The rest of this year and the beginning of the next, readers will hear from an abundance of literary superstars—Atwood, Banks, Harrison, Gurganus among them. Many others, known and lesser know, who make up our top 10, will get attention of their own. It will be a bountiful autumn. A feast, really.
Kicking off the top 10 is Pulitzer Prize–winner Jhumpa Lahiri, whose new novel, The Lowland, is set on two continents and spans four decades.
Bestseller Donna Tartt’s third novel, The Goldfinch, traces the lingering effects of a mother’s death on her growing son.
Much has already been written about poet Jason Mott’s debut novel, The Returned. His high-concept novel, about the dead coming back, in some cases decades after their death, was acquired several months pre-pub by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B Entertainment. With that head start, the show, shot in the southeast Missouri town of Arcadia and starring Omar Epps, is already slated to hit TV screens this year as the midseason replacement show Resurrection (likely renamed because a zombie series called The Returned is currently running in the U.K.).
James McBride’s new novel, The Good Lord Bird, “offers a fresh perspective on abolitionist firebrand John Brown in this novel disguised as the memoir of a slave boy who pretends to be a girl in order to escape pre–Civil War turmoil, only to find himself riding with Brown’s retinue of rabble-rousers from Bloody Kansas to Harpers Ferry,” says PW’s starred, boxed review.
In her first work of fiction in 13 years, Elizabeth Gilbert takes on the 19th century and spans continents with a story of a female botanist in The Signature of All Things. If this novel sells a fraction, even a hundredth of Eat, Pray, Love (nearly six million copies), it will be a success.
In a recent starred, boxed review, we called Someone by Alice McDermott, winner of the National Book Award, a “deceptively simple tour de force.”
Only two years ago, the young Stegner Fellow Jennifer DuBois debuted with the “terrific” (per PW) novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes. Cartwheel, acquired by Midas touch editor David Ebershoff, is DuBois’s new novel. Ripped from the headlines, it’s about a female student studying in Argentina who is suspected of murdering her roommate.
One of Dublin’s most fascinating new talents, Kevin Barry, was just awarded the IMPAC prize for his 2012 novel, City of Bohane. When PW asked him about the musicality of his language, Barry talked about “earning” a few good days of writing by having to go through many more “slow, slodgy days where your mind feels like porridge.” His new collection is Dark Lies the Island.
How to Be a Good Wife is not only a handy guide for your average postwar female (teaching valuable lessons in kitchen, bar, and bedroom artistry), but also the name of the first novel from 20-something author Emma Chapman.
At press time, Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Bleeding Edge, has proven as elusive as its author. All the secrecy only makes us want to read it that much more. The novel, set in Pynchon’s own backyard in the early days of the 21st century, opens with a mother walking her children to school on a glorious spring day on the Upper West Side. Half a year later, in lower Manhattan, a screaming comes across the sky.
PW’s Top 10: Literary Fiction
The Lowland. Jhumpa Lahiri. Knopf, Sept.
The Goldfinch. Donna Tartt. Little, Brown, Oct.
The Returned. Jason Mott. Harlequin Mira, Aug.
The Good Lord Bird. James McBride. Riverhead, Aug.
The Signature of All Things. Elizabeth Gilbert. Viking, Oct.
Someone. Alice McDermott. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sept.
Cartwheel. Jennifer DuBois. Random, Oct.
Dark Lies the Island. Kevin Barry. Graywolf, Sept.
How to Be a Good Wife. Emma Chapman. St. Martin’s, Aug.
Bleeding Edge. Thomas Pynchon. The Penguin Press, Sept.
Literary & General Fiction
Algonquin Books
The Explanation for Everything by Lauren Grodstein (Sept. 3, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-1616201128). In the New York Times bestselling author’s new novel, an evolutionary biology professor’s life is turned upside down when a student asks him to supervise her independent study in intelligent design. A meditation on belief, morality, and family. 30,000-copy announced first printing.
Amazon Publishing/New Harvest
Actors Anonymous by James Franco (Oct. 15, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0544114531). This genre-busting debut novel by James Franco, the hardest working man in show business, is an obsessive examination of the addictions of celebrity, acting, and the making of fiction. 75,000-copy announced first printing.
