30 exciting new books to read this fall

Goodbye, beach reads! From juicy memoirs to enthralling epics, it’s time to turn the page to autumn. Have a look at some of the most anticipated titles set to be released in the coming months.

Nonfiction

John Malone (Simon & Schuster)
The 84-year-old billionaire and CEO of Liberty Media, who launched a number of early cable networks such as Discovery and QVC, takes readers into the media trenches. He shares stories of industry-defining deals over the decades alongside the likes of Barry Diller and Ted Turner. Sept. 2

Elizabeth Gilbert (Riverhead Books)
The author of the phenomenally popular “Eat, Pray, Love” has penned her first memoir in more than a decade. Gilbert, who has twice been married to men, recounts falling in love with her best friend of many years, Rayya, and only admitting it to herself after Rayya was diagnosed with cancer and given months to live. At first, both women reveled in their new relationship and the time they had left, but things took a dark turn as Rayya succumbed to drug addiction and Gilbert was forced to confront her own addiction — to sex and love. Sept. 9

Seth Wickersham (Hyperion Avenue)
This cultural history looks at a host of QBs through the years — from greats like Johnny Unitas and John Elway to current players like Caleb Williams and Arch Manning — to understand how the position has become uniquely iconic both on the field and in the American psyche. Sept. 9

Charlie Sheen (Gallery Books)
From growing up the son of Martin Sheen and coming up with his Brat Pack pals to being a sitcom mega-star and full-blown addict, Sheen has lived many lives. The 59-year-old dishes on his sordid past in a book set to be published the day before he releases a Netflix documentary, “Winning,” about it all. Sept. 9

Jen Hatmaker (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)
When Hatmaker found out her husband was cheating on her, they’d been married for 26 years, co-hosted the HGTV show “Your Big Family Renovation” and had five children together. Hatmaker had topped bestseller lists writing about their family life and Christian faith. Suddenly, she had to rewrite her story and reconsider her beliefs. Sept. 23

Lionel Richie (HarperOne)
The soul musician and “American Idol” judge opens up about growing up a shy late bloomer in Alabama amidst the height of the civil-rights movement, rising to fame with the Commodores, going solo and becoming a global sensation. Sept. 30

John U. Bacon (Liveright)
In November 1975, the 729-foot SS Edmund Fitzgerald freighter sank amidst a massive storm on Lake Superior, taking all 29 crewmen with her. Bestselling author Bacon provides an engaging, thoroughly detailed account of both the tragedy and America’s postwar economic boom with the Great Lakes at its center. Oct. 7

Andrew Ross Sorkin (Viking)
In his bestseller “Too Big to Fail,” Sorkin dramatically portrayed the 2008 financial crisis. Now, across nearly 600 pages, he thrillingly brings the big crash to life, using newly recovered historical documents to give readers an inside account. Oct. 14

Virginia Roberts Giuffre (Knopf)
This memoir from Jeffrey Epstein’s most vocal victim was just announced last week. Giuffre had been at work on it for four years before she took her own life in April. In an email weeks before her death to her collaborator on the book, Amy Wallace, Giuffre wrote that it was her “heartfelt wish that this work be published, regardless of my circumstances at the time. . . . It is imperative that the truth is understood.” Oct. 21

Cameron Crowe (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)
The movie “Almost Famous” portrayed Crowe’s formative years as a teen journalist who went on the road with Led Zeppelin (fictionalized in the film) and ended up on the cover of Rolling Stone. With this highly anticipated release, Crowe reveals more about his unconventional adolescence, including embedding with David Bowie as he transformed into the thin white duke, hanging out with the Eagles and getting Joni Mitchell to open up. Oct. 28

Anthony Bourdain, edited by Kimberly Witherspoon (Ecco)
The hunger for more Bourdain and his writing remains insatiable. Witherspoon, his agent and friend of many years, has assembled a wealth of new material by the late great, including teenage diary entries, unpublished short stories and chapters from an unfinished novel. Oct. 28

Margaret Atwood (Doubleday)
The 85-year-old author shares the story of her own life. She grew up in the wilds of northern Quebec, isolated and independent; wrote “The Handmaid’s Tale” in bohemian Berlin in the 1980s; frolicked with Hollywood stars and famous artists and built a life with fellow novelist Graeme Gibson, her partner of more than four decades, who passed away in 2019. Nov. 4

