Zed: The Zoomer Book Club
The cream of the crop of fall’s hottest reads plus Shelf Life: who’s reading what now
To everything, there is a season, and fall brings a bounty of books
The Cold Millions by Jess Walter (Oct. 6) > From the author of the bestselling
2012 Hollywood satire Beautiful Ruins comes this hotly anticipated novel about two adventurous orphans,
Gig and Rye Dolan, who are emblematic of the class divisions roiling at the turn of the century in Walter’s hometown of Spokane,
Wash. The boys are itinerant workers, but as Gig dreams of a steady job and a house, idealistic Rye gets involved in the union fight for fair wages and better working conditions. The social injustices have modern-day parallels that are glaringly apt.
The Searcher by Tana French (Oct. 6) > The Dublinbased queen of the literary mystery is back with her seventh crime novel, this one about a retired Chicago cop, Cal Hooper, who buys a fixer-upper in a small
Irish town where he fully expects to live out his postdivorce days doing not much of anything, other than jaunts to the local pub. All that changes when Hooper meets a young boy who beseeches him to help find his missing brother, and the bucolic village turns out to have some seriously sinister undertones.
Inside Story by Martin Amis (Oct. 20) > The acclaimed novelist begins with the 2011 death of his dear friend, journalist Christopher Hitchens, who was his wingman since they were magazine writers in London in the ’70s. The book pays homage to the influence of his literary lion of a father, author Kingsley Amis, as well as Saul Bellow, Iris Murdoch and poet Philip Larkin, among other literary luminaries. At its core it is an exploration of life, love and death – a moving and funny paean to the people he loves and the life he lives with and without them. The Forgotten Daughter by Joanna Goodman (Oct.
27) > Joanna Goodman picks up the thread of the Phénix family, first introduced in the heart-rending 2018 bestseller The Home for Unwanted Girls. It’s 1992, and Elodie Phénix, who was given up for adoption but reunited with her parents in Unwanted Girls, is now fighting for reparations from the Quebec government for her mistreatment as one of the Duplessis orphans. Her older brother, James, who opposes Quebec sovereignty, falls in love with a radical separatist named Véronique whose father was imprisoned for murdering a politician in 1970. Elodie becomes Véronique’s confidante as Goodman explores how
French Canadian politics comes between the lovers and their families as they grapple with social injustices, political beliefs and moral quandaries.
The Arrest
by Jonathan Lethem (Nov. 10) > An unnamed cataclysmic event disrupts the world, and everything powered by fossil fuels or electricity has stopped working. At an organic farm in Maine, everything is going pretty well for Sandy and his sister, Maddy, until his frenemy Peter Todbaum, a rich Hollywood producer, shows up in a nuclearpowered super car. Sandy – a former Hollywood script writer – doesn’t know why Peter has made his way across America and what he wants with the farming colony, but it’s up to him to find out if his former college buddy is in search of one last blockbuster or something more menacing.
Dearly
by Margaret Atwood (Nov. 10) > Long before The Handmaid’s Tale, around the time of The Edible Woman and Surfacing, Margaret Atwood wrote reams of poetry. There have been 15 volumes since she selfpublished Double Persephone in 1961, but this is her first collection since The Door in 2007. There are poems with very Atwoodian themes like zombies, aliens and sirens; girls and women; and nature. Wisps of love hang from the words she seems to write to her husband, Graeme Gibson, who died in 2019 and to whom the book is dedicated “in absentia.” The collection offers introspection on aging and death and, in this respect, Dearly is a real goodie for oldies. In “Flatline,” Atwood
– who turns 81 in November – bemoans “the body, once your accomplice, is now your trap.”
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
by V.E. Schwab (Oct. 6) > France, 1714: Adeline LaRue prays to be rescued from a life betrothed to a man she does not love, but her prayers are answered by a demon. She makes a deal with the devil; she can live forever but she will never be remembered by anyone she meets, which ostensibly affords her the freedom to live 300 years “unhindered, untethered and unbound.” Then she meets a bookseller who utters the words she has been longing to hear: “I remember you.” Author Neil Gaiman, the genre-bending master of fantasy, calls it “a joyous evocation of unlikely immortality.”
How to Raise an Elephant
by Alexander McCall Smith (Nov. 27) >
It’s been 22 years since the world was introduced to Precious Ramotswe, founder of the No. 1
Ladies Detective Agency in Gabarone, Botswana. Now, she’s back with a case centred on a baby pachyderm that brings out Ramotswe’s maternal instincts and her sleuthing skills. How to Raise an Elephant is the 21st offering from author and retired law professor Alexander McCall Smith, who was born in Zimbabwe – the country formerly known as Botswana – in a series he namedmed after his first book.