Alice Hoffman moved 28 years later into a crowded September 8, 2026 release window with The Witches of Cambridge, a new novel from Scribner that reached readers as Practical Magic 2 reached theaters. For readers who follow Hoffman for witchcraft fiction, the timing puts a fresh book in front of the same audience looking for that lane in one week.
September 8 in Cambridge
The Witches of Cambridge does not continue the Owens sisters’ story. Hoffman instead sets the book in the 1950s, in Radcliffe and Cambridge, where two students, Ava and Lauren, enter the Lilith Society. Ava is the small-town one; Lauren is brazen. The setup gives the novel a new cast and a tighter institutional frame than a broad fantasy world, which is why it lands as a separate project rather than a sequel in everything but mood.
The release also arrives with another layer of visibility: The Witches of Cambridge was chosen as Read with Jenna’s September pick, and its audiobook is read by Mena Suvari. That combination matters for discoverability. One version lands in bookstores, another reaches listeners, and both arrive during the same month the title is being pushed through a book-club lane that can extend its shelf life beyond opening week.
Read with Jenna in September
The story’s setting leans on colonial Cambridge history, and the Lilith Society is described as a secret coven dating to that period. Hoffman then folds in classmates disappearing, which pushes the book away from pure atmosphere and toward an actual mystery. The broader frame also pulls in Salem witch-trial history and McCarthy-era fear of hidden enemies, so the novel is working in familiar American witchcraft and suspicion rather than inventing a world from scratch.
That is the friction in the timing. The book is presented as a fresh series, yet it arrives beside Practical Magic 2 and inside a seasonal moment that already belongs to witch stories. Hoffman’s sympathies are with the women history tried to erase, and the season seems built for that audience, but the overlap also means readers may treat The Witches of Cambridge as part of a larger pop-cultural wave even though it is not another chapter of the Owens sisters.
Mena Suvari and the audiobook
Mena Suvari’s narration gives the title a second entry point, which is the practical upside of a same-day book-and-film moment. If a reader wants the story now, the choice is simple: buy the novel, listen to the audiobook, or pick it up through Read with Jenna’s September selection. The cleaner read is that Hoffman used the September window to widen access, and in publishing, access is the lever that turns a release date into momentum.