Atlantic Monthly Press
(dist. by Perseus Books Group)
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis (Sept. 3, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0802119827). The first book in 10 years from Shacochis spans five decades and three continents as it traces a global lineage of political, cultural, and personal tumult, from WWII to September 11, 2001.
Atria Books
The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally (Aug. 20, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-1476734613). From the author of Schindler’s List comes an epic story of two Australian sisters, both trained nurses, whose lives are transformed by the cataclysm of the Great War.
Ballantine
Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan (Jan. 21, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0345516534). The second novel by the author of the bestselling Loving Frank chronicles the turbulent relationship between Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson and his wild-tempered American wife, Fanny.
Bellevue Literary Press
(dist. by Consortium)
Palmerino by Melissa Pritchard (Jan. 14, trade paper, $14.95, ISBN 978-1934137680). The new press that surprised everyone when Tinkers won the Pulitzer Prize will publish Pritchard’s first novel in nine years. The book will appeal to readers interested in Victorian culture, LGBT issues, and the supernatural. Critics have lauded Pritchard’s lyrical voice and her skill in bringing historical figures to life.
Coffee House Press
(dist. by Consortium)
An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky by Dan Beachy-Quick (Sept. 10, trade paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-1566893411). Tree of Life meets In Search of Lost Time in this contemporary tale of loss and the power of storytelling, from the poet (Circle’s Apprentice), writer, and critic.
Counterpoint
Lola Bensky by Lily Brett (Sept. 10, hardcover, $25 ISBN 978-1593765231). Drawing on her own experiences as a young journalist, the bestselling author of Too Many Men creates an unforgettable character in high school dropout Lola Bensky, a 19-year-old rock journalist sent by her Australian paper into the heart of the London music scene at the most exciting time in music history: 1967.
The Last Animal by Abby Geni (Oct. 15, hardcover, $24, ISBN 9781619021822) is that rare literary find—a series of stories unified around a single theme: people who use the interface between the human and the natural world to contend with modern problems of love, loss, and family.
Crown/Hogarth
The First True Lie by Marina Mander (Jan. 21, trade paper, $13, ISBN 978-0770436858) is an international bestseller about a curious boy named Luca, left parentless by his father’s absence and his mother’s death. Terrified of being an orphan, Luca chooses to pretend that his mom is still alive.
Doubleday/Talese
MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood (Sept. 3, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-0385528788). Bringing together characters from Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, the anticipated conclusion to Atwood’s speculative fiction trilogy confirms the ultimate endurance of humanity, community, and love. PW called it a “potential dystopian classic.”
Doubleday
Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem (Sept. 10, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-0385534932). This new novel from literary superstar Lethem about the all-but-forgotten American Communist Party is, according to PW, an “epic and complex” family saga, which “packs a witty punch” as it chronicles three generations of all-American radicals.
Doomed by Chuck Palahniuk (Oct. 8, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-0385533034). Madison Spencer, the liveliest, snarkiest dead girl in the universe, continues the adventures in the afterlife begun in bestseller Palahniuk’s Damned. Having somewhat reluctantly escaped from Hell, she now wanders the Purgatory that is Earth as a ghostly spirit.
The Color Master by Aimee Bender (Aug. 13, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-0385534895). The bestselling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake returns with a collection of dreamy, strange, and magical stories that, wrote PW, “combine gnomic postmodern prose with whimsical fairy tale reveries.”
Dutton
The Spymistress by Jennifer Chiaverini (Oct. 1, hardcover, $26.95, ISBN 978-0525953623). Bestselling author Chiaverini returns to the Civil War for a new novel inspired by “a true Union woman as true as steel” who risked everything by caring for Union prisoners of war—and stealing Confederate secrets.
Ecco
The Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan (Nov. 5, hardcover, $29.99, ISBN 978-0062107312) is the latest novel from the bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club, an evocative epic, spanning half a century, of two women’s intertwined fates and their search for identity, from the lavish parlors of Shanghai courtesans to the fog-shrouded mountains of a remote Chinese village. 750,000-copy announced first printing.
