Drawn from the 14,000+ titles in PW's Fall Announcements issue, we asked our reviews editors to pick the most notable books publishing in Fall 2017. Links to reviews are included when available. (Interested in our list of the most anticipated children's and YA books coming this fall? You can read it here.)
Fiction
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (Scribner, Sept.) - When the father of Leonie’s children is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out for Parchman farm, on a journey rife with danger and promise.
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (Penguin Press, Sept.) - Mia Warren, an enigmatic artist and single mother, rents a house from the picture-perfect Richardson family. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the alluring mother-daughter pair and Mia’s mysterious past.
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan (Scribner, Oct.) - Anna, sole provider for her mother and her severely disabled sister, meets a man who may hold clues to her father’s disappearance.
Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss (Harper, Sept.) - The author of The History of Love offers a novel of metamorphosis and self-realization. In present-day Israel, two visiting Americans—one a young wife, mother, and novelist, the other an elderly philanthropist—experience existential crises and transcendence.
The World Goes On by László Krasznahorkai, trans. by George Szirtes, Ottilie Mulzet, and John Batki (New Directions, Nov.) - These 11 stories from the Man Booker International winner range from the banks of the Ganges to a Portuguese marble quarry.
Mystery/Thriller/Crime
A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré (Viking, Sept.) - George Smiley returns in this spy novel from MWA Grand Master le Carré, though it’s Peter Guillam, Smiley’s devoted assistant from MI6, who takes center stage.
Origin by Dan Brown (Doubleday, Oct.) – The author of The Da Vinci Code brings back Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon for another adventure that mixes religion, science, history, and art.
Artemis by Andy Weir (Crown, Nov.) – Weir follows up his best-selling debut, The Martian, with a suspenseful caper novel set on the first and only city on the moon.
Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror
The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley (Bloomsbury, Aug.) - This incredible narrative of a disabled adventurer's journey through 19th-century Peru in search of quinine trees perfectly captures the disorientation of altitude sickness and culture shock in a setting where the nature of the fantastical elements remains ambiguous until the very end.
The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit, Aug.) - Jemisin caps off the Broken Earth trilogy with a devastating tale of a mother and a daughter, both wielding tremendous power, who face off over the fate of their ruined world.
Autonomous by Annalee Newitz (Tor, Sept.) - In Newitz's strikingly original debut, a man and a robot fall in love as they pursue a pharmaceutical Robin Hood through a luminous near-future setting.
Romance/Erotica
The Duchess Deal: Girl Meets Duke, Book 1 by Tessa Dare (Avon, Sept.) - In Dare's delightful Regency series launch, a duke who's afraid of being rejected for his scars proposes to a seamstress who shocks him by insisting on a relationship of equals.
The Glamour Thieves by Donald Allmon (Riptide, Sept.) - A cyberpunk sensibility, intense action, and flagrant sensuality make a potent mix in Allmon’s swoonworthy debut erotic romance, with sexual encounters between the orc and elf heroes that echo the heat of the fantastical near-future Arizona setting.
Irresistible You: Chicago Rebels, Book 1 by Kate Meader (Pocket Star, Aug.) - Meader, known for her firefighter romances, turns to sports with this splendidly characterized contemporary, in which a hockey team co-owner falls hard for a player who's planning to transfer away.
Poetry
The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons, Vols. 1 & 2 edited by Robert M. West (Norton, Oct.) - Ammons was one of the most innovative American poets of the 20th century and his full body of work is finally collected together in this two-volume set. In addition to the authoritative texts of the material that garnered him two National Book Awards and a National Book Critics Circle Award come more than 100 previously uncollected poems.
Electric Arches by Eve L. Ewing (Haymarket, Sept.) - Ewing’s stunning debut collides an array of forms as she questions what the imagination can make possible in the realm of social justice. As the boundaries between the self and the outside world blur, the political ramifications of interior life start to become clearer.
Heaven Is All Goodbyes by Tongo Eisen-Martin (City Lights, Sept.) - Eisen-Martin responds to state violence, racism, deindustrialization, and other related forms of oppression by taking readers out into the street. These slippery, complex poems contextualize the staggering inequalities of 21st-century America while their polyphonic voices confront their manifestations.
We’re On: A June Jordan Reader edited by Christoph Keller and Jan Heller Levi (Alice James, Sept.) - Legendary poet and activist Jordan (1936–2002) was committed to the liberation of all people and the revolutionary power of art. This expansive volume complements her poetry with prose, letters, and other writings that showcase the depth and breadth of her vision.
Comics/Graphic Novels
Akira: 35th Anniversary Box Set by Katsuhiro Otomo (Kodansha, Oct.) - Otomo’s cyberpunk masterpiece – one of the most influential manga of all time – is released fir the first time with the original Japanese page layouts, in a deluxe hardcover set. Tetsuo and Kaneda’s street battles through Tokyo remains a high point of comics.
Poppies of Iraq by Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim (Drawn & Quarterly Sept.) - Trondheim’s quirky, cartoonish art brings the cruelties and absurdities of Findakly’s memoir of growing up in Iraq into sharp relief. A complex story of family, memory and the places we leave behind.
The Hunting Accident: A True Story of Crime and Poetry by David L. Carlson and Landis Blair (First Second, Sept.) - The true story of a man who uncovers the real cause of his father’s blindness–he was always told it was a hunting accident but the facts were much darker–which spins into a story of crime and redemption involving mass killer Nathan Leopold, Jr.
Memoir
What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton (Simon & Schuster, Sept.) - Clinton’s new book of essays relates stories from her life, up to and including the 2016 presidential campaign, inspired by her favorite quotations.
Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir by Amy Tan (Ecco, Oct.) - The bestselling author shares her life as a writer, her traumatic childhood, and the connection between fiction and emotional memory.
Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook by Alice Waters (Clarkson Potter, Sept.) - A revealing look at Waters’s evolution from a rebellious yet impressionable follower to a respected activist who effects social and political change on a global level through the common bond of food.
Unstoppable: My Life So Far by Maria Sharapova (FSG/Crichton, Sept.) - In this insightful memoir, 30-year-old tennis star Sharapova details her life from her earliest memories to the present day.
Literary Essays/Criticism/Biographies
A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney (HMH, Oct.) – Midorikawa and Sweeney, two authors who are also longtime friends, uncover little-known stories of friendship from the lives of famous authors.
The Secret Life: Three True Stories of the Digital Age by Andrew O’Hagan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Oct.) – Novelist O’Hagan’s essay collection explores identity in the digital age through three figures: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange; purported Bitcoin inventor Craig Steven Wright; and O’Hagan’s own invented online identity, Ronnie Pinn.
Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children’s Literature As an Adult by Bruce Handy (Simon & Schuster, Aug.) – While revisiting the iconic books of American childhood, such as Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, Handy also revisits the—sometimes complex or unexpected—stories of their creators.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick edited by Darryl Pinckney (New York Review Books, Oct.) – This retrospective showcases the late Hardwick, a novelist and New York Review of Books co-founder, as an essayist. It includes works of political and travel journalism, but emphasizes her literary criticism.
History
Ghost of the Innocent Man: A True Story of Trial and Redemption by Benjamin Rachlin (Little, Brown, Aug.) - Rachlin reckons with the shortcomings of the American criminal justice system through the story of Willie James Grimes, a North Carolina man wrongfully convicted of rape and sentenced to life in prison in 1988, and who was freed in 2012 after his conviction was vacated.
Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 by Mike Wallace (Oxford Univ., Oct.) - Wallace’s magisterial follow-up to the Pulitzer-winning Gotham begins with the 1898 municipal consolidation of New York’s five boroughs and explores the development of a new socioeconomic order of consolidated corporate capitalism. Wallace takes the raucous story of this sprawling metropolis and shapes it into an engrossing, dynamic, and coherent narrative.
Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 by Stephen Kotkin (Penguin Press, Nov.) - In the second of his planned three-volume biography, Kotkin covers the forced collectivization of the Soviet peasantry, the outcry from within Soviet ranks and subsequent Great Purge, and the looming confrontation with fascism. Stalin certainly made history, as Kotkin shows, but far from the manner he had foreseen.
The Vietnam War: An Intimate History by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (Knopf, Sept.) - This lavishly illustrated companion volume to Ward and Burns’s latest documentary miniseries features scores of interviews with key figures of all levels in both the U.S. and Vietnam. More than 40 years after the war ended, Ward and Burns investigate how it started and why it unfolded in the manner it did.
Politics/Current Events
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Random/One World, Oct.) - The 2016 National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me offers essays that look back at the Obama era, and forward to what’s coming next.
The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen (Riverhead, Oct.) - Putin’s bestselling biographer reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible strain of autocracy.
I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street by Matt Taibbi (Random/Spiegel & Grau, Oct.) - The Rolling Stone writer explores the roots and aftermath of the killing of Eric Garner by the police on July 17, 2014, in New York City.
Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World by Suzy Hansen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Aug.) - An American writer living in Istanbul, grapples with a new understanding of her homeland and its place in the world.
Music
Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell by David Yaffe (FSG/Crichton, Aug.) - This book tells Joni Mitchell’s story, composed of dozens of in-person interviews with Mitchell and her friends, as well as analyses of her well-known lyrics, their imagery and style, and what they say about the woman herself.
Gold Dust Woman: A Biography of Stevie Nicks by Stephen Davis (St. Martin’s, Nov.) - Davis’s candid, energetic book reveals the life of the woman who’s arguably one of rock’s greatest singer-songwriters.
Science
Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change by Ashley Dawson (Verso, Oct.) - Many books have elucidated the ever-increasing dangers of climate change, particularly the disastrous impact that rising sea levels will have on coastal regions, but Dawson goes further as he outlines some potential solutions to this crisis. Massive technological projects may not be what’s needed, he finds; instead, the solution may already exist in radical movements to forge a more just and equitable society
The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks (Knopf, Nov.) - Sacks, a larger-than-life figure in the field of neurology, was working on two manuscripts when he died in 2015. This essay collection, which contains two previously unpublished pieces, revolves around core concepts in understanding the human condition and sees Sacks engaging with evolution, creativity, memory, and much more.
Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone by Juli Berwald (Riverhead, Nov.) - In this excellently timed exploration of the humble jellyfish, Berwald shares her personal journey to better understand these potential bellwethers of climate change’s effects on the oceans. Full of captivating tales of this bizarre and largely unfamiliar creature, the book sheds light on jellyfish research as it offers perspective on the jellyfish’s place on the planet—and our own.
Religion
The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve by Stephen Greenblatt (Norton, Sept.) - Harvard Humanities professor and Pulitzer-winning author Greenblatt probes the “beauty, power, and influence” that the Adam and Eve story has held through millennia.
PTL: The Rise and Fall of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Evangelical Empire by John Wigger (Oxford Univ., Aug.) – History professor at the University of Missouri Wigger explores the rise, stumble, and fall of the PTL evangelical empire founded in 1973 by Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. Jim Bakker was sentenced to 45 years in prison for wire and mail fraud.
Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby by Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden (Princeton Univ., Oct.) – Bible scholars Moss and Baden examine the Hobby Lobby-owning Green family’s collection of Bible-related antiquities and how they have aspired to influence national politics by funding a network of projects related to the Bible.
