These are among the new titles with local themes or released by local writers, listed in alphabetical order by author names:
“What Matters Most: Lessons the Dying Teach Us About Living” by Diane Button
The Open FIeld, 256 pages, $29 hardcover, Sept. 16, 2025
Diane Button, a Marin County writer and educator and frequent podcast guest, is a founding partner of Bay Area End-of-Life Doula Alliance in Northern California. She works with people who are dying and their families, offering practical, emotional and spiritual assistance and advice. The author of “The Doula Tool Kit” and “Dear Death” follows with “What Matters Most,” in which she shares personal stories, reflections and lessons she learned from real people who are dying. She has said, “The biggest takeaway from the book is to not be afraid to lean into conversations around end of life and to think about your own end of life. Because, really, talking about death is talking about life.” Maria Shriver said of Button and the new title: “The insights she has learned from her clients will bring you peace and remind you that it is never too late to work towards a meaningful life.”
“California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature” by John Freeman
Heyday, 400 pages, $30, Oct. 14, 2025
John Freeman, a New Yorker, is the former editor of the literary magazine Granta; Freeman’s, an annual of new writing, from 2015–23; a poet who authored three collections; executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf; and host of Alta‘s California Book Club since its establishment in 2020. In “California Rewritten: A Journey Through the Golden State’s New Literature,” he surveys major voices and modern-day classics of the West Coast literary scene, rectifying, as his publisher Heyday says, California’s status as “undersung” and “left to languish in the shadow of the East Coast’s literary hegemony.” Writers in Freeman’s focus include novelists Percival Everett, Rachel Khong and Viet Thanh Nguyen, memoirists Deborah Miranda, Javier Zamora and Maxine Hong Kingston and many more. Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of “The Man Who Could Move Clouds,” says of “California Rewritten”: “Freeman writes with singular precision and intelligence about new California literature, animating that mysterious relationship that unfolds when a writer’s imagination engages with place. In Freeman’s hands, California is a literary mecca, and each essay a revelation.”
“The Wayfinder: A Novel” by Adam Johnson
MCD, 736 pages, $30, Oct. 14, 2025
Adam Johnson, a former journalist, English professor at Stanford University and San Francisco resident, was born in South Dakota. The Pulitzer Prize winner for the 2012 novel “The Orphan Master’s Son” and National Book Award for 2015’s story collection “Fortune Smiles” is also the author of 2025’s “The Wayfarers: A Novel.” Described as an epic of historical fiction in the style of James Michener or Ken Follett, the book follows a royal family in Tonga amid political upheaval, and a young woman living on an impoverished island. The New York Times said of the book: “A powerful and original epic . . . Deadly politics, tragic romance and dangerous sea journeys keep the drama at a spirited boil.”
“Tread Lightly” by Elizabeth Kemp
Sibylline Digital First, 305 pages, $5.99 Kindle edition, Oct. 10, 2025
Elizabeth Kemp, a California native and Silicon Valley resident living with her high-school-sweetheart husband, worked in high-tech marketing and communications before becoming a stay-at-home mom and full-time writer. She writes blog Litetherapy offering “wellness insights to make life a little brighter” and her debut novel “Tread Lightly” is about a former hostage negotiator from Ireland whose new domestic life as a Silicon Valley housewife is interrupted when a lifeguard’s dead body is found in the public pool where she swims. Carinn Jade, author of “The Astrology House,” says of “Tread Lightly”: “The past and the present, the domestic and the professional, all come crashing into each other in this taut and emotional story. Kemp taps into the heartache of motherhood and the danger of crime in a debut that will make you do anything other than tread lightly.”
“Good Things: Recipes and Rituals to Share with People You Love: A Cookbook” by Samin Nosrat
Random House, 464 pages, $30, Sept. 16, 2025
Samin Nosrat, a Persian-American chef and cooking teacher who lives in Oakland, got her start in the restaurant industry working at Chez Panisse in Berkeley before writing the James Beard Award-winning cookbook “Salt Fat Acid Heat,” hosting of a Netflix series of the same name and writing a column for the New York Times. Her new volume “Good Things Recipes and Rituals to Share with People You Love: A Cookbook” has instructions on how to make more than 100 dishes she has prepared for herself and her friends. Booklist says of the title: “For Nosrat, cooking is about sharing time and attention with the people in our lives—and paying attention to details that take foods from simple to sublime.”
“The Life Machines: How Taking Care of Your Mitochondria Can Transform Your Health” by Daria Mochly-Rosen and Emanuel Rosen
S&S/Simon Element, ‘304 pages, $29, Oct. 14, 2025
Daria Mochly-Rosen, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine who has founded several biotech companies and developed treatments, works to demystify science to help people make educated decisions about their health. She lives in Menlo Park with her husband Emanuel Rosen, author of the bestselling “The Anatomy of Buzz,” and a former executive at Niles Software, where he launched a software to writers in managing bibliographies and references. The coauthors of “The Life Machines: How Taking Care of Your Mitochondria Can Transform Your Health” describe how organelles, known as “powerhouses of the cell,” orchestrate critical functions, and offer tips on how people can get and stay healthy through lifestyle changes that affect how mitochondria operate. Physician and bestselling author Abraham Verghese said, “Mitochondria have always intrigued me because evolution suggests they were once ancient bacteria that we somehow internalized for mutual benefit. In the last few years, we have learned they are so much more than energy machines and that they can cause a host of diseases when dysfunctional. Using case studies and cogent descriptions of scientific breakthroughs, ‘The Life Machines’ explores this mysterious resident of our every cell. It makes for a great read.”
