30 books to read this fall
Peak publishing season is upon us. This fall offers a bounty of books from prominent authors Danzy Senna, Rachel Kushner, Sally Rooney, Michael Connelly and Richard Price and newcomers Kay Chronister and Weike Wang. It'll see the release of novels that mark the end of beloved franchises (Attica Locke's "Guide Me Home") as well as returns to familiar worlds (Elizabeth Strout's "Tell Me Everything"). Our must-reads also include biographies on writers Dorothy Parker and Sanora Babb in addition to raw memoirs from Annie Ernaux and Sarah Moss. From explorations of race to an examination of a right-wing sheriffs' crusade, there's something for every reader.
FICTION
SEPT. 3
USC professor Senna follows up her previous critical successes with this hilarious Los Angeles-based novel. It follows Jane, a biracial novelist who is tired of not being able to support her family, so she goes to work on a TV series with an old college friend. Wry observations about writing, Hollywood and the space she occupies as a mulatto woman (Senna’s term) make this novel a tour de force. — Lorraine Berry
A literary take on the spy yarn, Kushner’s fourth novel (and Booker Prize finalist) is narrated by Sadie, an agent who has infiltrated a French group of environmentalists that’s determined to undermine a national reservoir project. Devious schemes, honey traps and assassination plans all figure into the plot. But Sadie’s undercover operation is just one part of the intrigue. Kushner, accessing the brash style that made her 2013 novel, “The Flamethrowers,” a surprise breakthrough, also slyly works in riffs on human evolution, mob mentality and the perils of managing multiple identities. — Mark Athitakis
“The Fallen Fruit” is a heady mix of well-researched historical fiction and gripping fantasy reminiscent of both Octavia Butler’s “Kindred” and Audrey Niffenegger’s “The Time Traveler’s Wife.” In 1964, history professor Cecily Bridge-Davis inherits the Bridge family homestead in rural Virginia only to learn that various ancestors have “fallen” into the past — as far back as the 18th century — a fate she fears awaits her. But there is much more to this complicated family history, even a mystery or two. “My family tree has poisoned roots,” Cecily says. “Secrets from generations ago sank far into the earth where truth and lies tangled in a polluted snarl.” — Paula L. Woods
Bad news: “Guide Me Home” completes Locke’s Highway 59 trilogy featuring Texas Ranger Darren Mathews. Good news: Locke wraps up her remarkable series with authenticity and wisdom, as Mathews turns in his badge, realizing that his race will always clash with his official duties. But when his estranged mother, Bell, implores him to look into a Black sorority girl’s disappearance, he agrees, and stumbles into a deep web of local corruption. — Bethanne Patrick
SEPT. 10
Jónasson’s experience as a leading Icelandic crime writer and translator of Agatha Christie novels informs this standalone mystery, related in intriguing ways to his bestselling Hulda trilogy. Helgi Reykdal, a criminology graduate student, is researching two unsolved 1983 deaths at a former tuberculosis sanatorium. As research for his dissertation turns to investigation, it ripples back to the 1950 TB epidemic and forward, ensnaring in its wake Reykdal, reluctant witnesses and the detectives on the case. — P.W.
Rejoice, Strout fans — Lucy Barton is back, and so is her ex-husband, William, and so is Bob Burgess, along with other members of the Stroutian universe. Don’t look for huge events this time around; the author concerns herself and her characters with the art of narrative, even having Lucy pick up the term “sin eater” from a chat with Olive Kitteridge, a reminder that our mistakes make up our most interesting tales. — B.P.
SEPT. 24
There’s not much one needs to say to explain the excitement over a new book by Rooney, the Irish wunderkind whose first novel is the unbelievably perfect “Conversations With Friends.” Unlike her previous books, which center on romance and its discontents, “Intermezzo” is about a family relationship: Two brothers, lawyer Peter and chess master Ivan, grapple with their father’s death. — Jessica Ferri
What Powers’ epic, Pulitzer-winning 2018 novel, “The Overstory,” did for forests, this novel does for oceans. Set largely on a French Polynesian island that has become an unlikely bargaining chip in a battle over the future of humanity, the novel shifts across a group of scholars, entrepreneurs, artists and oceanographers. Powers has loved braided, multifaceted narratives since his 1985 debut, “Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance,” and Booker Prize finalist “Playground” demonstrates how he’s sharpened both his intellectual interests with a knack for lively and optimistic storytelling. — M.A.
OCT. 1
Set in Appalachia, this debut novel centers on a family’s cranberry bog and its meanings for different generations, as well as its near-sentient presence: Patriarchs lie buried in its peat; their progeny take ritual washes in its mud and emerge with new wives to carry on the family line. It’s a Gothic, environmental take on heredity as well as inheritance, with one of the Haddesley daughters, Wenna, challenging both as human and earthen secrets bubble to the surface. — B.P.
