Take a nice long walk off a literary pier with fall’s big books. First, Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan makes her maiden deep dive into historical fiction with the vivid Manhattan Beach (Scribner). Anna Kerrigan, a child of the Great Depression, embraces the toughness she learned from her mysteriously vanished father by training as a professional diver at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. She is single-mindedly focused, a girl amid a sea of boys. But it’s not long before she becomes entangled with an irresistibly dangerous man who submerges them both in the shadowy past.
Everything must go when the newly divorced Jules Epstein, of Nicole Krauss’s Forest Dark (Harper), decides to liquidate his life and travel to Tel Aviv. With a well-aimed arrow of autofiction, Krauss fires a Brooklyn-based writer named Nicole into this remarkable narrative, herself a victim of writer’s block who must grapple with her marital disintegration. Starting with the decline, if not the disintegration, of the Soviet regime, Masha Gessen’s The Future Is History (Riverhead) tracks totalitarianism through the lens of a generation raised in post-Communist Russia.
On the home front, Hillary Rodham Clinton explains What Happened (Simon & Schuster) during the election upset of the century. Across the pond, Annalena McAfee’s Hame (Knopf) is deep-fried in all things Scottish. And whether on the line or crossing over it, Maria Sharapova is Unstoppable(Sarah Crichton). Love, all.
IN SHORT
Ta-Nehisi Coates knows all too well We Were Eight Years in Power (One World). Nathan Englander invites us to a politically charged Dinner at the Center of the Earth (Knopf). David Litt opts for oration over outburst in Thanks, Obama (Ecco). Toni Morrison wrestles with race in The Origin of Others (Harvard). Campus consent faces hard truths in V.F.contributing editor Vanessa Grigoriadis’s Blurred Lines (Eamon Dolan). Patti Smith sings of creative Devotion (Yale). Jesmyn Ward clears her throat with Sing, Unburied, Sing (Scribner). Celeste Ng lights Little Fires Everywhere (Penguin Press). Deborah Campbell tracks A Disappearance in Damascus (Picador). James Reston Jr. etches A Rift in the Earth (Arcade) over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Music and war come to a crescendo in Bradford Morrow’s The Prague Sonata (Atlantic Monthly Press). Chemistry + family = combustion in Jennet Conant’s Man of the Hour (Simon & Schuster). Sheila Metzner (Rizzoli) captures a life of fashionable reflection. Sally Quinn gets centered by Finding Magic (HarperOne). Franklin Foer logs on to a World Without Mind(Penguin Press). Microsoft C.E.O. Satya Nadella hopes to Hit Refresh(Harper Business). From Chamberlain to Churchill, Michael Kordaremembers World War II Alone (Liveright). Book-jacket visionary Chip Kidd (Rizzoli) gets graphic. Restaurateur Jen Agg takes the heat of I Hear She’s a Real Bitch (Penguin). From Canada to China, Alexandre Trudeau is a Barbarian Lost (Harper Perennial). Good Things Happen Slowly (Crown Archetype) for jazz genius Fred Hersch. All that glitters does not fade in Matthew Rolston’s Hollywood Royale (teNeues). The big shorts: Jeffrey Eugenides lodges a Fresh Complaint (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Tom Hanks collects Uncommon Type (Knopf), and Kiss Me Someone(Tin House), cries the inimitable Karen Shepard.
