The season’s most anticipated releases run the gamut, from rediscovered literary gems to spine-tingling suspense to candid memoir.
The Berry Pickers
Amanda Peters. Catapult, Oct. 31 ($27, ISBN 978-1-64622-195-0)
Per PW’s review, this “enthralling” novel of a young Canadian Indigenous girl kidnapped and raised by a white family in New England “is a cogent and heartfelt look at the ineffable pull of family ties.”
The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer
Tomas Tranströmer, trans. by Patty Crane. Copper Canyon, Oct. 31 ($40, ISBN 978-1-55659-685-8)
The Nobel Prize–winning poet’s first complete collection to appear in English gathers together his 14 previous volumes and presents the original Swedish versions alongside their translations.
The Chromatic Fantasy
H.A. Silver Sprocket, Oct. 18 ($29.99, ISBN 979-8-88620-032-4)
This graphic novel draws inspiration from illuminated manuscripts to tell the story of a trans man trapped in his life as a nun who makes a deal with the devil.
The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year
Margaret Renkl. Spiegel & Grau, Oct. 24 ($32, ISBN 978-1-954118-46-1)
The New York Times columnist’s “gently moving memoir” of a year spent observing her Nashville, Tenn., garden “will transform the way readers interact with their own backyards,” according to PW’s review.
Company
Shannon Sanders. Graywolf, Oct. 3 ($27, ISBN 978-1-64445-251-6)
This “masterly debut collection about a Black extended family and their triumphs, problems, and secrets” is “a winner,” per PW’s starred review.
Dragon Palace
Hiromi Kawakami, trans. by Ted Goossen. Stone Bridge, Sept. 19 ($18.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-73762-535-3)
Kawakami weaves surreal stories of an old man possessed by an animal spirit; a woman who sees small, three-faced creatures in her apartment; and more.
Geneva
Richard Armitage. Pegasus Crime, Oct. 10 ($26.99, ISBN 978-1-63936-540-1)
Actor Armitage’s “propulsive” debut, about a British scientist who gets caught up in shady dealings involving a new Alzheimer’s treatment, “demands an encore,” according to PW’s review.
Going for Broke: Living on the Edge in the World’s Richest Country
Edited by Alissa Quart and David Wallis. Haymarket, Oct. 3 ($19.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64259-965-7)
Under the auspices of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, this anthology collects first-person essays, poems, and photos by journalists and writers facing economic precarity.
Landscapes
Christine Lai. Two Dollar Radio, Sept. 12 ($26, ISBN 978-1-953387-38-7)
“Sebald fans should take note,” per PW’s review, of this debut novel about an archivist living and working in a near future wracked by climate change.
The Liberators
E.J. Koh. Tin House, Nov. 7 ($27.95, ISBN 978-1-959030-15-7)
Set against the backdrop of Korea’s tumultuous 20th-century history, Koh’s novel chronicles a couple whose arranged marriage cracks under the weight of immigration and loss.
Lord Jim at Home
Dinah Brooke. McNally Editions, Oct. 3 ($18 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-946022-64-6)
Originally published in 1973, this scalding satire of upper-middle-class British life draws inspiration from Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim.
Loved and Missed
Susie Boyt. New York Review Books, Sept. 19 ($17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-68137-781-0)
The story of a woman raising her granddaughter in the wake of her daughter’s drug addiction, British novelist Boyt’s “touching and mordant” U.S. debut “brims with intelligence and feeling,” per PW’s review.
The Moth for the Star
James Reich. 7.13, Sept. 12 ($19.99 trade paper, ISBN 979-8-9877471-2-4)
A murderer who cannot remember his victim struggles to make sense of his crime in this paranormal mystery that travels from Depression-era New York City to Cairo and beyond.
Mothtown
Caroline Hardaker, illus. by Chris Riddell. Angry Robot, Nov. 14 ($18.99, ISBN 978-1-915202-73-4)
In this literary horror novel, a young man who suspects that his parents lied to him about his grandfather’s death receives an unsettling package with bizarre instructions.
Pay as You Go
Eskor David Johnson. McSweeney’s, Oct. 24 ($28, ISBN 978-1-952119-74-3)
PW’s review describes Johnson’s debut novel, about a young man’s odyssey in search of an apartment, as “a big, buoyant adventure” that “feels both ebulliently modern and transparently classical.”
This Plague of Souls
Mike McCormack. Soho, Jan. 2, 2024 ($27, ISBN 978-1-64129-578-9)
Irish author McCormack follows up the Booker-longlisted Solar Bones with a metaphysical thriller about a man who returns home from prison to find his family has vanished.
Surviving Our Catastrophes: Resilience and Renewal from Hiroshima to the Covid-19 Pandemic
Robert Jay Lifton. New Press, Sept. 5 ($24.99, ISBN 978-1-62097-815-3)
The psychiatrist and National Book Award winner returns with a meditation on healing from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Tali Girls: A Novel of Afghanistan
Siamak Herawi, trans. by Sarah Khalili. Archipelago, Nov. 14 ($22 trade paper ISBN 978-1-953861-66-5)
Afghan author Herawi based this novel of girls and women living under oppressive Taliban rule in a rural village on true stories.
Upcountry
Chin-Sun Lee. Unnamed Press, Nov. 7 ($28, ISBN 978-1-951213-77-0)
In Lee’s gritty debut novel, three women of divergent social classes and beliefs face off in a Catskills town.
The Young Man
Annie Ernaux, trans. by Allison Strayer. Seven Stories, Sept. 19 ($13.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64421-320-9)
The Nobel Prize winner’s slim latest documents her affair, when she was in her 50s, with a man 30 years younger than her.
