Essential Fiction Books for Your Fall Reading List

Harlem Shuffle’s ingenious story plays out in a beautifully recreated New York City of the early 1960s. It’s a family saga masquerading as a crime novel, a hilarious morality play, a social novel about race and power, and ultimately a love letter to Harlem. But mostly, it’s a joy to read, another dazzling novel from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning Colson Whitehead.

Two different worlds and two very different lives collide in Paris in this captivating novel by Danielle Steel.

Two daughters. Two families. One inescapable fate. A captivating debut novel about the tangled fates of two best friends and daughters of the Italian mafia, and a coming-of-age story of twentieth-century Brooklyn itself.

Investigator Lucy Stoltz follows the trail of a serial killer, and closes in on a shocking suspect—a sitting judge. The Judge’s List is by any measure John Grisham’s most surprising, chilling novel yet.

A backpacking trip has deadly consequences in this “eerie psychological thriller…with alluring locales, Hitchcockian tension, and possibly the best pair of female leads since Thelma and Louise” (BookPage).

With its blend of sympathetic characters, riveting plot, and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz, to climate change, to our attachment to material possessions, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki—bold, wise, poignant, playful, humane, and heartbreaking.

In the wake of their mother’s death, three estranged brothers return to the Swedish lakeside cottage where, more than two decades before, an unspeakable accident forever altered their family and changed the course of their lives. By brilliantly dissecting a mind unraveling in the wake of tragedy, Alex Schulman reveals the ways in which our deepest loyalties leave us open to the greatest betrayals.

Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout explores the mysteries of marriage and the secrets we keep, as a former couple reckons with where they’ve come from—and what they’ve left behind. On every page of this exquisite novel we learn more about the quiet forces that hold us together—even after we’ve grown apart.

Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff’s new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.

From the award-winning, bestselling author of The Circle comes an exciting new follow-up. When the world’s largest search engine/social media company, The Circle, merges with the planet’s dominant e-commerce site, it creates the richest and most dangerous—and, oddly enough, most beloved—monopoly ever known: The Every.

Jack Reacher is back in a brand-new page-turning thriller from acclaimed bestselling authors Lee Child and Andrew Child. This will be the riskiest job of Reacher’s life. Failure is not an option, because in this kind of game, the loser is always better off dead.

The Morning Star is a novel about what we do not understand, about great drama seen through the limited lens of little lives. But first and foremost, it is a novel about what happens when the dark forces in the world are set free.