Big names fill a cornucopia of fall books
Michelle Obama, Stephen King, Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman and more speak volumes.
NEW YORK – Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, may be the glittering jewel in the fall books season, but plenty of other big-name baubles are headed for bookstores come September. ❚ Booksellers got a sneak peek at the fall lineup (the most important season of the year leading into the Christmas holiday) at the just-wrapped BookExpo America, the annual gathering of the publishing industry. ❚ New titles from Stephen King, John Grisham, Barbara Kingsolver and Sally Field are among the highlights:
❚ Memoirs: Becoming (November) is a look back by the former first lady, and one-half of a reported $65 million deal she and former president Barack Obama struck for separate memoirs. Michelle Obama’s is first out of the gate.
Sally Field dishes on one-time love Burt Reynolds (who delivered his own autobiography in 2015) and much more in In Pieces (September). Singer Tina Turner turns up the volume in My Love Story (October). And The Who lead singer Roger Daltrey hopes to create a sensation with his so-far untitled life story (October).
❚ Celebrities: Actress and book champion Reese Witherspoon shares her love for all things Southern in Whiskey in a Teacup: What Growing Up in the South Taught Me About Life, Love, and Baking Biscuits (September). Married funny people Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally get silly in The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, the tale of their “epic romance” (October).
❚ Mysteries/thrillers: Crime fans can feast on new books from legal eagle John Grisham ( The Reckoning, October), Michael Connelly ( Dark Sacred Night, teaming detectives Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch, October) and Louise Penny ( Kingdom of the Blind, November).
❚ More fiction: Stephen King, whose thriller The Outsider just hit stores in May, returns in October with the novella Elevation, about a man mysteriously losing weight while battling the lesbians next door.
In Unsheltered (October), her first novel since Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver takes on our polarized country in dual narratives set in the same New Jersey house, one in the present, the other in the 1870s.
Nicholas Sparks promises a fresh weepy in Every Breath (October), inspired by a real mailbox on a deserted beach in North Carolina stuffed full of letters left by passers-by. A safari guide from Zimbabwe helps provide the sniffles.
❚ Non-fiction: Bill O’Reilly’s publisher Henry Holt continues to stand by the fired Fox News host and the hugely successful “Killing” franchise he writes with Martin Dugard. The latest, Killing the SS, about the post-World War II hunt for Nazi war criminals, arrives in September.
Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin draws on the examples of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson in Leadership in Turbulent Times (September).
U.S. Senator/former presidential candidate (and Trump gadfly) Bernie Sanders rallies progressives before the midterm elections in Where We Go From Here (October).
Susan Orlean ( The Orchid Thief) looks at the unsolved catastrophic 1986 fire at the main branch of the Los Ange- les Public Library and shares her own love of libraries in The Library Book (October).
And in The White Darkness (October), David Grann ( Killers of the Flower Moon) re-creates Henry Worsley’s doomed 2015-16 quest to walk across Antarctica alone.