Fall 2018 Book Releases We're Excited to Read

A hedge-fund manager flees his life in New York while his brilliant wife, Seema, tackles the aftermath in this poignant and funny new novel from Gary Shteyngart. It's epic in scope, and it resonates powerfully, so powerfully that it just might take your breath away. (September 4)

To buy: $28, amazon.com, indiebound.org

This highly anticipated new novel from Olivia Laing delves into the life of writer Kathy Acker, whose engagement prompts more questions than answers. Through this frame, Laing contemplates state of the world, the nature of art, and the practice of living with love on a globe in tumult. (September 11)

To buy: $21, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Two couples navigating the tensions of marriage after children are at the heart of this sharp, moving new novel by Diana Evans. In it, a couple living in south London and one in the suburb of Dorking encounter domestic crises big and small. (September 11)

To buy: $26.95, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Fans of magical realism and historical fiction will devour this stunning new novel from Wayétu Moore, a story of Liberia and the African diaspora that’s populated with characters who grapple with accepting and harnessing their gifts upon a changing landscape. (September 11) 

To buy: $26, amazon.com, indiebound.org

This new novel from Rebecca Serle is a romance with a touch of magic that kicks off when Sabrina Nielsen’s 30th birthday party is crashed by her answer to the classic dinner party question: Which five people, dead or alive, would you invite to dinner? Things get interesting when three people from Sabrina's past (plus none other than Audrey Hepburn) show up. (September 11)

To buy: $27.99, amazon.com, indiebound.org

This historical novel about love and medicine sweeps through the landscape of World War I and follows a young medical student named Lucius as he arrives in a makeshift field hospital in the Carpathian Mountains to work alongside Sister Margarete, the only remaining nurse stationed there. (September 11)

To buy: $28, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Told in urgent, moving, and tender prose, the novel The Caregiver follows Mara Alencar as she flees 1980s Rio de Janeiro for California, where she becomes a caregiver to a young woman with stomach cancer. It's the final novel from the late writer Samuel Park, whose experiences in Brazil and Los Angeles inspired threads of the story. (September 25)

To buy: $26, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Conspiracy theories abound in The Shape of the Ruins, a thrilling new novel from Juan Gabriel Vásquez that unfolds a story about a theft, an arrest, and a web of secrets in the world of Colombian politics. It grips the imagination from the first page, entangling readers in the novel's dramatic twists and turns as it's led along by the narrator, also a novelist named Juan Gabriel Vásquez. (September 25)

To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Transcription tells the engrossing story of Juliet Armstrong, a young woman recruited into British intelligence during World War II, whose work—and the consequences of that work—return to haunt her years later. (September 25)

To buy: $28, amazon.com, indiebound.org

The friendship-turned-love story between C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman is at the heart of this new novel by Patti Callahan. It traverses the Atlantic, from New York to Oxford, and Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife, says, “Their connection comes to life in Callahan’s expert hands, revealing a connection so persuasive and affecting, we wonder if there’s another like it in history. Luminous and penetrating.” (October 2)

To buy: $25.99, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Marfa, Texas, is the inspiration for this thought-provoking collection from Jeffrey Yang, a poetic and visual exploration of the place and its contradictions, the landscape and its art. (October 2)

To buy: $20, amazon.com, indiebound.org

After an accident, the title character of Leif Enger’s long-awaited new novel finds himself a stranger in a place he used to know, a small Midwestern town that’s populated with curious characters whose lives unfold with humor and heart. (October 2)

To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org

These eight essays traverse the globe, engaging on topics as varied as tigers and tycoons, globalization and meaning, all tied together with writer Brian Phillips’ compelling voice and unrelenting curiosity. (October 2)

To buy: $15, amazon.com, indiebound.org

From the author of Swimming Lessons and Our Endless Numbered Days comes a suspenseful story set in the English countryside that follows a researcher named Frances Jellico as she encounters and befriends a couple who may not be exactly what they seem. (October 9)

To buy: $25.95, amazon.com, indiebound.org

The latest novel from Haruki Murakami arrives stateside this fall and promises a perspective-bending tale tackling the contours of love and war. (October 9)

To buy: $30, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Sixteen stories make up this enthralling, vivid debut collection from writer and physician Chaya Bhuvaneswar. The stories span centuries, from Renaissance Portugal to present-day India, and provide powerful glimpses into experiences of grief, violence, and betrayal. (October 9)

To buy: $16.95, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Mississippi-born writer Kiese Laymon has penned a mighty memoir in Heavy, a tectonic examination of his life and experience in the world, which is illuminated moment by moment through the unraveling of a lifetime of closely kept secrets. (October 16)