In a logging camp in 1934 New Brunswick, newborn Pearly is raised alongside Bruno, a foundling bear cub given to her father. In this magical read, Armstrong charms readers while drawing from rural folklore, superstitious beliefs and adventure in a suspenseful coming-of-age novel. When Bruno is taken, Pearly ventures after him, enduring human evil and a challenging landscape to rescue her ursine brother. — L.B.
OCT. 8
Mike Brink (from Trussoni’s 2023 novel “The Puzzle Master”) is invited to Tokyo to open the infamous and deadly Dragon Box, which has defied puzzle solvers for more than 150 years. But two sisters, descendants of a disgraced samurai clan, want that box too, and the imperial secret placed within it by Emperor Meiji. Polished prose, an action-packed quest across Japan and puzzles within the story too? Sign me up! — P.W.
OCT. 15
A finalist for the International Booker Prize, Chilean novelist Zerán has penned a riveting novel about an interrogation. The book is narrated by Estela, a maid and nanny who becomes an observer of her married employers’ fights and secrets. When the young girl in her care dies, Estela comes under suspicion, and, during questioning, she leaves family secrets as breadcrumbs, daring detectives to follow her trail. — L.B.
Detective Renée Ballard of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Open-Unsolved Unit gets a new volunteer: patrol officer Maddie Bosch. With a small squad of other talented volunteers, they tackle a 20-year-old cold case involving a serial rapist and, on Maddie’s initiative, the city’s most infamous unsolved murder. The iconic Harry Bosch is in the mix too, but the younger Ballard-Bosch pairing heralds an exciting succession plan for a beloved series. — P.W.
OCT. 22
Kinsky’s roaming Sebald-esque novels like “Grove” and “River” have made her a household name in plotless fiction. “Seeing Further” is her take on cinema. Our protagonist arrives at a dilapidated movie theater in Hungary and becomes intent on restoring it. Like all Kinsky books, “Seeing Further” is as much about this place, described as “a dream in a glass coffin,” as it is about her subject. — J.F.
OCT. 29
Following 2022’s “A World of Curiosities,” Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his intrepid band of investigators are back in a thriller that starts with a Sunday phone call that disturbs Gamache’s reveries in his garden and expands to include a break-in, a murder, political intrigue and a greater threat than even Gamache could imagine. Penny’s ability to balance the idyllic village life in Three Pines with impressive thriller chops makes “The Grey Wolf” a richly complicated, compulsively readable tale that’s well worth the two-year wait. — P.W.
NOV. 12
It’s been nearly 10 years between Price novels, and “Lazarus Man” shows him comfortably returning to his favorite characters: working-class New Yorkers caught in a maelstrom of racism, money, media and policing. Here, the collapse of an apartment building in Harlem kicks off a plot involving missing residents, hustling activists and the surprising survival of one man trying to reacclimate after the trauma of being trapped. Streetwise and informed by Price’s trademark dialogue and gallows humor, it’s a tale of individual redemption and an exploration of the precarity of American life. — M.A.
NOV. 19
An illusory reality colors this darkly comic novel by the International Booker Prize winner. Set on a still-trembling Earth after a global seismic event, the unnamed narrator sets out to find and kill her missing roommate. In a dusty city, she encounters ideologues offering healing who further destabilize the shaky ground of her existence. — L.B.
First published in 1982, Semiotext(e) brings DeLynn’s coming-of-age tale of lesbian longing back into print this fall with an introduction by Colm Tóibín. The “jarring accuracy” with which DeLynn writes about 16-year-old Lynn yearning for her English teacher, while dating boys and making homophobic jokes with her friends, moves “In Thrall” up to the top of our TBR pile. — J.F.
NOV. 26
Don’t overlook this one because it’s a young adult title; it’s full of atmospheric thrills. Arcadia “Dia” Gannon, a lonely high schooler in Missouri, wins an internship to the Louisiana Veda Foundation, along with six others. They all revere the mysterious Veda, world-renowned for exquisitely crafted and devilishly difficult board games. Once the group arrives in England, they find out the game they’re expected to play has higher stakes than they could have imagined. — B.P.
DEC. 3
Keru and Nate, along with their beloved sheepdog Mantou, live in New York and escape the city during annual vacations. Wang shows us two of these, the first on Cape Cod, with Keru’s parents; the second in the Catskills, with appearances from members of Nate’s family. Tensions run high in both instances, which are set five years apart, but Wang (“Joan Is Okay”) uses sharp detail and gentle humor to portray the evolution of a thoughtful partnership. — B.P.
