Autumn is an exciting season for readers: publishers release a higher volume of new books in the fall than throughout the rest of the year. It tends to be the season when much-awaited for new books by favorite authors hit the bookshelves, as well as debuts from authors the industry just knows readers are going to love. Literati inventory staff are busier than ever, opening lots and lots and lots of boxes, filling our display tables and shelves with these new book releases. Here are suggestions of some of the It titles not to be missed.
Celebrated NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg delivers an extraordinary memoir of her personal successes, struggles, and life-affirming relationships, including her beautiful friendship of nearly fifty years with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
A transporting, irresistible debut novel that takes its heroine, Cristabel Seagrave, from a theatre in the gargantuan cavity of a beached whale into undercover operations during World War II.
Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Barbara Kingsolver's much-anticipated new novel is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.
The remarkable story of 99-year old Stella Levi, whose conversations , conducted on Saturdays, with the writer Michael Frank over the course of six years, bring to life the vibrant world of the Jewish-inhabited Italian island, Rhodes, the deportation to Auschwitz that extinguished ninety percent of her community, and the resilience and wisdom of the woman who lived to tell the tale.
Little is known about Lucrezia de’Medici, the noblewoman who died at the age of 16 in 1561, but her mysterious death, rumored to be caused by poisoning at the hand of her husband, allegedly inspired the poet Robert Browning to write the foreboding monologue, My Last Duchess. In The Marriage Portrait, Maggie O'Farrell takes her own swing at Lucrezia’s story. She sets aside the young woman’s imminent death, instead focusing on imagining a rich interior life for the duchess that highlights the tragic contrast between her big hopes and dreams and the stark limitations of her time.
From the bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere comes one of the most highly anticipated books of the year — the inspiring new novel about a mother’s unbreakable love in a world consumed by fear.
"Step aside Miss Marple, Eugenia Potter, and Kinsey Millhone—Georgia O'Keeffe is the new sleuth in town! Kathryn Lasky brings the rich imagination of her YA and Juvenile books to "Light On Bone," a stunning, suspenseful adult mystery. Vivid prose brushstrokes bring the legendary artist, the Southwest landscape she loved, and a complicated plot with historical and imagined characters to life." — Katherine Hall Page, author of the award-winning Faith Fairchild series
From Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx, whose novels are infused with her knowledge and deep concern for the earth, comes a riveting, revelatory history of our wetlands, their ecological role, and what their systematic destruction means for the planet.
The 1971 collaboration of legendary Nashville bluegrass musicians and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, a Southern California country-rock-jug group, was the genesis of Will the Circle Be Unbroken, which Rolling Stone magazine would declare the most important album to come out of Nashville. In this definitive, beautifully illustrated book, McEuen gives an inside look at the making of a landmark album, covering each of its thirty-eight songs and sharing previously unseen photographs taken by the author and his brother Bill McEuen, who produced the recording.
Transform your home into a haven of calm and achieve your ideal lifestyle with this inspirational visual guide featuring more than 100 photographs, from the Netflix star and bestselling author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Inspired by the Japanese concept of kurashi, or “way of life,” Kurashi at Home invites you to visualize your best life from the moment you wake up until the end of each day.
Madly, Deeply is a rare invitation into the mind of Alan Rickman, one of the most magnetic, beloved performers of our time.
A major debut, blazing with style and heart, that follows a Jamaican family striving for more in Miami, and introduces a generational storyteller. "If I Survive You is a collection of connected short stories that reads like a novel, that reads like real life, that reads like fiction written at the highest level." —Ann Patchett
Legendary storyteller Stephen King goes into the deepest well of his imagination in this spellbinding novel about a seventeen-year-old boy who inherits the keys to a parallel world where good and evil are at war, and the stakes could not be higher — for that world or ours.
In the long-awaited third and final book in the Beartown series, a small hockey town must grapple with what happened two years ago. With change on the horizon, they try to save their marriages, lay old hurts to rest, and do everything they can to overcome their past to discover what truly makes a family and a community.
Sandra Cisneros returns with her first book of poetry in 28 years with Woman Without Shame, an electrifying collection of meditations on her life and work as an artist, paying tribute to her Mexican ancestors and the legacy she carries.
"Shrines of Gaiety is set during Jazz Age London, in all its fizzy madness and desperation for the new, the better, the hustle. Atkinson simply has a magician's ability to switch readers’ moods within a few paragraphs, and as dark as her stories can get, within them always shines a beacon of humanity.” — Gillian Flynn, bestselling author of Dark Places
In this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend.
Meacham chronicles the life of Abraham Lincoln, charting how—and why—he confronted secession, threats to democracy, and the tragedy of slavery to expand the possibilities of America.
The most trusted explainer of the most mind-boggling concepts pulls back the veil of mystery that has too long cloaked the most valuable building blocks of modern science. Sean Carroll, with his genius for making complex notions entertaining, presents the fundamental ideas informing the modern physics of reality. This book is an inspiring, dazzling introduction to a way of seeing that will resonate across cultural and generational boundaries for many years to come.
The bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and No Country for Old Men, among others, returns with the first of a two-volume masterpiece. The Passenger is the story of a salvage diver, haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God.
A charmingly idiosyncratic look at writing, creativity, and the author’s own novels, from the beloved and bestselling author of 1Q84, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, and Norwegian Wood, among others. Readers who have long wondered where the mysterious novelist gets his ideas and what inspires his strangely surreal worlds will be fascinated by this insightful and unique look at the craft of writing and into the mind of a master storyteller.