A Permanent Member of the Family: Stories by Russell Banks (Nov. 12, hardcover, $25.99, ISBN 978-0061857652). The literary powerhouse’s first story collection in almost 15 years includes six unpublished works. 30,000-copy announced first printing.
Europa Editions
(dist. by Penguin)
The Last Banquet by Jonathan Grimwood (Oct. 1, hardcover, $26.95, ISBN 978-1609451387), two-time winner of the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel, is a big book about food and flavor, about the Age of Reason and the ages of man, and about obsession. The Times of London calls Grimwood “a name to watch.”
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Someone by Alice McDermott (Sept. 10, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-0374281090) is a “deceptively simple tour de force” that, wrote PW in a starred review, “lays bare the keenly observed life of an ordinary woman.”
Hild by Nicola Griffith (Nov. 12, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-0374280871) finds the award-winning author of Slow River and Stay bringing “a sci-fi appreciation for alien culture and a woman’s perspective to this fictional coming-of-age story about real-life Saint Hilda of Whitby, who grew up pagan in seventh-century Britain,” said PW.
Graywolf press
Dark Lies the Island: Stories by Kevin Barry (Sept. 24, hardcover, $24, ISBN 978-1555976514) is an award-winning collection from the author of the Dublin IMPAC Award–winning novel City of Bohane, which was a debut novel that, PW wrote, “succeeds with a continual barrage of hybrid language reminiscent of Anthony Burgess at his A Clockwork Orange best.”
Duplex by Kathryn Davis (Sept. 3, hardcover, $24, ISBN 978-1555976538). Time, place, and mind all bend in this new novel from the author of The Thin Place. PW called it “otherworldly.”
Grove Press
(dist. by Perseus Books Group)
The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson (Oct. 1, hardcover, $24, ISBN 978-0802121639) is bestseller Winterson’s re-creation of a dark history full of complicated morality, sex, and tragic power plays, a literary suspense tale set in a brutal period of English history, centered on the notorious Pendle witch trials of 1612.
Brown Dog: Novellas by Jim Harrison (Dec. 3, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-0802120113). An all-in-one collection of five previously published works and one new novella, all featuring the recurring character Brown Dog.
Harlequin MIRA
The Returned by Jason Mott (Aug. 27, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-0778315339). This “exceptional debut novel” (PW) from poet Mott, recently bought for TV series development by Brad Pitt’s production company, the dead suddenly reappear inexplicably.
Harper
The First Phone Call from Heaven by Mitch Albom (Nov. 12, hardcover, $24.99, ISBN 978-0062294371). One autumn day, in the small northern town of Coldwater, Mich., the phones begin ringing. The people calling are all deceased, and they want to talk about heaven. 1.5 million-copy announced first printing.
We Are Water by Wally Lamb (Oct. 29, hardcover, $29.99, ISBN 978-0061941023). From the bestselling author of The Hour I First Believed and I Know This Much Is True, a new novel about a marriage, a family, and human resilience in the face of tragedy. 500,000-copy announced first printing.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone (Nov. 12, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-0618386239). An illicit romance at one of America’s most esteemed colleges leads to tragedy in Stone’s (Damascus Gate) “latest bulletin from the dark side of the human condition” (PW). 50,000-copy announced first printing.
Knopf
Leaving the Sea: Stories by Ben Marcus (Jan. 7, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-0307379382). A new collection of stories, following a year after Marcus’s first novel with Knopf, The Flame Alphabet, that showcase the author’s range.
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (Sept. 24, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-0307265746). The Pulitzer Prize–winning Lahiri’s latest novel spans continents and decades, from India in the 1960s, amid a rising antipoverty rebellion, to present-day New England. 350,000-copy announced first printing.
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy by Helen Fielding (Oct. 15, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-0385350860). For her third installment, Fielding takes readers to contemporary London and a host of contemporary difficulties, from drunk texting to the challenges of maintaining sex appeal in later life. 250,000-copy announced first printing.
Little, Brown
Stella Bain by Anita Shreve (Nov. 19, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0316098861) is an epic novel set against the backdrop of WWI from the bestselling Shreve (Eden Close), an author who is “particularly effective in evoking the landscape and atmosphere of a close-knit community and the authentic vernacular of its nicely differentiated inhabitants,” wrote PW. 250,000-copy announced first printing.