NONFICTION
SEPT. 17
Pishko is a journalist and lawyer whose work skillfully combines history, investigative reporting and astute political analysis in examining constitutional sheriffs’ ties to far-right militias, white nationalists and Donald Trump. It’s an intelligent, compelling narrative assaying the influences of toxic masculinity, gun culture and rural resentment, and the empowerment of sheriffs who declare themselves the ultimate arbiters of what is legal in their jurisdictions. — L.B.
Ugrešić, who died in March 2023, was one of the great firebrand writers to emerge from post-Iron Curtain Europe. She paid the price for it, forced from her native Croatia in 1993 for her criticism of the government. A series of sardonic novels and essay collections followed, stylistically varied but typically concerned with themes of exile and misogyny. “Muzzle,” based on extended interviews with her in 2021 and 2022, is both a fine introduction to her sensibility and capstone for her career, punctuated with her trademark candor. “There is no doctoral degree or promising literary reputation that can shield women from men’s fear and contempt,” she notes. — M.A.
SEPT. 24
Combining history, true crime and memoir, Thompson, a sportswriter for ESPN and a Mississippi native, has written a gut-punch of a book about the murder of Emmett Till and the place where it happened. Foregoing the harrowing photos that emphasize Till’s martyrdom, Thompson dives instead into family trees, court transcripts, witness memoirs and more to unearth the enormous human tragedy we forget at our peril: “Hate grows stronger and resistant,” he reminds us, “when it’s pushed underground.” — P.W.
OCT. 1
We would read Ernaux’s writing about cardboard or watching paint dry, but her new book, a chronicle of her love affair with a photographer while she was undergoing treatment for cancer in the early 2000s, sounds as intense as it gets. Ernaux said she was driven to keep things in order amid her illness and its treatment — and by taking photographs, she and her lover found a way to make sense of the chaos. — J.F.
OCT. 15
Hollywood, Parker once quipped, “is as dull a domain as dots the globe.” That didn’t prevent her from turning down its promise of steady money, though, and from the 1920s through the ’40s, she labored off and on for the movies, earning a pair of Oscar nominations for her screenplays before personal demons and the blacklist caught up with her. Crowther thoughtfully considers Parker’s ambivalence about Hollywood through her poetry and fiction, failed romances, miscarriages, suicide attempts and activism. Parker was often abrasive, but Crowther considers Parker empathetically, as a sui generis who resisted becoming a cog in the filmmaking machinery. — M.A.
In 1938, Sanora Babb was an L.A.-based journalist working on “Whose Names Are Unknown,” a novel about Dust Bowl migrants in Southern California, when she met John Steinbeck, who was working on a similar book. Generously — or foolishly — Babb lent Steinbeck her copious research notes, which he used as inspiration for “The Grapes of Wrath,” whose success undermined Babb’s career. (“Unknown” wouldn’t see print until 2004.) Dunkle’s biography is informed by this injustice, but doesn’t dwell exclusively on it, revealing Babb as a brilliant and enterprising Western author in her own right. — M.A.
OCT. 22
In her novels, like “Ghost Wall” and “Summerwater,” Moss considers what people try to control — and what they can’t. Her stunning new memoir focuses on her 1980s adolescent eating disorder, when her body shrunk beyond her control. At the same time, she shrank away from her family and peers, taking refuge in literature and her imagination, where the wolf of the title functions as a fierce spirit guide that helps her begin to heal. — B.P.
NOV. 12
What could be better than a book about Eve Babitz or Joan Didion? A book about both of them. Contemporaries. Frenemies maybe. Babitz biographer Anolik takes them both on in a dual biography that hopes to break the seal of Didion’s mysteriousness and Babitz’s connection to her through their shared time in L.A., where their friendship was formed and broken. Both writers are so iconic and yet so different — it will be interesting to see how the differences reveal new things about each of them. — J.F.
Combining personal memoir and cultural critique, former Washington Post Magazine editor Rowell plays provocateur, arguing that the creation and sale of new music have been stymied by audiences who only want familiar tunes that spark nostalgic memories. It’s either three chords and the truth or a book readers will argue with from its opening notes. — L.B.
NOV. 26
Finnish artist and writer Jansson is perhaps best remembered for her "Moomin" cartoon, about a hippo-like creature named Moomintroll and his family. But Jansson was prolific; she also wrote short fiction and a whopping 11 novels. “Sun City” is a work of nonfiction that chronicles her travels in America in the 1970s, focusing on the “particularly American institution, the retirement home.” Jansson’s observations will no doubt be equal parts humorous and devastating. — J.F.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
