More Fall Previews
Topping the WSJ ‘s list of “15 Books to Read This Fall” is, unsurprisingly, The Girl in the Spider’s Web by David Lagercrantz (RH/Knopf; RH Audio). Most of the rest of the titles are also no surprises, including Jonathan Franzen’s Purity (Macmillan/FSG; Macmillan Audio; OverDrive Sample) and Patti Smith’s M Train (RH/Knopf; RH Audio).
Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child (Europa Editions; OverDrive Sample) also makes the cut. With her fourth novel in the Neapolitan series, the author has moved rapidly from Who IS Elena Ferrante? to usual suspect, appearing on all the fall previews, the cover of last week’a NYT Sunday Book Review. and reviewed this week in the L.A. Times, The New Yorker, and Entertainment Weekly, and by Michiko Kakutani in the NYT. In libraries we checked, holds are heaviest for the first book in the series, My Brilliant Friend, which makes sense since many readers are still be new to the author.
Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, John Banville, John Irving, Geraldine Brooks, and Lauren Groff (whose Fates and Furies also just announced as the #1 pick for October’s Indie Next list) round out the expected selections.
The list also includes a few buzzy debuts such as Garth Risk Hallberg’s big-ticket 900-page City on Fire (RH/Knopf; Random House Audio) and Chinelo Okparanta’s novel Under the Udala Trees, About a young Nigerian girl discovering she is gay under a repressive society, it has also been included in previews by Bustle, BookRiot, The Millions, and BuzzFeed.
Reminding us that these previews lack the benefit of hindsight, an article accompanying the WSJ list declares Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (RH/Doubleday) “the sleeper hit of the summer.” (BuzzFeed, however, spotted it in January “27 Of The Most Exciting New Books Of 2015” as did the B&N Review, “Anticipations: Coming in Early 2015“).