10 books to add to your reading list in October

Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and nonfiction, to consider for your October reading list.

October’s books will take you far: From 19th century North Carolina to the modern Middle East, from a fractious Rastafari family in Jamaica to a family-run Chinese restaurant in Detroit. Centering these strong outings from authors established (Viet Thanh Nguyen) and new (Safiya Sinclair) is the double bind of family and community: the ways it can bear you up but also confine or even break you. Plus: sci-fi from Walter Mosley! Happy reading.

FICTION

Death Valley

By Melissa Broder

Scribner: 240 pages, $27

(Oct. 3)

Caught between worries about her dying father and her ill husband, a woman quite literally snags her clothes and her mind on cactus needles in the California desert. As she walks, Broder’s protagonist considers the novel she’s writing — about a woman, caught between her dying father and her ill husband. It’s as if M.C. Escher and Thich Nhat Hanh made installation art, but because it’s Broder, author of the hilariously dark oddball novel “Milk Fed,” the boundary-pushing hallucinatory musings make sense.

The MANIAC

By Benjamín Labatut

Penguin Press: 368 pages, $28

(Oct. 3)

Feeling unprepared for the impending arrival of our AI overlords? Labatut, a Chilean writer of twisty novels that bend scientific fact and fiction, has got you. His latest is about John von Neumann, the Hungarian polymath whose work on the Manhattan Project led to breakthroughs in quantum physics that are still unfolding today. But he is not the title character; that honor goes to the supercomputer MANIAC, and its uncanny role in mankind’s seeming determination to annihilate itself.

Read more: A novel by Benjamín Labatut explores the dark side of science — and the color blue

Blackouts

By Justin Torres

FSG: 320 pages, $30

(Oct. 10)

Say her name: Jan Gay. She was the primary researcher on a 1941 book called “Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns,” and she was a lesbian. Her work was then co-opted and published as proof of pathology under the name George W. Henry. In this novel about storytelling, Torres (“We the Animals”) places his protagonist with a dying person named Juan, and the pair use redacted volumes to recapture personal and communal histories.

Touched

By Walter Mosley

Atlantic Monthly: 176 pages, $26

(Oct. 10)

Already a master of the thriller, Mosley turns to sci-fi in “Touched,” which he has said is the first of many planned novellas in a genre that allows a writer to break all the rules. Here, a Black man named Marty has an unusual and disturbing week from which he rebounds with supernatural powers — which he uses to incite rebellion against an intergalactic plan to finish life on Earth. It’s like nothing else you’ve ever read, and it’s so, so good.

Read more: In 2019, Walter Mosley won his first Edgar with a new PI. Now there's a sequel

Let Us Descend

By Jesmyn Ward

Scribner: 320 pages, $28

(Oct. 24)

From Carolina rice fields to the slave markets of New Orleans and on to a Louisiana sugar plantation, the enslaved young woman Annis endures a hellish march, surviving through memories of her warrior grandmother; her mother’s love and training; her absent love, Safi; and an anarchic group of elemental spirits. It’s no spoiler to point out that the brilliant Ward employs a Dantean structure as Annis makes her descent and, at last, her rebirth.

NONFICTION

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution

By Cat Bohannon

Knopf: 624 pages, $35

(Oct. 3)

Bohannon, who holds a PhD in narrative and cognition, takes on a story nearly too big to tell: how biological women influenced the human race. Without breasts and blood, wombs and placentas, our race wouldn’t have much of a story to tell, Bohannon argues — and it might not have tools either, since women may have been first to figure out they needed something to help them adapt to the world around them.

A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, a Memorial

By Viet Thanh Nguyen

Grove Press: 400 pages, $28

(Oct. 3)

Nguyen, one of today's most important writers, structures his memoir around learning how to be a man through being a son and then a father. Forced to flee Vietnam with his family as a child, Nguyen grew up around violence in San Jose — his parents were shot in their grocery store when he was 9. But as he grew up and identified as American too, he wondered about this dual legacy, which so infused his Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction. Here he ponders how it has shaped him.

Read more: Viet Thanh Nguyen on his 'Sympathizer' sequel and the 'scarcity' of voices like his

How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

By Safiya Sinclair

37 Ink: 352 pages, $29

(Oct. 3)

Now a poet living in the United States, Sinclair was once taught to reject all of “Babylon,” the vestiges of empire that Rastafari like her father believed kept Jamaica from its rightful glory. Unfortunately, Sinclair’s father was a bad Rasta and a worse parent; he terrorized his family with rigid rules, flights of temper and occasional beatings. Not only is Sinclair’s writing superb, its power is matched by the wild truth of the story.

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy

By Nathan Thrall

Metropolitan: 272 pages, $30

(Oct. 3)

Reading this Middle East expert’s account of a Palestinian worker and activist and the death of his angelic 5-year-old son, Milad, is tough — and necessary. The bus accident that took the boy’s life in 2012 was caused in no small part by the neglected infrastructure that makes Palestinian Jerusalem a miserable, dangerous place to live. By narrowing the focus to one family’s loss, Thrall humanizes the consequences of systemic decay.

Read more: Why Safiya Sinclair cut her dreadlocks and wrote a memoir of pain and poetry

Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant: A Memoir

By Curtis Chin

Little, Brown: 304 pages, $30

(Oct. 17)

Chin, a filmmaker and co-founder of the Asian American Writers Workshop, grew up in Detroit, doing homework and having meals at his family’s restaurant, Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine. His memoir focuses on the ways Chung’s served as a haven for this gay ABC (American-Born Chinese) boy, helping him navigate many different cultures and identities over a simple, nourishing plate of almond chicken.

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.