The 10 Buzziest Books Of Fall 2019
There are many reasons to get excited about fall: all the best movies get released; apples are at their peak (and so are apple pies!); it's time to pull out your favourite sweaters; and, it's when many of the highest-profile new novels hit shelves. Here's our list of the most exciting books of the season, from Cecelia Ahern's P.S. I Love You follow-up to Lara Prescott's blockbuster debut, The Secrets We Kept.
The Secrets We Kept, by Lara Prescott
Prescott’s debut reportedly landed her a $2-million deal after a 14-way publisher tug-of-war. Equal parts feminist espionage thriller and literary love story, it follows two parallel tracks that eventually meet in the middle: first, a pair of girls from a CIA typing pool in 1950s D.C, tasked with spinning propaganda to take down Communism, and second, the Russian novelist Boris Pasternak, whose mistress is sent to the Gulag where she gathers intel to inform his novel, the future classic Doctor Zhivago. It’s a perfect smoothie of highbrow fiction and addictive page turner, and it’s already set to become a film from Marc Platt, who produced the Oscar-nominated thriller Bridge of Spies.
September 3, $35.
A Delhi Obsession, by M.G. Vassanji
The two-time Giller winner M.G. Vassanji reimagines the Romeo and Juliet story in modern India. His Romeo is Munir, a Muslim widower from Toronto who takes a spontaneous trip to India, where he meets Mohini, a married Hindu woman and teacher who offers to show him the sights. But as they fall in love, they’re being watched by Jetha Lal, leader of a radical Hindu nationalist group committed to protecting the virtue of Hindu women. Like all of Vassnji’s books, this one is lyrical and lovely, delivering a lush travelogue to 21st-century Delhi while also plumbing the bigotry and terror of India’s religious wars.
September 10, $30.
The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
In his 2015 polemic, Between the World and Me, Coates wrote about the dangers and devastation of living in a black body in America. His first novel takes that idea back to its root. It’s about Hiram Walker, born into slavery in antebellum Virginia, the son of a plantation owner and a female slave. He has a photographic memory, which gives him an advantage in the cutthroat world of the racist South, but his true gift is a secret superpower called Conduction, which allows him to travel instantaneously across bodies of water—an asset in the age of the Underground Railroad. It’s one of the heaviest books you’ll read this year, but also one of the most beautiful, stitched through with folklore, magic and grit.
September 24, $37.
The Braid, by Laetitia Colombani
This novel, already a massive bestseller in its native France, is a little on the nose: it follows three women—a lawyer in Montreal, a wig-maker in Palermo and a toilet-cleaner in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh—whose stories are woven into, well, you get the idea. But its fable-like simplicity is charming enough to overcome its hokey gimmick. These women have nothing in common except for their fierce self-determination, overcoming loneliness, illness, poverty and misogyny while intersecting in surprising and poignant ways.
September 24, $22.
The World That We Knew, by Alice Hoffman
Alice Hoffman brings twinkling magic to the most surprising places: Roman-occupied Judea, turn-of-the-century New York, modern-day Florida. In her latest novel, she sprinkles that stardust onto the bleak landscape of Nazi-occupied Europe. Lea, a young Jewish girl running from German persecution, gains a saviour in the form of Ava, a female golem bound to protect her. From there, it puts a feminist twist on practically everything it touches: Jewish folklore, European fairy tales and the hero’s journey.
September 24, $25.
Postscript, by Cecelia Ahern
Ahern’s sequel to her massive hit P.S. I Love You is fluff of the highest order, picking up the tale of Holly, whom you might remember from the last book as the widow who connected with her dead husband by reading a secret cache of love letters he wrote before he died. The new book finds her seven years later, when a group of people calling themselves the P.S. I Love You Club ask her to help them create care packages for their families to find after they’re dead.
September 24, $35.
Frankissstein, by Jeanette Winterson
It was only a matter of time before someone linked the rise of artificial intelligence back to its mitochondrial DNA: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the original sci-fi nightmare about men creating machines that turn into monsters. Winterson, who’s always been fixated on the dangers and opportunities innate in the human body, has revamped Shelley’s novel into a cyber-gothic tale for the Brexit age. Her novel retells the famous story of Frankenstein’s composition—a spooky-story contest with Lord Byron at Lake Geneva—alongside a bonkers cryogenics heist involving a transgender Ry Shelley; her love interest, an AI professor named Victor Stein; and Ron Lord, a Byron proxy who sells sex robots.
October 1, $32.
Grand Union, by Zadie Smith
After five novels, two essay collections and countless bits and pieces, Zadie Smith is finally publishing her first full-length short story collection. She uses the stories as a petri dish for playful experimentation with form, characters and voice, and the results are whimsical, campy and touching. In one story, a drag queen grapples with mortality in a corset shop; in another, Smith reimagines the mythic urban legend of Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando escaping post-9/11 New York on a cross-country road trip.
October 8, $34.
The Shape of Family, by Shilpi Somaya Gowda
One day in 2009, 13-year-old Karina refuses to go swimming with her little brother, Prem, in their backyard pool. Minutes later, she finds his lifeless body floating face-down in the water. This is the latest heart-tugging family saga from a Canadian author who specializes in the genre, tracking Karina and her yuppie parents as they cope with grief, guilt and alienation in the wake of Prem’s death—and throughout, he’s watching them all fall apart.
October 15, $25.
Find Me, by André Aciman
Last year, as the world heaved a collective sigh over the film adaptation of Call Me By Your Name, people started clamouring for a sequel—including Aciman, who wrote the original novel in 2007. “The film made me realize that I wanted to be back with [the] and watch them over the years,” he told Vulture. The sequel, which will hopefully give way to its own gorgeous movie version in the not too distant future, revisits Elio, now a classical pianist in Italy, and Oliver, who’s an empty-nester back in the U.S. This one might be worth consuming on audio—the narrator is the wonderful Michael Stuhlberg, who stole the movie as Elio’s dad. A little late for peach season, but welcome nonetheless.
October 29, $36
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