A feast of fiction awaits lucky readers this autumn: was there ever a year with so many books from so many big names? New novels by Sally Rooney, Ali Smith and Jonathan Coe. Booker contenders from US big hitters Richard Powers and Rachel Kushner. The latest adventure from Haruki Murakami and rip-roaring feminist horror from Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk… The weeks ahead are packed with treats to brighten the dark nights in prospect, including Robert Harris’s latest political thriller, Precipice, about a bed-hopping PM in 1914; there’s even a new John le Carré, from the pen of the late novelist’s son, Nick Harkaway.
With so much in store, where to begin? Whet your appetite with our exclusive first look at one of the year’s most keenly anticipated releases: Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings, the first novel in seven years from The Line of Beauty author. We also talk to another Booker winner, Roddy Doyle, about revisiting his best-loved creation, Paula Spencer, in his new book, The Women Behind the Door.
To guide you through the glut of goodies, here’s a preview of some of the best novels the season has to offer. Prize winners and long-cherished names mix with new voices, not least the German bestseller Fatma Aydemir, translated into English for the first time with her sensational new novel, Djinns. Whatever your favourite genre or style – whether you’re after a morally twisty drama of greed and race in the Obama years, a surreal inter-dimensional love story with unicorns and talking shadows or a satirical state-of-the-nation extravaganza set in the dying days of Tory Britain – this autumn has a novel to suit every taste: tuck in.
William Boyd
(Viking, 5 September)
For page-turning glamour, you can bank on a William Boyd novel to hit the spot. After a detour into the 19th century with his previous book, The Romantic, his latest spy romp returns to his more usual 60s beat in the company of a tragedy-haunted travel hack lured into doing the British state’s dirty work after a trip to newly independent Congo. Boyd is having a blast, as always, and he goes all out to ensure we do, too, as our hero zigzags around Europe under orders from a shadowy handler, Faith Green, beautiful but enigmatic – what else?
Rachel Kushner
(Jonathan Cape, 5 September)
Kushner made the Booker shortlist in 2018 with The Mars Room, about a lapdancer jailed for murder. She’s tipped to go one better with her new book, a brainy espionage caper whose wry humour stands out on this year’s longlist. The high-concept scenario is narrated – somewhat unreliably – by one Sadie Smith, a booze-addled American private investigator who rocks up in France to root out a claque of hard-left eco-saboteurs operating under the sway of a maverick scholar’s conspiracy theory about the fate of the Neanderthals. Think Mick Herron crossed with Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood.
Rumaan Alam
(Bloomsbury, 17 September)
Seen last year on Netflix, starring Julia Roberts, Alam’s 2020 dystopia Leave the World Behind probed the tension between two couples, one white, one black, who find themselves unexpectedly thrown together at a Long Island holiday rental. His new book drops the sci-fi styling for another nervy social drama eyeing the complex contours of prejudice. A black graduate in post-crash New York is hired by an elderly white philanthropist in thrall to her ideas of how best to give away his billions – but there’s one plan she’s keeping to herself. A slow-burn tale of connivance and deceit with a knockout ending.
Elizabeth Strout
(Viking, 19 September)
The shrewd-eyed observer of love, loss and the ties that bind – life, basically – is back with a prospect to make fans itch: Lucy Barton, still in Maine after fleeing Covid-struck New York in Strout’s last novel, Lucy by the Sea, has now become pals with every book club’s best-beloved grouch, Olive Kitteridge, titular heroine of Strout’s 2009 Pulitzer winner. As the friendship blossoms, the lawyer Bob Burgess, another Strout regular (and divorced Lucy’s sort-of-beau), defends the accused in a murder case that sets tongues wagging. Strout weaves a gossamer-light web of a community’s hopes and setbacks.
Sally Rooney
(Faber, 24 September)
The most talked-about author of her generation returns with a hotly awaited fourth book in seven years, her longest yet. With a Joycean tang to the prose, it continues the deepening of her style since the crystalline insouciance of her 2017 debut Conversations with Friends. And after everyone assumed she was writing about herself in her last novel Beautiful World, Where Are You – one of whose characters was a famous young Irish novelist – this time she gives us a story of two grieving brothers, one a lawyer, one a chess player, entangled with three women in the wake of their father’s death.
Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
(Fitzcarraldo Editions, 26 September)
The Polish Nobel winner ladles up a deliciously creepy revenge tale in this satirical spin on Thomas Mann’s 100-year-old masterpiece The Magic Mountain. Instead of the Alps, we’re in the mountains of Silesia, among a group of male tuberculosis patients spouting misogynist tirades while off their faces on psychedelic liquor. But odd goings-on in the woods portend a comeuppance… For anyone daunted by the girth of Tokarczuk’s last novel, the 800-page theological epic The Books of Jacob, this is closer to the shivery slimline thrill of her surprise 2018 hit, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.
