This fall will offer every kind of bookish treat, but is there anything more exciting than a new novel from a favorite author who hasn’t published one in ages? Kiran Desai fans have been waiting since 2006 for a follow-up to The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award; they’ll be thrilled to hear that our starred review calls The Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny (Hogarth, September 23) “a masterpiece.” Sonia is an aspiring novelist and Sonny works for the Associated Press when their grandparents, embarrassingly, try to set them up—and they wind up together anyway, for a lifetime spreading out across “almost 700 delicious pages.”
It’s been 10 years since Angela Flournoy’s debut, The Turner House, which centered on a single family and their Detroit home; her new novel,The Wilderness (Mariner Books, September 16), follows a group of four friends across their 20s, 30s, and 40s, beginning in 2008 and reaching into the near future, moving back and forth across time and perspective. “Elegant and unsettling, this novel evades the expected at every turn,” according to our starred review.
The Wayfinder (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 14) is Adam Johnson’s first novel since the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Orphan Master’s Son (2012). The setting of this historical epic is the Polynesian island of Tonga, where a girl named Kōrero sets off on what our starred review calls “a grand, perilous, and transfiguring adventure that puts her, her family, and her friends on a sea voyage that could mean either salvation or oblivion for their people.”
Thomas Pynchon will also have a new novel out this season, Shadow Ticket (Penguin Press, October 7). It’s his first in 12 years, and it concerns a Milwaukee private eye who finds himself heading for Hungary in 1932; unfortunately, the book isn’t yet available for reviewers.
If you’re a mystery or thriller reader, even two or three years can seem like a long time to wait for the next installment of your favorite series. So you’ll be glad to hear that Richard Osman has returned to the Thursday Murder Club in The Impossible Fortune (Pamela Dorman/Viking) and Mick Herron is back at Slough House in Clown Town (Soho Crime, September 9; see the feature on p. 29).
It’s always a pleasure to discover a new-to-you writer who’s been around for a while; that was my experience with Catherine Chidgey, whose novel The Book of Guilt (Cardinal, September 16) imagines a world where World War II ended by treaty with no winners or losers. The story concerns a set of triplet brothers growing up in a group home in Britain in 1979; they’ve clearly been part of a creepy scientific experiment. Our starred review calls the book “an emotional and intellectual tour de force.”
And, of course, there’s nothing like an incredible debut. Get ready to hear a lot about The White Hot by Quiara Alegría Hudes (One World/Random House, November 11; see feature on p. 47), the story of a woman whose incandescent rage causes her to run away from her daughter in order to save them both. Our starred review calls it “a profound journey of the soul.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
