There’s so much great fiction coming out this month that there’s no room for an introduction. Let’s get right to it!
What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (Knopf, September 23): McEwan returns to the literary games he played in Atonement (2002) with this brilliant novel in two parts. In 2119, a humanities professor named Thomas Metcalfe is traveling the postnuclear British archipelago, trying to track down a poem called “A Corona for Vivien.” Written in 2014, it was famously read aloud by poet Francis Blundy at his wife’s birthday dinner and then never seen again. McEwan vividly conjures a world in which cities from New York to Lagos have vanished into the ocean but everything people from the early 21st century put into the cloud—email, texts, photos—is available to scholars “by way of the Nigerian internet”; somehow Metcalfe can piece together the day of Vivien Blundy’s birthday party from the perspectives of all the guests, practically minute-by-minute, but he still can’t find the poem. Then McEwan flips things around, and in the second section Vivien tells us what really happened. Our starred review calls it “a philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.”
To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage (Avid Reader Press, September 2): When we meet Steph Harper, she’s 6 years old, in the back seat of her mother’s car as they run toward a new life in Oklahoma’s Cherokee Nation. Steph is already dreaming of becoming an astronaut, and we follow her through many years and settings as she propels herself upward. “This author is as ambitious as her protagonist,” according to our starred review. “There are three novels worth of material here, all good. The moon or bust!” (Listen to our interview with the author on the Fully Booked podcast.)
Mercy by Joan Silber (Counterpoint, September 2): A man leaves his friend, who’s overdosing, at the emergency room of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village in the 1970s. From there, the tale spins in many directions in Silber’s latest novel-in-interconnected-stories. “What a sophisticated trick, to create this particular form of suspense and intellectual pleasure,” says our starred review.
A Different Kind of Tension: New and Selected Stories by Jonathan Lethem (Ecco/HarperCollins, September 23): Lethem hasn’t published a story collection in 10 years, so here’s a chance to catch up with his consistently pleasurable short fiction. “As always, Lethem is broadly curious, genre-promiscuous, and genuinely unpredictable,” according to our starred review. “He ranges, so his stories do, too.”
What a Time To Be Alive by Jade Chang (Ecco/HarperCollins, September 30): Lola Treasure Gold is just hanging out in LA, not sure what to do with her life, when her best friend dies doing a skateboard stunt and a video Lola makes about his death goes viral. What does it mean to gain fans from your friend’s death—especially when that friend might have become more? “Chang draws characters with quick mastery,” according to our starred review, “and writes Lola as a mille-feuille of sophistication, delighted lust, and self-doubt. The dialogue snaps and sparks, and Chang dispenses observations about race, class, feminism, sex, and influencer and tech-founder culture with panache.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
