Hold onto your hats, book lovers—there’s an incredible amount of great fiction coming out this fall. I get most excited about a book that’s taken years to write, both because the anticipation has had time to build and because I think you can feel the difference in the book itself. Take Min Jin Lee’s American Hagwon (Cardinal, Sept. 29), her first novel since Pachinko (2017): At 650 pages, it encompasses 15 years, three continents, and many members of the Koh family. As our starred review says, “Through masterfully controlled storytelling, Lee patiently explores how her large group of characters’ fortunes are shaped by forces from within and without: the powerful lure of sex, the sucking vacuum of greed, the insidiousness of racism, the obligations between parents and children.…The author’s wisdom is a gift to her readers.”
China Miéville has co-written several books over the past decade, but the last novel he wrote single-handedly was The Last Days of New Paris in 2016. Now comes The Rouse (Del Rey, Sept. 15), a 1,260-page behemoth he’s been working on for 20 years. Among the memorable characters are Maur (Maureen) Towns, a single mother whose son enlists in the army, becomes an elite soldier, and dies (or maybe not). Then there’s Trooper Allardyce, whose job is to revive the dead. Our starred review calls this “a sprawling but fast-moving tale about the most inhuman concoctions of the military-industrial complex.…A smartly imagined, genre-bending tale that readers may find all too real.”
Fans of Jasper Fforde’s extra-metafictional Thursday Next novels have been waiting 14 years for a new installment and weren’t sure if there would ever be one. So it’s a pleasure to tell you that Thursday will be back to her old hijinks, popping in and out of other novels in an attempt to stop AI from replacing authors (or something like that) in her 14th adventure, Dark Reading Matter (Soho, Oct. 6). Our starred review calls it “a rollicking jumble of plot devices, dad jokes, literary references, existential dread, and pure, joyful silliness.”
Eleven years after Welcome to Braggsville (2015), T. Geronimo Johnson returns with The Occidental Book of the Dead (Morrow/HarperCollins, Oct. 6), another irreverent yet serious look at race in the U.S. This time, in a fictionalized Atlanta, a white cop on patrol with his Black partner—George Washington Jonson, our primary narrator—shoots and kills a white teenager. Our starred review calls it “a swing-for-the-fences novel, both a gripping procedural and high literary study of American bigotry.”
Readers of Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2011) have been waiting 15 years for his second novel, and now, with The Brightness (Little, Brown, Oct. 27), Harbach has returned to the fictional town of Westish, Wisconsin, this time with less baseball and a detour to New York City. The new book focuses on 27-year-old Pella Affenlicht—daughter of the former president of Westish College, who’s coming home to start over after getting divorced—and a group of her friends. Our starred review calls the book “brilliant, poignant, and absorbing.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