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (Oct. 22, hardcover, $30, ISBN 978-0316055437). The author of the bestsellers The Secret History and The Little Friend tells of a boy who, taken in by the family of a wealthy New York friend after the death of the boy’s mother and her lingering impact as he moves into adulthood. 250,000-copy announced first printing.
Liveright press
(dist. by W.W. Norton)
Local Souls by Allan Gurganus (Sept. 23, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-0871403797). The bestselling author of Oldest Confederate Widow Tells All returns with his first comic novel, set in the late 19th-century American South. Southern author Wells Tower says of Gurganus: “No living writer knows more about how humans matter to each other.”
McPherson & Co.
Sea of Hooks by Lindsay Hill (Nov., hardcover, $25 ISBN 978-1-62054-006-0). A young man in San Francisco, blessed with a near hallucinogenic outlook, recounts his “icy Victorian mother,” alcoholic father, and his own spiritual journey to Bhutan.
McSweeney’s
The End of Love by Marcos Giralt Torrente, trans. by Katherine Silver (Oct. 15, hardcover, $22, ISBN 978-1938073564). In this quartet of stories, Torrente explores the confounding, double-edged promise of love. Each finds a man carefully churning over his past, trying to fathom how the distance between people can become suddenly unbridgeable.
Melville House
(dist. by Random House)
Half the Kingdom by Lore Segal (Oct. 1, hardcover, $23.95, ISBN 978-1612193021). A dark comedy about life, death, and growing old in post-9/11 America, by the author of Other People’s Houses and Her First American.
Milkweed Editions
Let Him Go by Larry Watson (Sept. 10, hardcover, $24, ISBN 978-1571311023). Margaret and George Blackledge chase their ex-daughter-in-law across the American West to retrieve their grandson from the clutches of a dangerous family, in a battle reminiscent of the Hatfield and McCoys. 25,000-copy announced first printing.
Morrow
The Tilted World by Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly (Oct. 1, hardcover, $25.99, ISBN 978-0062069184). Set against the 1927 Mississippi Flood is a story of murder and moonshine, sandbagging and saboteurs, dynamite and deluge, and a man and woman who find unexpected love—from married couple Franklin, author of the bestselling Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, and Beth Ann Fennelly, a Pushcart Prize–winning poet. 100,000-copy announced first printing.
W.W. Norton
Archangel by Andrea Barrett (Aug. 19, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-0393240009). The National Book Award–winning author of Ship Fever returns with another novel that lives at the intersection between questions of science and ethics. Said PW: “There is indeed a sense of expansion as one travels onwards in Barrett’s world, and pleasure in watching it fill out.”
Dirty Love by Andre Dubus III (Oct. 7, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-0393064650). This collection of four loosely connected short works from the award-winning author of the #1 bestseller The House of Sand and Fog showcases the abilities of this “master of naturalistic New England fiction” at his most trenchant, wrote PW.
Other Press
A Well-Tempered Heart by Jan-Philipp Sendker (Jan. 21, trade paper, $15.95, ISBN 9781590516409). Sendker returns with a sequel to his international bestseller The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, which was a word-of-mouth slow-build hit and a favorite among booksellers.
The Elixir of Immortality by Gabi Gleichmann (Oct. 1, trade paper, $18.95, ISBN 978-1590515891). An epic blend of fact and fiction that spans a thousand years of European and Jewish history as told through 36 generations of the Spinoza family, including the famous philosopher Baruch Spinoza.
Penguin/Pam Dorman Books
The Girl You Left Behind by Jojo Moyes (Aug. 20, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 9780670026616). Moyes, the author of last year’s bestseller, Me Before You, an Indie Next Pick, returns with a tale of two women separated by a century but united in their determination to fight for what they love.
Pantheon
Nostalgia by Dennis McFarland (Oct. 1, hardcover, $25.95, ISBN 978-0307908346). Bestselling author McFarland’s latest is a Civil War novel that traces the journey of a 19-year-old private abandoned by his comrades and struggling to regain his voice, identity, and place in a world utterly changed by war.
