33 Must-Read Books of Fall 2019
There is much to love about autumn, not least that it’s the season when readers get to curl up with some of the biggest, most anticipated books of the year. So we gathered this bounty of must-reads—a literary harvest to savor that we will update each month of fall 2019.
Wild Game by Adrienne Brodeur
When Brodeur was fourteen, her capricious, magnetic mother Malabar enlisted her help in covering up an extramarital affair she had with a close family friend. “Nothing,” Brodeur writes in her lush memoir, “made me feel more loved than making my mother happy, and any means justified that end.” Devastating and delectable (and just a bit detestable), this debut chronicling the affair and its aftermath is a captivating hymn to the costs and comforts of daughterhood. Read Emily Bernard's review of the book here.
Grand Union by Zadie Smith
Nineteen years ago, White Teeth announced the arrival of Zadie Smith as a turn-of-the-century wunderkind. She has since released four more highly praised novels and two books of essays, establishing herself as an intellectual writer in the best sense: burrowing into complexity, seeking it out, raising suspicion about situations where it appears absent. Now her first-ever story collection offers yet another kaleidoscopic display of her singular sophistication. Smith’s compositions—rife with ambivalence, in love with ideas, witty and mordant—echo in the head long after the last word. Read the full review here.
She Said by Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey
For any who believe that reporters are cynical about the business of journalism, Kantor and Twohey, The New York Times writers who brought down seemingly untouchable mogul Harvey Weinstein, stand as proof of its integrity. Of the many important revelations to emerge in their groundbreaking and unputdownable She Said, the most compelling is that, above all, the Weinstein story was the result of a brave collaboration between Weinstein’s victims and the journalists, activists, and good citizens who came forward, despite threats to their livelihoods and reputations. Read the full review here.
Know My Name by Chanel Miller
Miller, the survivor at the center of the Stanford rape case, takes back her identity in a chilling and ultimately triumphant memoir that reveals how she has moved on—from victim to writer and activist. Know My Name evokes a woman whose spirit hasn’t been broken—a study in what it means to strike back, not in revenge, but in reclamation. Read the full review here.
The Book of Gutsy Women by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton
More than a tour of feminism’s greatest hits, this compendium of female trailblazers is infused with the Clintons’ personal experiences. With intimate dialogue between the authors, the book feels like a torch-passing. It’s moving to witness the woman who was almost our first female president bond with her daughter over these pioneers—a hint at what could’ve been, yes, but also at what, inevitably, will be.
Agent Running in the Field by John Le Carré
The espionage master’s thrilling latest brings intelligence expert Nat out of semiretirement to lead a motley group of British spies who stumble upon a covert Russian operation against theWest. But it’s Nat’s Trump-hating badminton partner, Ed, who may be the mission’s unwitting sleeper cell.
Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi
In this 2019 International Booker Prize–winning novel, a trio of Omani sisters— a repressed seamstress, an aspiring intellectual, and a dewy-eyed idealist— grapple with fates forged by the clash between their strict patriarchal upbringing and modernity.
Royal Holiday by Jasmine Gullory
From a reigning queen of contemporary romance comes a wondrous amour between Vivian—a 54-year-old black woman who’s overdue for vacation and spending Christmas in England with her daughter, the Duchess’s personal stylist— and Malcolm, Her Majesty’s private secretary, a.k.a. Hot Chocolate.
Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl by Jeannie Vanasco
When Vanasco was 19, a close friend sexually assaulted her; 14 years later, she tracked him down to get some answers as to why. Here, she spins that episode into a cuttingly funny meta-meditation on her own pain in the context of #MeToo.
Edison by Edmund Morris
The celebrated biographer, who died in May, leaves us his last work: an ingenious and revealing look at the complex man whose inventions changed the world, even though there’s no such thing, in Edison’s own words, as “an idea being brain-born; everything comes from the outside.”
Home Work by Julie Andrews
The legendary star of Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, and Victor/Victoria reflects on her momentous career and complex marriage to director BlakeEdwards, sharing tidbits about her friendship with Walt Disney, how she got over losing My Fair Lady to AudreyHepburn, and the difficulty of being both a devoted mother and a working actor.
Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Díaz
This hard-hitting memoir-in-essays adeptly captures how the wounds of youth can remain long into adulthood.The author survived a foulmouthed, chain-smoking mother described as“small but scared of nothing” while trying to avoid becoming her Lothario father, a “keeper of secrets, teller of tales” who gave her—and now readers— the gift of words.
A Pilgrimage to Eternity by Timothy Egan
The New York Times columnist and disillusioned Catholic wrestles with his crisis of faith while walking the Via Francigena, a 1,200-mile medieval path from Canterbury to the Vatican.Interspersing the historical with the personal, Egan’s chronicle of the journey leads to his epiphany that “there is noway. The way is made by walking.”
Arias by Sharon Olds
The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet’s incendiary 12th collection lingers on the dissonance between our public and private selves, “actual as a small mammal in the woods /with a speaking countenance.
Curious Toys By Elizabeth Hand
After 14-year-old tomboy Pin—drug runner for a carnival cross-dresser and daughter of a fortune-teller—discovers a murder at an amusement park, she tries to crack the case in this atmospheric, gender-bending mystery set in 1915 Chicago.
Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
When teenagers Aubrey and Iris come together with the passion and carelessness of young love—a relationship that produces a daughter, Melody—both families swallow their disappointment and resolve to make do. Moody, spare, and intense as a Picasso line drawing, the National Book Award winner’s poignant latest confronts the indelible marks of youthful indiscretions and the way we explain our adolescence to our adult self. Read the full review here.)
Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith
In this slim, hallucinatory volume, Smith roves the country in real time, visiting favorite haunts, hitching rides with strangers, contemplating the fuzzy border between waking and dreaming, and mourning the results of the 2016 presidential election. But just as a sense of gloom begins to settle, the sun peeks through the clouds. For while “there is nothing in heaven like the suffering of real life...,” she writes, “I still keep thinking something wonderful is about to happen.”
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
Patchett’s masterful eighth novel, is a fierce, intimate, and unstoppably readable saga of two siblings struggling not to let the past define them. The Bel Canto author weaves together, with clear-eyed compassion and intuitive, witty honesty, the ties that keep us whole and hold us back. Read the full review here.
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
The grande dame of dystopian fiction revisits the way-too-close-for-comfort totalitarian world of Gilead in this magnificent sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Filled with her signature pitch-black humor and blistering critiques of patriarchy gone wild, Atwood’s follow-up expands the universe of the original in spine-tingling ways—for starters, by revealing the backstory of the villainous Aunt Lydia.
Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke
When a 9-year-old goes missing on a vast lake, who do you call? In this scalp-prickling encore to her Edgar-winning Bluebird, Bluebird, Locke brings back intrepid Texas Ranger Darren Matthews, who tracks the boy’s trail to the town of Jefferson, a gumbo of race and class prejudices captured in vivid detail: “a Miller High Life...a premade bologna sandwich...bluesy zydeco on the radio.”
Whose Story Is This? By Rebecca Solnit
In 20 essential essays, the firebrand feminist thinker probes such zeitgeisty topics as whether “the fall of men has been greatly exaggerated” and male anger is “a public safety issue.” Ultimately, Solnit concludes, we are “moving on to a future with more people and more voices and more possibilities.”
The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott
This cinematic Cold War thriller spins a seductive spy drama from the covert mission to publish Boris Pasternak’s classic Russian romance Doctor Zhivago as a strategy to undermine the Soviets—a real-life plot unveiled several years ago in the Washington Post. Among the cast of this fictional rendering are Pasternak’s muse and mistress, and the tight-lipped ladies of the CIA’s secretarial pool who see and hear all.
Girl by Edna O’Brien
The lauded Irish novelist leaps continents in a feat of imagination that transmogrifies headlines into a searing fable of violence and resilience. Maryam, a Nigerian girl abducted by Boko Haram, survives repeated rapes and betrayals through sheer will. In spare, exacting prose, O’Brien aims her saga, like a divining rod, at “the best of all knowing and feeling and forgiving.”