Fatma Aydemir, translated by Jon Cho-Polizzi
(Peirene Press, 22 October)
Sometimes you just want a big old family saga to lose yourself in – and there’s none more engrossing this autumn than Djinns, the first English outing for a Turkish-Kurdish writer whose nuanced take on post-migration experience made her a controversial bestseller in her native Germany. It opens on the dying thoughts of Hüseyin, a Gastarbeiter metalworker suffering a fatal heart attack in the week he’s due to retire. Then come the lives of his children, from the eldest daughter he forced to marry early, to his youngest son, a high-schooler dangerously in love with another boy on his football team.
Ali Smith
(Hamish Hamilton, 31 October)
For serious-minded frolics, look no further than Ali Smith, whose low-slung experimentalism in her much-cherished Seasonal Quartet tackled ills such as post-Brexit xenophobia, Covid and climate catastrophe in surprisingly acrobatic style. Her new book is the first of a two-part sequence – next year’s Glyph will continue a story apparently hidden in these pages – and it takes place in a doomy future where even the name Taylor Swift no longer rings any bells. We follow two border-crossing siblings as they navigate a tech-addicted surveillance state persecuting “unverifiables”.
The Proof of My Innocence
Jonathan Coe
(Viking, 7 November)
The premier satirist of great British crapness is on killer form in this gag-a-minute mystery set amid Liz Truss’s rise to PM, as a zero-hours sushi seller at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 gets ensnared in the tale of a political blogger murdered at a NatCon-ish rally of rabid Tories in the Cotswolds. Sending up literary fads as well as the state of the nation, the style cleverly pinballs from cosy crime to “dark academia” and autofiction – and who but Coe would think to structure a book around the abysmal transport police mantra “See It. Say It. Sorted”?
Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel
(Harvill Secker, 19 November)
Now 75, the undisputed king of anything-goes magic realism sparked frenzied late-night queues in Tokyo last April with his first novel since 2017’s surreal mystery Killing Commendatore. Written in lockdown, The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a parallel-reality romance about a middle-aged everyman in search of a lost love who vanished in her teens. He soon finds himself talking to his own shadow in a unicorn-stalked city whose headline attraction is a peculiar library. Regular readers will delight in the Easter eggs nested in an unsettling quest spun from Murakami’s long-patented dream logic.
To order Gabriel’s Moon, Creation Lake, Entitlement, Tell Me Everything, Intermezzo, The Empusium, Djinns, Gliff, The Proof of My Innocence or The City and Its Uncertain Walls and support the Guardian and Observer go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
The best of the rest…
Other fiction to look forward to in the coming months includes Aussie heavyweight Tim Winton’s grippingly apocalyptic Juice (Picador, 17 October), catnip for fans of The Road. Something small but perfectly formed will always do well as Christmas draws near – ask Claire Keegan – and Tessa Hadley’s novella The Party (Jonathan Cape, 31 October) looks just the ticket, as does a standalone story from Susanna Clarke, The Wood at Midwinter (Bloomsbury, 24 October), tantalisingly set in the world of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.
If you prefer to curl up with an epic when the clocks go back, try Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Third Realm (Harvill Secker, 3 October), the latest in the spooky Norwegian panorama he began with The Morning Star. For a thriller, Nick Harkaway’s Karla’s Choice (Viking, 24 October) extends the canon of his late father, John le Carré, to follow spymaster George Smiley in the years between The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Or get in on the ground floor of a new series with Richard Osman’s We Solve Murders (Viking, 12 September), introducing his latest unlikely sleuthing team, daughter-in-law/father-in-law duo Amy and Steve.
In translation, look out for new novels from two past winners of France’s prestigious Goncourt prize: Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Silence of the Choir (Europa Editions, 26 September) and Michel Houellebecq’s long-awaited Annihilation (Picador, 19 September), finally available in English, as well as Virginie Despentes’s splendidly titled Dear Dickhead (Quercus, 12 September).
For horror stories either side of Halloween, look to Eliza Clark’s She’s Always Hungry (Faber, 7 November) and Daisy Johnson’s The Hotel (Jonathan Cape, 17 October). And for a wild card, keep an eye out for Duets (Scratch Editions, 17 October), in which established names (Jon McGregor, Eley Williams) and rising stars such as Gurnaik Johal buddy up to co-write eight tales without worrying about hiding the joins: a feast of fiction all by itself.