2023 Texas Book Festival must read: Stacey Abrams, Ann Patchett, Walter Isaacson

On Friday, the Texas Book Festival offered a "sneak peak" at this year's authors and political leader, community organizer and best-selling author Stacey Abrams leads the lineup. Also on the bill for this year's festival are PEN/Faulkner award winner Ann Patchett, Time magazine editor Walter Isaacson and National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson.

The lineup preview included 16 authors, a small fraction of the 250 authors for readers of all ages who will present at this year's event.

What is the Texas Book Festival and how do I attend?

Founded in 1995 by former librarian and then First Lady of Texas Laura Bush, the festival's mission is to connect "authors and readers through experiences that celebrate the culture of literacy, ideas and imagination."

This year's event is scheduled for November 11-12. The fest takes over the area in and around the Texas Capitol in Downtown Austin and features book signings, author presentations, cooking demonstrations and kids' activities. Some author sessions take place in the Capitol building.

Book festival programming is free and open to the public.

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What should I read to get ready for this year's Texas Book Festival?

While Abrams is the author of multiple nonfiction books, she's also a popular romance novelist. Her latest work, "Rogue Justice," is a political thriller that continues the story of young law clerk Avery Keene, who unraveled a vast conspiracy that ensnared the highest officials in power in Abrams' 2022 release "While Justice Sleeps." (Minus the queasy real-life echoes of creeping fascism, the latter was a fine summer read.)

In her new novel "The Madstone," this year's Texas Writer Award recipient Elizabeth Crook weaves unlikely romance into a young pregnant mother's fraught stagecoach run across the Lone Star State in 1868. Isaacson shadowed controversial Tesla-leader and richest man in the world for the intimate biography "Elon Musk." Patchett's latest novel "Tom Lake" is a meditation on love, marriage and family. And Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's "Chain-Gang All-Stars" is a dystopian take-down of the prison industrial complex that imagines prisoners as modern-day gladiators coaxed into battling for a promise of freedom.

For younger readers, Woodson is presenting her middle grade novel "Remember Us" and Angie Thomas, author of "The Hate U Give," will be promoting her debut middle grade effort, "Nic Blake and the Remarkables: The Manifestor Prophecy."

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A few more books for your Texas Book Festival reading list

• S.A. Cosby "All the Sinners Bleed"

• Andrew Sean Greer "Less Is Lost"

• Vashti Harrison "Big

• Roger Reeves "Dark Days"

• Curtis Sittenfeld "Romantic Comedy"

• Rachel Louise Snyder "Women We Buried, Women We Burned"

• Luis Alberto Urrea "Good Night, Irene"

• Abraham Verghese "The Covenant of Water"

• Lawrence Wright "Mr. Texas"

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Stacey Abrams, Ann Patchett, Walter Isaacson headed to Texas Book Fest