Penguin
The Yellow Eyes of Crocodiles by Katherine Pancol, trans. by William Rodarmor and Helen Dickinson (Oct. 29, trade paper, $16, ISBN 978-0143121558). Le Divorce meets The Elegance of the Hedgehog in this French megabestseller, with more than two million copies sold throughout Europe. This is Pancol’s English-language debut.
The Penguin Press
Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon (Sept. 17, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 9781594204234). The secretive literary genius and National Book Award winner returns with a novel about some New York swindlers set in the first days of the 21st century, “in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the events of 9/11.”
Penguin/Blue Rider press
Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker (Sept. 17, hardcover, $26.95, ISBN 978-0399160967). A new novel by bestselling author Baker (Vox) reintroduces feckless but hopeful hero Paul Chowder, whose struggle to get his life together is reflected in his steadfast desire to write a pop song, or a protest song, or both at once.
Picador
The Affairs of Others by Amy Grace Loyd (Aug. 27, hardcover, $24, ISBN 978-1250041296). Selected for this year’s BEA Editors Buzz, a debut novel from the former fiction editor of Playboy magazine, about a young woman, haunted by loss, who rediscovers passion and possibility when she’s drawn into the tangled lives of her neighbors.
Random House
Cartwheel by Jennifer duBois (Oct. 8, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-0812995862). A National Book Award Foundation “5 under 35” author and Iowa M.F.A. graduate, DuBois made a splash with her first novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Prize for Debut Fiction. Her second novel is torn from the headlines: an American foreign exchange student is arrested for murder in Buenos Aires.
Perfect by Rachel Joyce (Jan. 7, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-0812993301). From the author of the international bestseller The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry comes a novel about the search for truth and unconditional love.
Night Film by Marisha Pessl (Aug. 20, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-1400067886). The critically acclaimed author of Special Topics in Calamity Physics returns with a suspenseful literary thriller PW called “just as twisted and intelligent” as her lauded debut.
Andrew’s Brain by E.L. Doctorow (Jan. 28, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1400068814). A new novel from the author of Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and The March takes us into the life and mind of a man—his marriages, mistakes, dreams—as he thinks about how to make sense of his life and times.
Enon by Paul Harding (Sept. 10, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1400069439). The next novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Tinkers, in which a father’s grief over the loss of his daughter threatens to derail his life.
RIVERHEAD
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride (Aug. 20, hardcover, $27.95 ISBN 9781594486340). “McBride offers a fresh perspective on abolitionist firebrand John Brown in this novel disguised as the memoir of a slave boy who pretends to be a girl in order to escape pre–Civil War turmoil, only to find himself riding with John Brown’s retinue of rabble-rousers from Bloody Kansas to Harpers Ferry…. Outrageously funny, sad, and consistently unflattering,” wrote PW in its starred review.
Sweet Thunder by Ivan Doig (Aug. 20, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 9781594487347). The bestselling novelist and storyteller of the American West draws on his own experiences as a newspaperman in the first half of the 20th century to depict the struggles of a fledgling newspaper in Butte, Mont. 75,000-copy announced first printing.
On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee (Jan. 7, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 9781594486104). From the award-winning author of Native Speaker and The Surrendered (one of PW’s 10 Best Books of 2010) comes a provocative story of a female fish-tank diver who lives in a future, long-declining America. 100,000-copy announced first printing.
Scribner
Quiet Dell by Jayne Anne Phillips (Oct. 15, hardcover, $28, ISBN 9781439172537). From one of America’s most accomplished and acclaimed fiction writers, a chilling, spectacularly riveting novel based on a real-life multiple murder by a con man who preyed on widows—a story that has haunted Jayne Anne Phillips for more than four decades.
My Notorious Life by Kate Manning (Sept. 10, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 9781451698060). The author’s debut novel, 2002’s Whitegirl, echoed the course of the relationship between O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson; she returns after 11 years with a new novel about a famous midwife set in Victorian-era New York.
Simon & Schuster
Snow Hunters by Paul Yoon (Aug. 6, hardcover, $22, ISBN 978-1476714813). Ann Patchett says of Yoon’s debut novel: “Behind every subtle gesture, this novel shimmers with a deep and complex history. [It’s] a beautiful and moving meditation on a solitary life.” Yoon’s story collection, Once the Shore, won the 2010 Asian American Literary Award for Fiction.
