NEW YORK, NY.- Fall is full of harbingers of change: Air is brisk, daylight becomes fickle, leaves turn red. There is perhaps no better way to ground such a time of transformation and impermanence than with a great new read. Become seduced by the undercover spy-for-hire at the heart of Rachel Kushner’s thriller “Creation Lake”; ring in Sad Girl Autumn with “Intermezzo,” a characteristically cool Sally Rooney title about two brothers grieving their father’s death; or get swept up in the kaleidoscopic journeys of multiple narrators living in and under the ocean in Richard Powers’ “Playground.” Whatever your mood, these books — among many other reads coming this fall — will provide an escape, a shift in perspective and engrossing new worlds to cozy up to this season.
SEPTEMBER
‘Creation Lake’
By Rachel Kushner
A disgraced FBI agent turned freelance operative infiltrates a rural French commune of environmental anarchists in Kushner’s latest thriller, which grapples with a question that has preoccupied philosophers and scientists for centuries: What, at our core, makes us human? (Scribner, Tuesday)
‘Small Rain’
By Garth Greenwell
A writer discovers that he has a rare disease and lands in the ICU. Confined to bed and forced to confront his mortality, the narrator contemplates love, art, beauty, family — everything that makes up the complicated terrain of life. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Tuesday)
‘Colored Television’
By Danzy Senna
After her agent and publisher reject her sophomore novel, Jane directs her attention to something potentially more lucrative: Hollywood. But a series of white lies and bad decisions leads her down a path of self-destruction. (Riverhead, Tuesday)
‘Guide Me Home’
By Attica Locke
In the final volume of Locke’s Highway 59 trilogy, Detective Darren Matthews comes out of early retirement to investigate the disappearance of a young Black woman. To solve the case, he must reconcile with his estranged mother, sort out his alcohol dependence and mend his strained relationship with the woman he loves. (Mulholland, Tuesday)
‘Dear Dickhead’
By Virginie Despentes; translated by Frank Wynne
This epistolary novel — composed of email exchanges and social media posts shared among three characters — is a dissection of sex, classism and feminism today. As the title might imply, creative profanity abounds. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sept. 10)
‘The Wildes’
By Louis Bayard
In classic Bayardian fashion, this historical fiction novel takes a cast of real people — in this case, Oscar Wilde and his family — and weaves them into an imaginative story, told from the perspective of the playwright’s wife and his two sons after Wilde’s imprisonment for homosexuality. (Algonquin, Sept. 17)
‘Entitlement’
By Rumaan Alam
A young Black woman goes to work for a billionaire eager to give his fortune away. The more she becomes enmeshed in his world, the more she adapts to his lifestyle and world views, abandoning her own values and sense of self in the process. (Riverhead, Sept. 17)
‘We Solve Murders’
By Richard Osman
The beloved “Thursday Murder Club” author returns with a new series that revolves around a man (a retired cop) and his daughter-in-law (a private security guard) who unite to take down an Al Capone-like crime boss. (Pamela Dorman, Sept. 17)
‘Intermezzo’
By Sally Rooney
In Rooney’s latest novel, two brothers — one a competitive chess player, the other a lawyer — are forced to confront their strained relationship in the wake of their father’s death, while also juggling nascent love affairs. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sept. 24)
‘Playground’
By Richard Powers
Lives intersect on a French Polynesian island in this expansive, oceanic novel, which explores the effects of artificial intelligence and climate change on humanity. (Norton, Sept. 24)
‘The Empusium’
By Olga Tokarczuk; translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
A feminist twist on Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain,” Tokarczuk’s novel — her first since winning the Nobel — centers on an engineering student suffering from tuberculosis who finds himself at a men’s sanitarium haunted by mysterious forces. (Riverhead, Sept. 24)
OCTOBER
‘The Mighty Red’
By Louise Erdrich
A love triangle is at the heart of this novel, set against the backdrop of a beet farm in North Dakota during the economic meltdown of 2008-09. It’s as much about the financial crash and environmental destruction as it is about the people most impacted by and vulnerable to these devastations. (Harper, Oct. 1)
‘The Third Realm’
By Karl Ove Knausgaard
Like its predecessors, “The Morning Star” and “The Wolves of Eternity,” this latest entry in Knausgaard’s saga bounces between different narrators and revisits a familiar premise: A dark star appears, everyone sees it but knows nothing about it, and weird stuff ensues. (Penguin Press, Oct. 1)
‘Shred Sisters’
By Betsy Lerner
The relationship between sisters can be as loving as it is devastating. Lerner’s debut novel explores the polarities of this dynamic as her characters navigate girlhood, mental illness and heartbreak over the course of two decades. (Grove, Oct. 1)
‘Season of the Swamp’
By Yuri Herrera; translated by Lisa Dillman
This work of speculative fiction takes up a centuries-old mystery involving a young Benito Juárez, who was Mexico’s first Indigenous president, and his relatively unknown 18-month exile in New Orleans. Herrera imagines a colorful life during a turbulent time in a culturally radiant city at the edge of a swamp. (Graywolf, Oct. 1)
‘Slaveroad’
By John Edgar Wideman
Part autofiction, part history and part memoir, this book is an alchemy of genres. Wideman meditates on the word “slaveroad” as a metaphor — both temporal and corporeal — to examine its various meanings and its connection to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. (Scribner, Oct. 8)
‘Our Evenings’
By Alan Hollinghurst
Spanning more than 50 years, this sprawling novel follows a gay, biracial teenager whose boarding-school scholarship is funded by a family that lingers in the backdrop of his life into adulthood. (Random House, Oct. 8)
‘Variation’
By Rebecca Yarros
From the bestselling author of the Empyrean romantasy series comes a new book — this time without dragons. After a career-ending injury, a famous dancer returns home, where she confronts dark family secrets while reconnecting with her first love. (Montlake, Oct. 8)
‘Don’t Be a Stranger’
By Susan Minot
After going through an intense divorce, Ivy, a 52-year-old writer and mother, becomes entangled in an all-consuming (and messy) relationship with a younger man. (Knopf, Oct. 15)
‘Women’s Hotel’
By Daniel M. Lavery
This novel features an ensemble cast of ordinary but distinct characters in 1960s New York who all reside at the Biedermeier — a fictional and more decrepit version of the storied, all-female Barbizon Hotel. (HarperVia, Oct. 15)
‘Forest of Noise’
By Mosab Abu Toha
This new collection from a renowned Palestinian poet offers a glimpse into life in a besieged Gaza and what it’s like to survive and find care, even hope, under the most dire of conditions. (Knopf, Oct. 15)
‘Blood Test’
By Charles Baxter
A middle-aged insurance salesman undergoes a predictive blood test and receives disturbing results that threaten to upend his life, and those of the people around him. (Pantheon, Oct. 22)
‘Absolution’
By Jeff VanderMeer
A decade after his Southern Reach trilogy, VanderMeer returns with this surprise fourth volume that acts as a prequel to the bestselling series and provides clues to the origin of the mysterious region known as Area X. (MCDxFSG, Oct. 22)
NOVEMBER
‘The City and Its Uncertain Walls’
By Haruki Murakami; translated by Philip Gabriel
Murakami’s new novel — based on a short story of the same name published 44 years ago — follows a lonely, unnamed male narrator who is still grieving over the childhood disappearance of his first love. (Knopf, Nov. 19)
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
