The Five Novels You Need to Read This Fall

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Fall is always the season when the year’s literary heavy hitters come out to play, and 2023 is no exception. With so many highly anticipated novels hitting the shelf at once, it can be overwhelming to know which one to preorder first! But don’t sweat it; these five are absolutely worth the hype—and then some.

Absolution, by Alice McDermott

“You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives.” The year is 1963; the city, Saigon. Patricia is newly married to an “engineer on loan to the navy.” While the particulars of her husband’s work are fuzzy to her, Patricia’s responsibilities are clear: keep her husband’s sheets washed and ironed, ignore the thrumming of distant artillery over the garden party chatter, and befriend housewives like Charlene, whose social standing, Patricia convinces herself, may somehow advance her husband’s career. Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter has questions, and Patricia has the benefit of hindsight. With wry humor and razor-sharp insight, Patricia lays her memory bare for the next generation. Damning and dazzling, this is the story of a Vietnam we never got in history class—a story of innocence lost, the bounds of womanhood tested, and our nation held to account.

Land of Milk and Honey, by C Pam Zhang

The Menu takes a turn for the apocalyptic in this deliciously lyrical read. In an imagined future that feels alarmingly close, smog has descended, blotting out the sun, killing crops, and leaving a young chef ravenous for flavor. Desperate for fresh produce, she accepts a mysterious job cooking for an “elite research community” on a mountain in Italy and discovers fridges brimming with extinct meat, bounties of fruit bursting with juice, and her own thorny hunger for pleasure. There is far more cooking in this strange Eden than the chef’s roasted truffles; in a climate of scarcity, sensuous indulgence always comes with a side of moral complicity.

Happiness Falls, by Angie Kim

Everything was normal the morning of Mia’s father’s disappearance. That’s what Mia’s mother and twin repeatedly tell the police. But Mia, a self-proclaimed overanalyzer, isn’t so sure. She knows that tiny differences can have enormous implications; an abnormality in 0.00000003 percent of her younger brother’s DNA resulted in Angelman syndrome, a rare condition that leaves him—the only one who knows what happened on that fateful morning—perpetually smiling and unable to speak. As Mia pores over the minute details of her family’s life and her brother’s behavior, the mystery of her father’s disappearance becomes entangled with mysteries of the human condition. With unexpected humor and aching tenderness, the bestselling author of Miracle Creek forces us to reckon with our definitions of family, ability, and happiness. Can we ever really know the people we love?

The Unsettled, by Ayana Mathis

A decade after taking the world by storm with her debut novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie—the 72nd Oprah’s Book Club selection and an instant bestseller—Mathis is back with a highly anticipated and emotionally propulsive follow-­up. Ava Carson grew up in Bonaparte, Alabama, one of the oldest and strongest Black communities in the state. But by 1985, Bonaparte’s Black population has nearly vanished and Ava is a single mother living in a Philadelphia homeless shelter, separated from her fierce mother by years of estrangement and several states. Through a chorus of distinctive and virtuosic voices, we gather the story of a mother, a daughter, and the land that both unites and divides them.

Let Us Descend, by Jesmyn Ward

The two-time National Book Award–winning author of Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing delivers her most masterful work yet. Born into slavery and out of sexual assault, Annis has lived a life characterized by bodily exploitation. When she is sold south, her power over her physical reality only shrinks. But this is not the only reality that matters; Annis’s mother always told her that this world was “seething with spirit.” She was right. Pitting ancestral wisdom and human connection against the arbitrary brutality of slavery, this book will have readers torn between wanting to savor the richness of every sentence and needing to know, immediately, what happens next.

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