The presidential election season often feels like a slow time for fiction releases—but there are enough exciting books coming out this fall to keep even the most voracious reader busy.
Here are the opening lines of Entitlement (Riverhead, Sept. 17), Rumaan Alam’s first novel since Leave the World Behind (2020): “It was a strange, sultry summer, the summer of the Subway Pricker, but Brooke Orr had decided not to let that interfere with the business of life in New York.” The Subway Pricker! You can feel the dread radiating off the page. Brooke is a Black woman who works for a white billionaire’s charitable foundation and finds her ambition growing to match her surroundings. Our starred review says this book “cements Alam’s status as a talented truth-teller willing to tackle tough issues with grace, generosity, and sensitivity.”
With We Solve Murders (Pamela Dorman/Viking, Sept. 17), Richard Osman gives the elderly sleuths of the Thursday Murder Club books a rest only to introduce a new elderly sleuth, retired London cop Steve Wheeler, along with his daughter-in-law, Amy, a bodyguard for a private security company. Amy’s protecting glitzy novelist Rosie D’Antonio when she realizes that someone is trying to kill her—kill Amy, that is. “Osman fans will be glad to hop on [Rosie’s] private jet and go along for the ride,” according to our starred review.
After the 2021 English translation of The Books of Jacob, Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk returns with The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Riverhead, Sept. 24). It’s a much slimmer book than both its predecessor and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, similarly set at a tuberculosis sanitorium. The guests, all gentlemen, debate the issues of the day, including the relative value of men and women. Our starred review says Tokarczuk “reckons with some of the major intellectual questions of the 20th century while simultaneously spinning a mysterious—and spooky—web of intrigue and suspense.”
Our starred review calls Rivers Solomon’s Model Home (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Oct. 1) a “startling reimagination of the haunted-house genre.” Black, nonbinary Ezri Maxwell has gotten as far as they can from their upbringing in a white community near Dallas, where their parents were cold and their house was—haunted? Now their sisters insist something’s wrong, and they all converge on their childhood home to find their parents dead. “Solomon harnesses and recasts classic horror tropes to tell an original story of race and class, family, trauma, and grief,” says our starred review.
Louise Erdrich continues her string of extraordinary novels with The Mighty Red (Harper, Oct. 1), set in a sugar beet–growing community in North Dakota. There’s a love triangle among high school students aiming for marriage, an intense mother-daughter relationship, and an entire town dealing with the impact of a catastrophic accident. Erdrich’s “writing feels both effortless and wise,” according to our starred review.
Juhea Kim’s first novel, Beasts of a Little Land (2021), was an epic story of 20th-century Korea. Her second, City of Night Birds (Ecco, Nov. 26), goes in a completely new direction, focusing on the world of contemporary Russian ballet and featuring ambition, love, injury, pain, celebrity, and even a subplot about the invasion of Ukraine. Our starred review calls it “another brilliant page-turner.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