The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman
Berlin, 1941: the summit of Nazi power and brutality. A mother must spirit her child away from certain death with the aid of a rabbi’s daughter and a female golem; together they raise a torch against history’s darkest night. In Hoffman’s telling, evil mingles with courage, and the “cruel perversions of men” are poised against sanctuaries where “angels walked through the yellow grass.”
The Grammarians by Cathleen Schine
Brandishing Wilde-esque whimsy, the author of The Three Weissmanns of Westport returns with an effervescent story of identical-twin word nerds—one’s a copy editor with a column called “The People’s Pedant,” the other a kindergarten teacher—whose increasingly divergent means of self-expression threaten their ludicrously close sisterhood.
Face It by Debbie Harry
The trailblazing frontwoman shares tales of growing up in New Jersey amid hobos and raccoons, creating a “girl drag” persona that was an homage to Marilyn Monroe, surviving New York City’s bad old days, posing for Andy Warhol, and touring the world with Blondie. The big reveal: Beneath the bleach and ballsiness is a heart of glass, shattered by the anguish of being abandoned by her birth mother.
Sontag by Benjamin Moser
A towering figure like Susan Sontag deserves a towering tome, and Moser’s 700-plus-page biography of the iconic cultural critic delivers. Following its subject from forsaken daughter of an alcoholic single mother to intellectual guru setting the worlds of arts and letters ablaze, this blockbuster à la Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra is both granular and grand—an opus fit for the writer-philosopher who “created the mold, and then she broke it.”
Make It Scream, Make It Burn by Leslie Jamison
A whale’s song pulses unanswered through the briny deep. A toddler recalls a past life as a World War II pilot. A photographer becomes obsessed with a destitute Mexican family. In these enthralling essays, the Empathy Exams author travels the landscapes of hope and sorrow, mixing reportage and criticism while drawing on her own vulnerability.
Akin by Emma Donoghue
The author of the literary phenomenon Room returns with a soul-stirring novel in which octogenarian Noah, a childless Manhattan widower, is forced to become guardian to 11-year-old Michael, a grandnephew he’s never met. The unlikely pair—Noah, world-weary and tech-challenged; Michael, street-smart and in need of a father figure—bond over a family mystery whose clues lead them to France. There they piece together the half-century-old puzzle of whether Noah’s mother was a member of the Resistance or a Nazi sympathizer.
Cantoras by Carolina de Robertis
Tired of swimming against the tide of the oppressive Uruguayan dictatorship of the 1970s, five gay women flee to the country’s idyllic coastline in search of solace and solidarity. Over the next three decades, they form a “family stitched together by the very fact that they’d been torn from the fabric of the accepted world.” Every line of this gorgeous and grippingly adventurous tale sings with lush, aqueous beauty.
The Second Founding by Eric Foner
Not all constitutional amendments are created equal. A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian pares away the myths surrounding the 13th, 14th, and 15th—which abolished slavery, guaranteed all citizens due process under the law, and vastly expanded voting rights—while tracing their DNA through today’s body politic. Foner’s peerless scholarship and radiant humanity uncover the battles royale that tested the nation’s character and roil us still.
Dominicana by Angie Cruz
Fifteen-year-old Ana acquiesces to her mother’s wishes and marries 32-year-old smooth talker Juan, who whisks her away from a rural Dominican village to the Big Apple. Yet her new husband and country aren’t all she imagined; as the former turns abusive and the latter erupts with the tumult of the ’60s, the heroine of this wondrous fish-out-of- water story tries to hold steady, knowing “a well-placed rock in a river changes the current.”
Out of Darkness, Shining Light by Petina Gappah
When the explorer David Livingstone dies, his African entourage vows to bear his body to the coast for eventual burial in England. Based on Livingstone’s journals and narrated by his gossipy cook and a freedman with a messiah complex, this textured novel illuminates the agonies of colonialism and blind loyalty—Conrad’s heart of darkness in reverse.
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