To buy: $26, amazon.com, indiebound.org

After last year’s fantastic novel The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry is back with another mysterious tale, this one about a translator named Helen Franklin who, once she hears a folk tale about a figure called Melmoth the Witness, finds herself in proximity to a very peculiar disappearance. (October 16)

To buy: $27.99, amazon.com, indiebound.org

This thrilling tale is set in the Hamptons, where secrets threaten to derail a family of well-to-do Long Islanders—a young woman, her fiancé, and his teenaged daughter—who are haunted by a mystery with an icy grip. (October 16)

To buy: $26, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Two families separated by time but connected by place are at the heart of Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, a story in which a woman named Willa Knox begins to research the history of her home and unearths Thatcher Greenwood, a science teacher from the 1880s whose life echoes through the intervening years. (October 16)

To buy: $29.99, amazon.com, indiebound.org

The stories in this collection are aching and powerful dispatches on race, violence, and the modern world. Take George Saunders’ word for it: He calls Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black, “An excitement and a wonder: strange, crazed, urgent and funny...The wildly talented Adjei-Brenyah has made these edgy tales immensely charming, via his resolute, heartful, immensely likeable narrators, capable of seeing the world as blessed and cursed at once.” (October 23)

To buy: $14.99, amazon.com, indiebound.org

This darkly comic, macabre tale spins a story about an orphan named Marie Grosholtz (nicknamed "Little") who was born in 18th-century Switzerland and developed her sculpting talents in Revolutionary-era Paris, eventually becoming the famed Madame Tussaud. (October 23)

To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org

In this funny and compelling family drama, the question of inheritance brings together the family of Stanley Huang, who has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and whose ex-wife, current wife, and children struggle with the idea of both losing Stanley and inheriting a possible fortune. (October 30)

To buy: $26.99, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Fans of Jasmine Guillory's novel The Wedding Date will be over the moon for her latest, a lighthearted story to get lost in that begins with a disastrous public proposal and explores the newfound friendship and unexpected love story that grows from catastrophe. (October 30)

To buy: $15, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Fans of Lucia Berlin’s short fiction should pick up this new collection, a selection of stellar stories that are, at turns, lively, memorable, and sharp. It's the follow-up to 2015’s posthumously published A Manual for Cleaning Women. (November 6)

To buy: $26, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Half-Hazard, a collection of poetry by Kristen Tracy, explores the funny, the broken, and the imperiled through memorable verse, entertaining perspectives, and a wry look at the world. (November 6)

To buy: $16, amazon.com, indiebound.org

A former poet laureate of the United States, Natasha Trethewey is back with a collection of poems both new and selected that illuminate shared national traumas and give voice to issues of gender, race, loss, remembrance, and healing. (November 6)

To buy: $26, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Two sisters separated by a war and an ocean are at the center of this new novel by Eugenia Kim. In it, one daughter is left behind in South Korea while her family takes her sister to the United States in hopes of building a new life. (November 6)

To buy: $26, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Helen Klein Ross’ latest novel is a centuries-spanning family saga about Bridey, a sixteen-year-old Irish immigrant bound for New England who finds herself alone, pregnant, and facing an uncertain life, as well as her descendants, whose lives are altered by the mysteries of Bridey’s past. (November 6)

To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org

From the author of The Story of Arthur Truluv comes this novel about community and caring for one another that sees Lucille Howard, a friend of Arthur Truluv’s, step in to take care of her neighbors' son when fate intervenes and disrupts their lives. (November 13)

To buy: $26, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Jonathan Franzen returns to bookshelves with this thought-provoking essay collection; it concerns itself with issues personal, political, and global, and it grapples eloquently with the state of the world. (November 13)

To buy: $27, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Anuradha Roy’s new novel is a story of family, love, and loss; it introduces readers to Myshkin, who is abandoned by his mother, Gayatri, and who must unravel the mysteries of her life to learn about his own. (November 20)

To buy: $26, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Come with Me is an absorbing new novel about Amy Reed, a PR rep, mother, and wife, who works in tech, specifically in a start-up exploring an the possibility of an algorithm that allows people to access alternate lives, all the ones they didn’t get to live for one reason or another. (November 27)

To buy: $26.99, amazon.com, indiebound.org

Inspired by the real-life art of Marina Abramović, particularly her work The Artist Is Present, this new novel from Heather Rose introduces readers to a composer named Arky Levin who happens upon an art installation that changes his life and whose story opens out into essential questions of presence, connection, and love. (November 27)

To buy: $15.95, amazon.com, indiebound.org