Leave your world behind
And just like that, the summer of COVID has become the autumn of COVID. And we are all looking ahead — perhaps with trepidation — to the winter of COVID, which is looming just around the bend.
Fortunately, there is a lot of great reading coming up to keep us fascinated, stimulated and engaged as we huddle at home and wait for a vaccine. Here are 14 of the don't-miss books coming out between now and the end of the year:
“JACK”
Marilynne Robinson Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 320 pp. $39.99.
The fourth novel set in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Robinson, “Jack” is the story of the love affair between the white son of a minister and a Black schoolteacher.
“THE SEARCHER” Tana French
Viking, 464 pp., $27.
French leaves Dublin and her Dublin Murder Squad behind and heads to the west of Ireland for this tale of small-town intrigue and lies. It pits an outsider from America against the folks who have always lived there.
“LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND”
Rumaan Alam Ecco, 256 pp. $27.99.
Two families — one Black, one white — hunker down together on Long Island as New York City is plunged into a blackout, something that is quickly seen as a national, not local, emergency. A National Book Award finalist for this year, with winners being announced Nov. 18.
“A LOVER’S DISCOURSE” Xiaolu Guo Grove, 271 pp. $26. (Tuesday)
In post-Brexit Britain, a Chinese woman comes to London to start a new life. Guo is a filmmaker, essayist, novelist and memoirist, winner of a National
Book Critics Circle Award. Her books have been translated into 28 languages.
“RED COMET: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath” Heather Clark
Knopf, 1,152 pp., $40. (Oct. 20.)
A deeply reported biography of the life of the poet, who died by suicide at age 30. Clark separates the work of the writer from her life, examining her depression, failing marriage and fears of being institutionalized.
“THE SILENCE” Don DeLillo
Scribner. 128 pp. $22. (Oct. 20)
A group of people are gathered at a dinner party on Super Bowl Sunday in 2022 when a catastrophe silences the digital world. “I started with a vision of empty streets in Manhattan,” DeLillo said. “The idea of the silence grew from sentence to sentence, from one chapter to the next.”
“AMERICAN GOSPEL”
Lin Enger
University of Minnesota Press. 248 pp. $24.95.
(Oct. 27.)
It’s August 1974, Richard Nixon is on the verge of resigning the presidency, and an elderly man on a farm in Minnesota is waiting for the Rapture. As word gets out, crowds converge there.
“PERESTROIKA IN PARIS”
Jane Smiley
Knopf. 288 pp. $26.95. (Dec. 1)
The story of a horse, a dog and a boy who happen to cross paths in Paris.
“EARTH KEEPER: Reflections on the American Land”
N. Scott Momaday
Harper. 80 pp. $17.99. (Nov. 3)
A Kiowa poet and novelist, and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, Momaday grew up on reservations in the American Southwest. His latest is both a tribute to the land and a warning that we must preserve it.
Charles Baxter
Pantheon, 336 pp. $26.99. (Nov. 17)
A young man has gone missing. His parents search Minneapolis for him, stumbling upon an activist group led by a charismatic leader. Baxter, the Edelstein-Keller Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota and winner of the Rea Award for the
Short Story, is the author of five other novels.
“MOONFLOWER MURDERS” Anthony Horowitz
Harper, 608 pp. $29. (Nov. 10)
In this addictive followup to “Magpie Murders,” Horowitz once again gives readers a story within a story. In this one, an editor visits the house where a man was murdered and a woman disappeared — and believes the clues are in the text of a mystery she edited.
“MEMORIAL” Bryan Washington
Riverhead. 320 pp. $27. (Oct. 27)
The follow-up to “Lot,” Washington’s stellar collection of stories, “Memorial” is a novel about a couple — Benson, a Black teacher, and Mike, a JapaneseAmerican chef. When Mike’s father falls ill, Mike heads back to Japan just as his mother arrives to visit.
Kao Kalia Yang
Metropolitan Books, 272 pp. $17.99. (Nov. 10)
The prize-winning memoirist and picture book writer tells the stories of 14 refugees who have found new homes in Minnesota.
Rachel Joyce
Dial Press, 368 pp. $17.99. (Nov. 3)
Set in a dreary 1950 England, the new novel by the author of “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” follows the adventures of shy, awkward and plain Margery Benson as she impulsively throws away her job, her apartment and her good name and heads to New Caledonia in search of a mythical bug.