Lessons by Ian McEwan
Each fall sees some of the biggest names in fiction releasing new books, some of whom crank out novels regularly and reliably and some of whom surprise us after a long wait. I couldn’t give a paragraph to every luminary, so in addition to the titles outlined below, you’ll also find hitting the shelves a new, satisfying portal fantasy from Stephen King called Fairy Tale, a new collection of short stories titled Liberation Day from the master George Saunders, the David Copperfield-inspired Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, and a 912-page tome by John Irving, The Last Chairlift. Here’s a quick guide to some of the rest of what’s coming so you don’t feel overwhelmed.
Two years ago, Maggie O’Farrell experienced a breakout with her novel Hamnet, a fictional imagining of the death of Shakespeare’s son during the Bubonic plague in 1596. It hit bestseller lists and stayed there for many, many weeks. Now she’s returning to the 16th Century with The Marriage Portrait, published on September 6. This time she takes us to Renaissance Italy and the marriage of the young duchess Lucrezia to a duke who might not have her best interests at heart. Actually, we know at the outset that she’ll be dead before her 17th birthday—but why? And how? The answers are mesmerizing.
In Ian McEwan’s Lessons (September 13), we follow one man’s life through the decades, through global events large and small, and see how he grapples with past traumas. The novel is ambitious, both wide-ranging and intimate, and full of family secrets, but if anyone can pull it off, it’ll be McEwan, who has been getting his best reviews since Atonement.
COVID-19 novels are upon us and Elizabeth Strout joins the fray on September 20 with Lucy by the Sea, which continues the story of Lucy Barton, whom we first met in My Name is Lucy Barton, and whose story continued last year in Oh, William! At the start of the pandemic, Lucy lets her ex-husband convince her to move to Maine to stay with him.
Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson (who might be best known for Life After Life, but who also has a terrific series of mysteries featuring Jackson Brodie) releases September 27 and is set in 1926 London and features the nightclubs of Soho. One club owner and mother of six defends her empire and looks to advance her clan in a story of money, corruption, and betrayal.
If you follow Celeste Ng on Twitter like I do, you know she’s as deeply empathic in real life as she is on the page and her new book addresses some of the terrifying hate crimes that have plagued our country recently and historically. Our Missing Hearts (October 4) is a cautionary tale featuring a father and son living in a chilling dystopian future that feels all too possible. When the son receives a message from what he can only assume is his missing mother, he sets off on a journey to find her.
Lydia Millet follows up her National Book Award-winning A Children’s Bible with Dinosaurs on October 11. In it, Gil walks from New York to Arizona. Once settled, new neighbors move in—their house has one wall made entirely of glass. Gil becomes increasingly involved in their lives while musing on the ties of humans and animals and the crisis of extinction.
Cormac McCarthy is back with not one, but two new novels, companion stories about a brother and sister plagued by loss. The first, The Passenger, releases on October 25 and is a sprawling novel of a salvage diver in 1980 New Orleans pursued by conspiracy, while Stella Maris, releasing on December 6, is a tightly told conclusion written entirely in dialogue. McCarthy writes such haunting, brutal, beautiful, strange fiction, these are two I’m really looking forward to.
And now we’ve made it to December, when Jane Smiley releases new historical fiction, A Dangerous Business, a murder mystery set in Gold Rush California. If you were to tackle even half of the books mentioned here, you’d have thousands of pages to get you into 2023. Maybe that’s plenty. But while all of these books are enticing to me, what I’m most excited about is the possibility of finding something else amongst this fall’s new releases, something I hadn’t been expecting, something new.
Hannah Harlow is owner of The Book Shop, an independent bookstore in Beverly Farms. Harlow writes biweekly recommendations for us. See more of what she recommends reading at thecricket.com.