“The Covert Pioneer” by S. Lucia Kanter St. Amour
Pactum Factum Press, 388 pages, $35 hardcover, $20 paper, Oct. 13, 2025
S. Lucia Kanter St. Amour, a resident of San Francisco’s North Beach whose Italian family has lived in the neighborhood for generations, is an attorney, founder of a nonprofit providing services for autistic children and their families, and writer. Her sixth title, the historical novel “The Covert Pioneer,” is about two trailblazers separated by a century. Theodora “Teddy” Ellis is a pioneering miner, suffragist and San Francisco real estate developer in the 19th century; Georgina “Ellie” Benvenuto is a divorced climate migrant attorney and single mother to a child with disabilities whose connection to a long-forgotten heirloom of Teddy’s holds the key to a pivotal legal case. Publisher Weekly’s BookLife said the book “stands as a powerful testament to women who make history and refuse to be written out of it, urging readers to recognize that the past is not static, but something we must continuously confront and renew.”
“Shipyard Gals” by Valerie Stoller
Sibylline Press, 325 pages, $6 Kindle edition, $21 paperback, Oct. 25, 2025
Valerie Stoller, an Oakland resident who grew up in New Jersey, went to college in Ohio and was a nurse practitioner for 20 years, is the author of the debut novel “Shipyard Gals.” Set in 1944, it follows the adventures of three women working in a California wartime shipyard: Elena, an outspoken journalist desperate to find work and send money home to her family in El Salvador; Rachel, a naïve nurse determined to prove herself at the chaotic shipyard clinic; and Ruby Mae, a young Black woman from Louisiana who discovers that the Bay Area isn’t an escape from racism. Their world is rocked in the wake of the explosion at Port Chicago naval base which killed more than 300 people. Julia Park Tracey, author of “The Bereaved” and “Silence,” says, “Stoller honors the legacy of the real Rosie the Riveter workers who shaped American history with courage and skill. ‘Shipyard Gals’ is both moving and vital. Valerie Stoller has given voice to the working women whose stories still echo today.”
“Love Rebels: How I Learned to Burn It Down Without Burning Out” by Kitty Stryker
Thornapple Press, 204 pages, $24.95, Oct. 17, 2025
Kitty Stryker, a Berkeley activist, writer and sex educator in the LGBTQ+ community, is particularly interested in bringing conversations about consent and critical thinking into everyday life. The devoted cat mom, the author of “Say More: Consent Conversations for Teens” and “Ask Yourself: The Consent Culture Workbook,” has a new memoir/guidebook. In “Love Rebels: How I Learned to Burn It Down Without Burning Out,” she emphasizes that without taking care of interpersonal relationships, many people burn out of activism at the very time when more people are needed on the ground. A reader on Goodreads said of the book: “This is an empowering, thoughtful read that reminds us there are countless ways to contribute to meaningful change.”
“Switch” by Lisa Towles
Indies United Publishing House, 310 pages, $4 Kindle, $33 hardcover, Sept. 30, 2025
Lisa Towles, an Oakland resident and full-time tech industry worker, is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime and International Thriller Writers. The author of 13 crime novels, her new book “Switch” is the last of the three-book E&A Investigations Thriller Series which follows the private investigation team of Mari Ellwyn and Derek Abernathy in international settings. In “Switch,” which addresses quantum computing and corporate espionage, the team investigates bank robberies linked to a missing body and a vanished medical examiner in a case that ignites Mari’s personal quest to confront a nemesis and her father’s past. Publishers Weekly said of “Hot House,” the first in the series: “The page-turning twists keep coming as do welcome doses of humor. Fans of bantering sleuth duos will be eager for the next book.”
“You Could Be Happy Here” by Erin Van Rheenen
Sibylline Press, 262 pages, $20, Sept. 16, 2025
Erin Van Rheenen of San Francisco is a writer, teacher and traveler who says, “My life has been an effort to see the beauty in being upended. Life upends us all, again and again. I seek to claim my upendedness as a good thing. And to write about it.” The former science writer at San Francisco’s Exploratorium also is the author of “Living Abroad Costa Rica” and the bilingual (English/Spanish) children’s book “The Manatee’s Big Day.” Her debut novel “You Could Be Happy Here,” about a Northern California woman who heads to Costa Rica in search of her phantom father, addresses the question: How far would you go to find your true home? Gail Tsukiyama, author of “The Samurai’s Garden,” calls it an “auspicious” debut and “a wonderfully insightful story of one woman’s journey of discovery filled with humor, intriguing facts and common sense” in which “the reader soon learns that humanity and the natural world are more alike than we know.”
The post Bay City Books: New books from local authors — September-October 2025 appeared first on Local News Matters.