When an aging poet realizes her critical acclaim hasn’t translated into financial stability, she agrees to train a poetry AI program named Charlotte on the campus of a California technology company. For a week she struggles with questions about art, family and connection.
Astra House, Sept. 5
Smith’s new novel is about a trial that divided Victorian England, in which a lower-class Australian butcher claimed the right to a vast estate. This wandering work of historical fiction examines who has the right to tell a story, who is taken seriously and who is remembered.
Penguin Press, Sept. 5
Holly, by Stephen King
Private investigator Holly Gibney appeared in ‘The Outsider’, ‘Mr. Mercedes” and other novels, and King has said she “stole” his heart. Now she takes center stage as she tries to find a missing girl and uncover the gruesome secret of two retired professors.
Scribner, Sept. 5
Dey’s third novel follows Mona, whose father is a novelist. After he makes her an accomplice in an affair with his publicist, the other women in her family hold her responsible. Jumping between Mona’s story and her family’s, Dey explores alienation from multiple perspectives as decades of betrayal pile up.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sept. 12
In the aftermath of the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London and the death of her estranged husband, a woman named Alice considers returning to Nigeria in hopes of leaving behind the “discord about place” she feels with Britain. to let go.
Pantheon, September 12
Atkinson’s first short story collection in years contains eleven coherent selections reminiscent of fairy tales. They are populated by a recurring cast of characters: the dissolute, aimless Franklin Fletcher; Princess Aoife; Dame Phoebe Hope-Waters; and a chorus of talking animals.
Double day, September 12
Rouge, by Mona Awad
In this gothic tale set in contemporary Los Angeles, a young woman mourns her beauty-obsessed mother and is saddled with her debts. Eventually, she becomes entangled in the cult-like spa that took her mother’s life.
Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci, Sept. 12
Groff’s new novel is a wilderness epic about a maid who must survive a bitter winter after fleeing a colonial settlement in 17th century Virginia.
Riverhead, Sept. 12
The Young Man, by Annie Ernaux. Translated by Alison L. Strayer.
Ernaux received the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, becoming the first Frenchwoman to receive the prize. This book describes an affair she had in her fifties with a much younger man, which led her to revisit how her own life unfolded: “With him I traveled through all ages of life, my life.”
Seven stories, September 12
The year is 1978 and the All-American Sex Killer, as the criminal is called in the papers, is on a killing spree. After a pair of young women go missing in Seattle and a college girl finds two of her sorority sisters dead in Tallahassee, two women linked by tragedy embark on a joint mission to catch the culprit.
Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci, Sept. 19
mr. Texas, by Lawrence Wright
Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has lived in Texas for many years, tells a satirical story about the politics of his state. After Sonny’s heroic actions during a fire, a lobbyist approaches him to run for his district’s seat in the Texas state legislature. As Sonny, who values doing the right thing, ventures deeper into his campaign, he must decide how far he’s willing to go to move forward and save his ranch (and his marriage).
Knopf, Sept. 19
Night’s Watch, by Jayne Anne Phillips
At the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia – which operates on Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride – 12-year-old ConaLee and her mother take their lives back in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Knopf, Sept. 19
The Pole, by JM Coetzee
This new book by the Nobel laureate traces the ever-evolving power imbalance in a love affair between a Polish pianist, Wittold Walccyzkiecz, and his lover Beatriz, a married philanthropist.
Liveright, Sept. 19
Hill (known for his earlier book ‘The Nix’) tells the story of Jack and Elizabeth’s marriage, from their courtship on the Chicago art scene in the 1990s to their life as parents decades later. According to Hill, the novel is most concerned with the question, “How far can something change before it is no longer fundamentally itself?”
Knopf, Sept. 19
In a version of the future where the world is blanketed in smog and everyday foods (even fresh strawberries) have become scarce, a young chef travels to a mountain colony on the Italian-French border to cook meals with rare ingredients for the ultra-rich . There she rediscovers the joys of food and forms a curious bond with her boss’s daughter.
Riverhead, Sept. 26
Eli and Elizabeth are a couple living in Bulgaria, but one day Eli leaves the apartment and discovers that he is in his wife’s body – and that his wife, presumably in his body, is missing. As Eli searches for his wife across Europe, he reexamines his marriage, his experiences, and even the basics of his identity.
HarperVia, Sept. 26
Mathis follows three generations of a black family in 1985. Ava Carson moves to a Philadelphia shelter after leaving an abusive marriage along with her son Toussaint. In Alabama, Ava’s estranged mother is a once-promising blues singer whose hometown is rapidly changing. But when Toussaint’s father, Cass – a Black Panther – returns to town with a vision to build a local health clinic and commune, he brings hope and a sense of danger.
