“Sourdough,” Robin Sloan (MCD/Farrar Straus and Giroux)
We can hardly believe the end of summer is looming. The heat is ferocious and so are the soaking rain storms that turn our streets into canals. And who knows howmanyh u rricanescares lie ahead?
But we’re so close to fall. The kids are complaining about heading back to school soon (parents, oddly, are not). We busted the budget with our tax-free shopping week- end. Traffic will soon be back to its regularly scheduled, miserable, soul-crushing disaster.
And the fall books are almost here.
Falls books are different from summer books (which you’re still probably trying to catch up on). They’re literary. They’re Important. But they are also often so, so good.
So to get you ready for Sep- tember a little early, we present the books you don’t want to miss this fall.
: In his novel “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore” book, Sloan unraveled a mystery about a web designer who takes a job in a peculiar all-night Bay area book shop. New technology clashed, then melded, with classic history. “Sourdough” promises a similar sort of tech and analog mashup, in this case involv- ing the food industry: a software engineer learns to bake bread and uncovers a secret underground market. We’re already hungry for it. Out Sept.5.
“The Golden House,” Salman Rushdie (Random):
“The Golden House” opens with the arrival in America of a mysterious foreign billionaire and his three grown sons, who settle in an exclusive neighborhood in Greenwich Village. Early buzz has compared Rushdie’s novel about the Obama years as a modern “Bonfire of the Vanities.” We’ll have to read it and see for ourselves. Out Sept.5.
“Little Fires Everywhere,” Celeste Ng (Penguin):
In her first novel, the devastating but beau- tiful “Everything I Never Told You,” Ng recounted the events leading up to the death of a teenage girl in 1970s Ohio. Ng, who excels at exploring the push and pull of family, culture and community, returns to the Cleveland suburbs in “Little Fires Everywhere,” about the Richardson family and their attraction to a mysterious mother and daughter who become tenants. Out Sept. 12.
“Forest Dark,” Nicole Krauss (Harper):
Author of the haunting novel “The History of Love,” which ranges from Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe to contemporary Brighton Beach, Krauss lays out the story of an elderly lawyer and a young novelist whose paths cross in the Israeli desert. If it’s half as moving and lyrical as “The History of Love,” we will be pleased. Out Sept. 12.