“One of our most inventive purveyors of the form returns with pitch-perfect, genre-bending stories that stare into the abyss of our national character. . . . An exquisite work from a writer whose reach is galactic." — Oprah Daily
From the bestselling author of Just Like You, High Fidelity, and Fever Pitch, a short, warm, and entertaining book about art, creativity, and the unlikely similarities between Victorian novelist Charles Dickens and modern American rock star Prince.
For over four decades, Margaret Sullivan has spent her life in the newsroom, going from a summer intern at the Buffalo News to becoming the first female public editor at The New York Times. Along the way, Sullivan has battled sexism along with normal competition and become a sharp critic of the ethics of journalism. In Newsroom Confidential, Sullivan describes her journey and discusses how the public has lost trust in the media and what journalists can do to regain that trust.
In the 1960s, Keith and Hugh were best friends and baseball all-stars. But as they grow older, their lives take different trajectories. Keith’s father becomes a legendary prosecutor determined to clean up Biloxi and Hugh’s dad works his way up to become the head of the local mob. As both boys follow in their father’s footsteps, they find themselves on opposite sides of the law in Grisham’s latest legal thriller.
Dimple Pennington didn’t exactly hit the jackpot in the family department. She barely knows her four half-siblings, and her absent father is a people person who enjoys fraternizing with everyone but his own kids. But when she lands in a sticky situation that could lead directly to prison, help comes from a surprising, familial place. As Dimple and her siblings band together, they get to know each other for the first time as adults and begin to come to terms with the role their father might, or might not, play in their lives. The novel, Candice Carty-Williams’ second, after her acclaimed 2019 debut Queenie, is a big-hearted reminder that a messy family is still a family.
Why the world's most resilient dictatorships are products of violent revolution.
Ling Ma follows up her prescient and popular 2018 debut novel Severance with Bliss Montage, a collection of short stories that finds the fantastical within the mundane. In eight captivating tales that blur the lines between reality and delusion, Ma harnesses the pulsating desire and power dynamics present in all relationships, from intimate friendships and haunting romantic entanglements to motherhood and the invisible yet omnipresent ties of ancestors.
Jasmine Guillory’s wine-fueled new romance novel offers top notes of heady flirtation and a satisfyingly rich finish. Protagonist Margot Noble is deeply stressed running the family’s Napa Valley winery alongside her brother, but she finds release in a hot one-night stand with Luke, a handsome stranger and former Silicon Valley techie who just happens to be, unbeknownst to Margot, the winery’s newest employee. As they abruptly transition from lovers to colleagues, Luke and Margot must contend with their simmering attraction and unexpected feelings for each other.
In the follow-up to the “bedazzling, bewitching, and be-wonderful” — New York Times — best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning Less: A Novel, the awkward and lovable Arthur Less returns in an unforgettable road trip across America.
A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school, to the quiet Pennsylvania home where a woman can live without her past, The Book of Goose is a story of disturbing intimacy and obsession, of exploitation and strength of will, by the celebrated author Yiyun Li.
The beloved star of the 1994-2004 TV series Friends takes us behind the scenes of the hit sitcom and his struggles with addiction in this candid, funny, and revelatory memoir that delivers a powerful message of hope and persistence.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout revisits one of her most unforgettable characters, the titular heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton and Oh William!, its sequel. Lucy By the Sea is another Barton installment that confronts the deep and familiar tangles of intimate relationships. As the COVID-19 pandemic takes hold, Lucy and her ex-husband William, with whom she shares a complex friendship, hunker down in a remote town in Maine, away from her life in New York City. Through this complex and isolating time, Lucy plumbs the nuances of human connection.
Hua Hsu’s poignant new memoir is about a coming-of-age friendship that provides the catalyst for clear-eyed recollections. Hsu describes how a friendship struck with Ken, a student whose preppy, stereotypically masculine interests were a far cry from his own counter-cultural tastes, became a deep kinship rooted in their exclusion from American culture. Though their backgrounds differed — Ken came from a long line of Japanese Americans, while Hsu is the child of Taiwanese immigrants — they found common ground. After Ken’s unexpected and violent death, Hsu kept his memory alive by writing. The result is this bittersweet memoir, a reflection on the power of friendship and how we can find connection in the most unexpected of places.
In this debut memoir writer and activist Prince Shakur reckons with his self-actualization in a world inherently hostile to his identities as a queer, Black radical in America. Starting with his experiences as the young son of Jamaican immigrant parents in Ohio, Shakur details his struggles with familial homophobia and the aftermath of his father’s murder. In college, he finds community and political organizing that speak to his values, but realizes there is no easy answer to structural oppression in the U.S; his travels around the world both during and after college reveal to him that the prejudice he has experienced is not exclusively American, though his trips to Ferguson, Mo., where he protested for Black Lives Matter, and to the Dakotas, where he stood alongside activists at Standing Rock, were among his most meaningful. The story of Shakur’s life is a deeply personal reflection that celebrates self-discovery in the face of intergenerational trauma and a violent colonial legacy.
A powerful and poignant new book by Crazy Rich Asians and Fresh off the Boat star Constance Wu about family, romance, sex, shame, trauma, and how she found her voice on the stage.
Manning recounts how her pleas for increased institutional transparency and government accountability took place alongside a fight to defend her rights as a trans woman. She details the challenges of her childhood and adolescence as a naive, computer-savvy kid, what drew her to the military, and the fierce pride she has about the work she does. This powerful, observant memoir will stand as one of the definitive testaments of our digital, information-driven age.
The New York City mayoral race has long been a point of contention for its residents, something that takes on even greater consequences in N.K. Jemisin’s anticipated sequel to The City We Became.