Murmuration: What We Know About TJ Klune’s November Book

There is a new TJ Klune on 17 November, from Tor, in hardback, with a cover you have probably already seen on a preorder page.

It is not new. It came out in 2016.

Here is the truth: this is a ten-year-old novel returning under a bigger name, and the reason it left its first publisher is a better story than anything in the jacket copy.

The Reader’s Truth: “A book coming back is not the same as a book arriving. It is worth knowing which one you are buying.”

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The dates

Where	When
United States	17 November 2026 — Tor Books, 336 pages, hardback, $29.99
United Kingdom	19 November 2026 — Tor / Pan Macmillan, 336 pages, hardback

Two days apart, which for once is not enough of a gap to cause anyone trouble. Retailers are also already listing a US paperback for August 2027, if you would rather wait for it.

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What it is about

A temperate morning in 1954. Mike wakes up in Amorea, a small mountain town, and everything in it is perfect.

He works at the bookstore and leads the town’s book group. At the diner, Sean the waiter knows his order and has a particular smile for him, and after a long time of circling each other they are finally about to do something about it.

Then the edges start to fray. There are no children in Amorea and no parents either. Nobody who leaves for the far mountains comes back. Some of the faces in the diner photographs are ones only a few people can place.

And one night Mike wakes to a sky gone black with starlings, and begins to wonder whether his name is Mike.

Tor is selling it to readers of Severance, The Twilight Zone and Stephen King. That is a fair description of the register, and it is the last thing we are going to say about the plot.

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The part nobody is putting on the cover

Murmuration has been published three times.

Edition	Publisher	When	Pages
First	Dreamspinner Press	October 2016	324
Second	BOATK Books — Klune’s own imprint	November 2019	265
Third	Tor Books	November 2026	336

Tor’s own page for the book describes it as “now available in hardcover from Tor Books.” That phrasing is doing a lot of quiet work. It does not say when the book first appeared, or where, or why it moved. Pan Macmillan’s page does not mention it either.

The short version of why: in September 2019 Klune wrote on his own site that his publisher at the time, Dreamspinner Press, owed him nearly thirty thousand dollars and had not paid him, and that he was asking for the rights back to every book he had with them. He got them, put the books out himself, and over the last three years Tor has been picking them up one at a time. Murmuration is the latest.

That is compressed almost to the point of unfairness, and it deserves more room than a paragraph. The longer version is here — it involves a trade body, a bounced cheque, and a writer who specifically asked his readers not to go after the publisher.

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So do you already own this?

Quite possibly, and this is the bit no other preview will tell you.

The book has been continuously on sale since 2019 in Klune’s own edition. If you have read Murmuration, that is almost certainly the copy you read — not the rare 2016 one.

The page counts mean nothing. 324, then 265, then 336. A novel cannot lose a quarter of its length and then get it back. Those numbers are trim size and typesetting, nothing else.

Tor has not announced a revision. We looked at Tor’s page, Pan Macmillan’s page, the trade listing and the advance-copy reviews, and none of them says the text has changed. Advance readers know it is a republication — several say so — and not one of them mentions altered text.

What the precedent suggests. When Klune re-released the Green Creek books himself in 2019 he was explicit that there were no changes to the stories, only that every mention of the old publisher had been taken out. When Tor reissued The Bones Beneath My Skin in 2025, a reader comparing both editions found a new author’s note and nothing else worth remarking on.

So: expect a new cover, probably a new author’s note, possibly some bonus material. Do not expect a different book. If you already have it and you are not a completist, your money is fine where it is.

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If you are coming from The House in the Cerulean Sea, read this first

This is the thing to get right, because a lot of people are about to buy this on the author’s name alone.

The comedy is gone, and that is deliberate. Readers of the 2016 edition said plainly that it is not funny and is not trying to be. Advance readers of the Tor edition say the same, in almost the same words.

There is a sex scene on the page. Reviewers of the 2016 edition and of the Tor advance copies both mention it, and both describe it as explicit. It is one scene rather than a running feature, but this book comes out of the part of his career where that was the norm for the genre he was writing in, and it reads like it.

It is darker than the Tor books. Reviewers flag heavy swearing and instances of domestic violence. One reviewer who admired it is careful to add that the book is not violent or gruesome or gritty — the weight of it is psychological rather than graphic. Reader content notes vary a lot on this one, so if a particular subject matters to you, look at StoryGraph’s list before you buy rather than taking ours.

The ending does not tuck you in. Cerulean Sea‘s whole contract with the reader is a soft landing. Reviewers of this one reach for “bittersweet,” and some found the implications of the resolution harder to sit with afterwards than the suspense was during.

It repeats itself on purpose. The structure loops, and some readers find the first stretch slow before it pays off. On StoryGraph it averages well but splits opinion — though almost nobody abandons it, which tells you the slow part does eventually do its job.

None of that is a reason not to read it. It is a reason not to give it to your aunt who loved the one with the magical children.

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Should you preorder?

If you have never read it: yes, if the Twilight Zone comparison appeals, and if the content notes above do not put you off. It is the hardest thing he has written and a lot of people rate it above the cosy books.

If you already own the 2019 edition: probably not, unless you want the hardback on a shelf next to the rest of the Tor spines. Wait until someone who has both confirms whether anything changed.

If you are buying for someone else as a Christmas present: check which Klune they like first. This is not the gentle one.

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One thing we are not going to do

We have not read it, in any of its three editions.

So this is not a review. What we can do is tell you what it is, how old it is, which copy you may already own, and what it is going to feel like if you came here from a book about a man who learns to love six magical children. That seemed more useful than guessing whether it is good.

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The short version

• Murmuration, 17 November 2026 in the US (Tor, 336 pages, $29.99) and 19 November in the UK
• First published in October 2016 by Dreamspinner Press; self-published by Klune in 2019; this is the third edition
• Amorea, 1954. A bookseller, a waiter, a town with no children, and a sky full of starlings
• Standalone — no connection to The House in the Cerulean Sea or anything else
• Not a cosy book. Heavy swearing, domestic violence, a sex scene on the page, an ending that does not console
• No revision has been announced; expect a new cover and an author’s note, not a new text

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Have you read it in one of its earlier lives? If you have both editions, tell me whether anything moved — that is the one question about this book I genuinely cannot answer yet.

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Sources: Murmuration at Tor Books / Macmillan · Murmuration at Pan Macmillan UK · The 2016 Dreamspinner edition, reviewed at the time · TJ Klune on the rights reversion, September 2019 · TJ Klune on re-releasing Green Creek unchanged · Publishers Weekly on Dreamspinner Press