Knopf, Sept. 26
Lethem’s latest work spans nearly 100 years and looks at the neighborhood through a lens of the crimes – both literal and figurative – that underlie its gentrification.
Ecco, October 3
The Maniac, by Benjamin Labatut
Labatut’s first novel, written in English, is a trio of stories about true geniuses and scientific breakthroughs that disrupted the fabric of human reality. His subjects include Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest; Johnny von Neumann, who worked on the Manhattan Project; and Lee Sodol, a South Korean master of the game of Go, who retired in 2016 after being defeated by artificial intelligence.
Penguin Press, Oct. 3
The unnamed narrator first met Juan while undergoing treatment in a mental hospital. Ten years later, Juan dies and the narrator has volunteered to complete his investigation. Scattered throughout the book are excerpts from a fictional biography, poems, and playful references to queer art and literature.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, October 10
Yoon’s poignant, evocative new collection focuses on themes such as migration, displacement, collective memory and the Korean diaspora.
Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci, Oct. 10
Jasmine arrives in the United States in search of her daughter, whom her abusive husband gave up for adoption. She soon finds out that the child has been taken in by a wealthy publishing family in New York and becomes their nanny. As a cocktail waitress, she balances paying off her debts to the human traffickers who brought her to America, and must fight threats that could reveal her secret.
Tomorrow, October 10
When Dani realizes that she and her daughter would be in financial trouble without her husband’s income, she takes a job at the Temple—a local yoga center that could also be a brothel—under the leadership of its leader, Renata. But then Renata disappears, and it’s up to Dani to find her.
Vintage, October 10
This sequel to Grisham’s 1991 novel, “The Firm,” revisits attorney Mitch McDeere in the years since he and his wife, Abby, exposed a Memphis law firm’s ties to the criminal underworld. Now, 15 years later, Mitch is a partner at one of New York’s largest law firms. After a friend is kidnapped in Libya, a hostage negotiation puts him at the center of an international emergency.
Double day, October 17
Tremor, by Teju Cole
Composed of vignettes, Cole’s new novel follows a weekend through the eyes of Tunde, a Nigerian photography professor, as he meditates on art, race and history.
Random House, October 17
Revenge is mine, by Marie NDiaye. Translated by Jordan Stump.
Maître Susane is a lawyer who lives quietly in Bordeaux until a man approaches her with the request: can she represent his wife, who is accused of murdering their children? With the case threatening to disrupt her life, she wonders if she knows this man from her past.
Knopf, October 17
This is the first novel in 20 years by O’Brien, winner of the National Book Award and best known for his 1990 collection, The Things They Carried. The story is a madcap robbery/road trip starring a bank robber (who used to be a journalist) and his hot-tempered hostage Angie. The chase is followed by a bumbling private investigator, drug-driven billionaire and wannabe Charles Manson.
Zeeman, October 24
Ward, the National Book Award-winning author of “Sing, Unburied, Sing” and “Salvage the Bones,” returns with a story based on Dante’s “Inferno,” following an enslaved teen named Annis who belongs to her mother and sold by her white father. “It took years and multiple versions to understand how Annis and enslaved people could have maintained their sense of self and their sense of hope, in a time and place that day in and out trying to deny both,” Ward said of the book.
Scribner, Oct. 24
This new novel, from a National Book Award winner, is set in 1963 Saigon. After a miscarriage, Tricia joins Charlene’s efforts to help Vietnamese civilians. Decades later, when Charlene’s daughter reaches out, Tricia ponders the consequences of her friend’s altruism, both on their lives and on a larger scale.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, October 31
A shine, by Jon Fosse. Translated by Damion Searls.
Fosse, a Norwegian writer, has become something of a literary sensation following the popularity of his dark Septology series. In his new novel, a man makes a series of wrong turns, gets out of his car, starts walking through the woods, and is blinded by the titular “shine” and other near-death hallucinations.
Transit books, October 31
Park spent nine years working on his new surrealistic graphic novel, which depicts an alternate political reality. In this world, the Korean Provisional Government, a resistance organization founded in March 1919, is still working towards a unified Korea.
Random House, Nov. 7
Set in the spring of 2020, an unnamed female narrator ponders the meaning of life, connection, and self-mythology in pandemic New York.
Riverhead, Nov. 7
Bye, by Michael Cunningham
Told over the course of three days – April 5 in 2019, 2020 and 2021 – this new novel explores how Dan, Isabel, their children and Isabel’s brother change over the course of a tumultuous period profoundly shaped by Covid-19. Cunningham received a Pulitzer Prize for his novel ‘The Hours’.
Random House, Nov. 14
After the death of their child, a couple form a utopian society in an abandoned restaurant in western Massachusetts, with a colorful group of members from all walks of life. But as with all counterculture experiments, the group soon wonders if utopia is actually possible.
Algonquin, Nov. 14
