Clear your calendars, readers, because we have a lot of books to keep up with this fall.
Start with the 150 titles that our editors have chosen to feature for our special Fall Preview—the unmissable new releases in adult fiction and nonfiction, children’s books, and young adult literature. And those are just the ones that we’ve been able to review. Plenty of highly anticipated books—from Dustin Hoffman’s memoir to the final novel in Leigh Bardugo’s Alex Stern series—weren’t available to critics at press time; stay tuned for those reviews.
What about audiobooks? Kirkus launched its comprehensive audiobooks coverage at the beginning of the year, and we’ve reviewed more than 800 titles in the months since. Because audiobook availability lags behind that of the print book—the latter has to be fully edited and typeset before the former can be recorded—we haven’t seen reviews for many fall audiobooks. But learn which ones are on editor Jennifer Dowell’s radar, including the new Inspector Gamache mystery by Louise Penny, Miss Wolcott’s Ghost, on which actor Alfred Molina has taken up narration duties.
Here are some books that top my own TBR list:
The Weight of Angels by John Boyne (Henry Holt, Sept. 29): It’s been a good year for anyone obsessed with the incomparable Oscar Wilde. In the spring, Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland published After Oscar, about the long-reaching effects of his trial and imprisonment for “gross indecency.” Now novelist Boyne imagines a counterfactual narrative in which those events never happened. Our starred review calls it a “witty and melancholy act of literary resurrection.”
The Disappearers by Marlon James (Riverhead, Sept. 1): After two volumes in his Dark Star fantasy series, James returns to the Jamaican setting of his Booker Prize winner, A Brief History of Seven Killings, with this novel about a group of gay men attacked by a Kingston mob in 1988, leaving one dead and the others injured and traumatized. “Even when it stress-tests your senses,” says our starred review, “this sprawling depiction of gay life in Jamaica is galvanizing.”
American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark (Scribner, Sept. 1): Is Roy Cohn—the closeted lawyer who spearheaded anticommunist witch hunts in the 1950s and died of AIDS in 1986—the key to understanding our current president? This new book, from the biographer of Robert Oppenheimer, sets out to make a persuasive case. “A thorough, deeply reported life story of the gleefully villainous lawyer who molded a U.S. president,” says our starred review.
Countertenor by Anthony Roth Costanzo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Oct. 27): If Cohn’s story leaves me feeling slimy, I’ll turn here for ethereal uplift. Costanzo is a male opera singer who sings in the uppermost range; his book is both a memoir and a music history encompassing 17th-century baroque castrati and the countertenors of the early music revival in the 20th century. Our starred review calls it a “must for opera lovers and fun for general readers as well.”
Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.