Anthony Hopkins (Simon & Schuster/Summit Books)
With his memoir, the 87-year-old Oscar winner for “Silence of the Lambs” promises to delve not just into his difficult childhood in Wales but his drinking problem and the toll it took on his marriage and only child. The book will also likely touch on Hopkins’ late-in-life autism diagnosis; in 2017, he announced he has Asperger’s syndrome. Nov. 4

Vanessa Bryant (MCD)
The death of Kobe Bryant and daughter Gianna in a 2020 helicopter crash shocked the country. Now, his wife shares personal stories about both and cements the basketball star’s legacy. Nov. 18

Christine Kuehn (Celadon Books)
Kuehn was living a quiet suburban existence when she got a life-changing letter from a screenwriter asking about her father. She would come to learn that her aunt Ruth had an affair with Joseph Goebbels. When he discovered she was half Jewish, Goebbels sent Ruth and her parents to be spies in Hawaii, where they would end up helping the Japanese to orchestrate the attack on Pearl Harbor. Kuehn’s father, Eberhard, didn’t know what the rest of his family had been doing until his own father was arrested. Nov. 25

Fiction

Nathan Harris (Little, Brown and Company)
At the end of the Civil War, formerly enslaved siblings June and Coleman were separated when their master fled with June to Mexico. After two years of waiting in New Orleans for her to return, Coleman travels south to find his sister — and the freedom that still eludes them both. Sept. 2

Karin Smirnoff (Knopf)
Lisbeth Salander, a k a “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” is back in the Millennium series’ eighth installment. Lisbeth leaves her home in Stockholm for Gasskas, a chilly town in the north of Sweden, to look for a hacker friend who’s been kidnapped. All is not well in Gasskas: Locals are battling a huge corporation stripping the area of its natural resources, and a journalist has turned up dead. Sept. 2

Zoe Dubno (Scribner)
This sharp debut is narrated by a young woman returning to New York from London for a funeral and unwittingly falling back in with the unbearable downtown art friends she was happy to leave behind. She suffers through a dinner party rife with her old buds, who are just as pretentious and self-absorbed as she remembers. They all await the arrival of a Hollywood starlet, who promises to take the evening further south. Sept. 2

Nino Haratischwili (HarperVia)
This story of four women — friends since childhood in Tbilisi — is drawing comparisons to Elena Ferrante. Like the Italian writer’s “Neapolitan Novels,” it spans decades, portraying key moments in the characters’ personal lives against major historical shifts — here the fall of the Soviet Union and Georgia’s rise as an independent country. Sept. 9

Dan Brown (Doubleday)
At nearly 700 pages, the latest from “The Da Vinci Code” author promises to be huge in myriad ways. Professor Robert Langdon is back and heading to Prague to see his new girlfriend, a scientist about to publish a provocative book about the nature of the human mind, give a lecture. But his plans are thrown into disarray by a horrific murder and his girlfriend’s sudden disappearance. Sept. 9

Elin Hilderbrand and Shelby Cunningham (Little, Brown and Company)
Hilderbrand, the author of the bestseller “The Perfect Couple” and many others, has teamed up with her young daughter, Shelby, a college student and alum of St. George’s prep in Rhode Island, on this novel set at a fictional boarding school. Gossip circulates, a queen bee/famous influencer buzzes about, a new kid stands out, and faculty conceal secrets. Sept. 16

Ian McEwan (Knopf)
This love story from the award-winning author of “Atonement” is set in two time periods. In 2014, at a lively dinner party, a famous writer reads a poem he’s composed for his beloved wife Vivien’s birthday. A copy of the poem is never found, and it’s seemingly lost to time. In 2119, with the world reeling from a nuclear disaster, a British scholar goes on a quest to find the poem — and discovers much more than he imagined. Sept. 23

Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead Books)
Lockwood was a finalist for the Booker Prize in 2021 with “No One Is Talking About This,” her witty examination of Internet culture and human connection. Her newest centers on a woman trying not to lose her mind in the middle of a worldwide pandemic. Sept. 23

Thomas Pynchon (Penguin Press)
At age 88, the famed, reclusive surrealist — known for “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “The Crying of Lot 49” — is releasing his first novel in a dozen years. It centers on a private detective during the Great Depression who is hired to find a heiress to a Wisconsin cheese fortune who has run away. The search takes him to Europe, and escapades with spies, Nazis, swing dancers and other over-the-top characters follow. Oct. 7