The Gravity of Birds by Tracy Guzeman (Aug. 6, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-1451689761). In this debut novel, an art authenticator and an art historian are employed by a famous, reclusive painter to sell a never-before-seen portrait. Guzman’s short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Gulf Coast, and other literary journals.
Soho Press
A Beautiful Truth by Colin McAdam (Sept. 17, hardcover, $25, ISBN 978-1616953157) is told simultaneously from the perspective of humans and chimpanzees, set in a Vermont home and a Florida primate research facility. PW called the novel “a thought-provoking foray into the not-so-dissimilar minds of our ape relatives.”
Inside Madeleine by Paula Bomer (Dec. 3, trade paper, $15, ISBN 978-1616953096). From the author of the “alarmingly genuine” (per PW) novel Nine Months comes a second collection of stories about the curious, complicated relationships girls have with their bodies, with other girls, and with boys.
Sourcebooks Landmark
Sworn Sword by James Aitcheson (Aug. 1, hardcover, $24.99, ISBN 978-1402280764) is the first of a projected historical series, set in 11th-century England, about the Norman Conquest. PW said that Aitcheson “shows great promise as a novelist with this colorful debut.”
Soft Skull
Good Indian Girls: Stories by Ranbir Singh Sidhu (Oct. 15, trade paper, $15.95, ISBN 978-1593765316). In this debut story collection, Sidhu takes on a range of dark topics, like disastrous anthropological expeditions, the fate of pet snakes, a strange cult built around a discovered skull, and the birthday-present sex games given to a workaholic by his doting wife.
Kara Was Here by William Conescu (Nov. 12, trade paper, $15.95 ISBN 978-1-59376-533-0). Brad Mitchell’s life is falling apart. His marriage is in limbo, the woman he thought he would marry, Kara, died from an overdose, an old friend keeps trying to convince him that Kara was actually murdered, and he has started to see double. When Kara—or, rather, her ghost—returns to Brad’s side, his past and present blur into a murky fog.
Spiegel & Grau
Bingo’s Run by James A. Levine (Jan. 7, hardcover, $24, ISBN 978-1400068838). A doctor whose medical research in Africa prompted him to write his first novel, the “heartbreaking and terrifying” (PW) The Blue Notebook, returns to Kenya for a story about a lovable young drug runner in Nairobi.
St. Martin’s
Lookaway, Lookaway by Wilton Barnhardt (Aug. 20, hardcover, $25.99, ISBN 978-1250020833) is a satirical novel about a family coming apart, a society changing beyond recognition, and a woman doing her best to hold it all together. Barnhardt is the author of three previous novels, including her critically acclaimed first novel, Emma Who Saved My Life.
How to Be a Good Wife by Emma Chapman (Oct. 15, hardcover, $24.99, ISBN 978-1250018199) is a haunting novel being likened to Room, about a wife and mother who, after her son goes off to college, can’t seem to remember her life before marriage. Worse, she begins having disturbing visions.
Twelve
The Apartment by Greg Baxter (Dec. 3, hardcover, $24, ISBN 978-1455574780) is a meditation on our relationship with a new Europe that measures our feeble attempts to cure violence with violence, and an unflinching portrait of the ways that we are shaped by guilt. 30,000-copy announced first printing.
Viking
Who Asked You? by Terry McMillan (Sept. 17, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-0670785698). Family ties are tested and transformed in the new novel from the bestselling author of Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back.
The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee (Sept. 3, hardcover, $26.95, ISBN 978-0670014651). A new novel about a boy separated from his mother in a nameless land, from the Nobel Prize–winning author of Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace. A “captivating and provocative” novel, said PW.
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert (Oct. 1, hardcover, $28.95, ISBN 978-0670024858). After 13 years, Gilbert, the bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, returns to fiction with, according to PW, a “big, expansive, old-fashioned” epic novel of desire, ambition, and the thirst for knowledge.
Yale Univ. Press
The African Shore by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, trans. by Jeffrey Gray (Oct. 22, trade paper, $13, ISBN 978-0300196108). A highly praised novel by Guatemala’s leading writer of fiction, now in English for the first time.
