Fall 2021 Book Releases on Our Radar

The Sisters of Reckoning is the sequel to Charlotte Nicole Davis’s debut novel, The Good Luck Girls. The series takes place in the fictional Arketta, where girls are sold into the indentured service of brothels, and vicious, vengeful ghosts haunt the nighttime landscape waiting to rip wanderers to shreds.

In The Good Luck Girls, five of these girls make a daring escape that leads them through an Old West-style desert and towns, in search of a woman who can remove their branded tattoos, which carry a curse and mark them as belonging to their brothel. The Sisters of Reckoning picks up where the first book left off, with the girls deciding on their next steps now that they’ve escaped across the border of Arketta into freedom. 

We read Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic as one of our book club books and absolutely loved it. Moreno-Garcia is a master of crafting atmosphere and building the kind of eerie suspense that creeps steadily larger as the story unfolds. As soon as I finished Mexican Gothic I wanted to read everything she’s ever written. 

So far I haven’t picked up any of her backlist books, but her latest book, Velvet Was the Night, is at the top of my list. It takes place in 1970s Mexico City, where a secretary, Maite, becomes embroiled in the search for a missing woman—her beautiful next-door neighbour Leonora. But the shadowy criminal, Elvis, is also on the hunt for the missing Leonora.

At this point, I don’t think Sally Rooney needs an introduction. If you pay any attention to the book world, you’ve at least heard of Normal People, especially after the limited series TV adaptation. It almost goes without saying that her latest, Beautiful World, Where Are You, is on my list of top fall releases. 

I have to admit, I’m not as obsessed with Sally Rooney as so many others are. But I enjoyed Normal People well enough to have her latest on my radar. It sounds like it’s going to involve the same kind of exploration of relationships and millennial life as her previous works. And I have to say, I love the way she delves into character studies and the complexity of sex, love, friendship, and all the grey areas in between.

I’ve kept track of Colson Whitehead’s work since reading The Underground Railroad a few years ago. I devoured The Nickel Boys when it came out. Whitehead has a talent for writing historical novels that feel present and immediate, with characters that seem like they could be real people. I have no doubt that Harlem Shuffle will deliver more of the same.

Harlem Shuffle follows Ray Carney, respected salesman and family man—on the surface. Eventually he falls into the life of a crook as he starts fencing stolen goods for his cousin Freddie. 

I read T.J. Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea early this year and fell in love with its cast of misfit characters who find a home in one another. It’s the found family trope with the volume turned up to max and some magical children thrown in for a dose of whimsy.

Under the Whispering Door maintains the magical note, but with a slightly darker edge. Wallace Price is collected by a reaper and taken to Hugo, tea shop owner and ferryman to souls crossing to the other side. But Wallace isn’t ready to abandon the life he didn’t fully live, so with Hugo’s help he intends to live a full lifetime before he has to cross over.

Dark academia meets southern gothic with fast cars and a haunting in Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo. I think I first saw this described as Fast and Furious meets The Secret History meets Faulkner’s southern gothic, and I can’t think of anything that is more specifically tailored to my interests. 

When Andrew’s best friend Eddie dies of apparent suicide just six months into his graduate program at Vanderbilt, he begins a search for the truth. What he finds are secrets and lies, nights ruled by drag-racing and hard drugs, and a ghost seeking revenge. 

Even though it’s called Summer Sons, I think it’s going to be the perfect kick-off to my October reading.

Cloud Cuckoo Land is the latest from Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize winning author of All the Light We Cannot See. This time, Doerr takes readers to three different settings: fifteenth century Constantinople, modern day Idaho, and an interstellar spaceship in the future. The lives of the characters intertwine across centuries, connected by a single story.

All the Light We Cannot See is an exquisitely written, sweeping story of human resilience and ingenuity, so I was thrilled to hear that Doerr had another book coming out. I would ordinarily be a little skeptical of this kind of intertwining story, but I trust that Doerr will pull it off.

Catherynne M. Valente is one of my auto-buy authors. I didn’t even need to read the premise of Comfort Me With Apples before adding it to my TBR list. I’m in love with her writing style and am convinced she could write absolutely anything beautifully.

Comfort Me With Apples is recommended for those who loved Gone Girl and Spinning Silver, which sounds like an odd combination, but Valente has written a thriller that riffs on Bluebeard, a fairytale by Charles Perrault about a man who murders all of his wives. In it, our main character Sophia believes her life is perfect—perfect husband, perfect house, perfect life—except for how he travels so much, and for the locked basement in her home, and for the way her neighbours won’t meet her eyes when she starts asking questions about him.

We read Chloe Gong’s debut novel These Violent Delights as part of our Bookstagram Made Me Do It series and we loved it. It’s an incredible blend of 1920s glamour in old Shanghai and supernatural happenings in the form of a monstrous plague, all wrapped in a retelling of Romeo and Juliet. But it ends on quite the cliffhanger.

Our Violent Ends is the sequel and it’s going to be one of my pre-orders because I can’t get it soon enough. Gong does a fantastic job taking the classic Romeo and Juliet story and turning it into something fresh, while keeping what we love about the original. It was so much fun to find all the moments we recognized from the play, but she also keeps you guessing about how it’s going to end.