB archived information and FBI files, author and journalist Brendan McNally sets the record straight in Traitor’s Odyssey, telling the full epic tale of Martha Dodd’s life for the first time, casting her in a new and bright light.
