Fall 2023 Adult Announcements: Literary Fiction – Publishers Weekly

Highly anticipated returns, family drama, and literary invention feature in this falls notable fiction.

Top 10

The Bee Sting

Paul Murray. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Aug. 15 ($30, ISBN 978-0-374-60030-3)

Irish novelist Murray, who recently toured Metas virtual reality platform for New York magazine, conveys the bleakness of a territory closer to homehis countrys Midland Regionin this family drama.

Come and Get It

Kiley Reid. Putnam, Jan. 9 ($28, ISBN 978-0-593-32820-0)

Campus hijinks ensue with the story of a University of Arkansas resident assistant who takes on extra work in hopes of buying a house after graduation and deals with pranks from dorm residents.

Devil Makes Three

Ben Fountain. Flatiron, Sept. 26 ($30.99, ISBN 978-1-250-77651-8)

Fountains second novel comes 11 years after the NBCC-winning Billy Lynns Long Halftime Walk. The setting is Haiti, where an American expat adjusts to the new normal after the 1991 coup.

Family Meal

Bryan Washington. Riverhead, Oct. 10 ($28, ISBN 978-0-593-42109-3)

Washington continues writing about food, which he did so well in Memorial, with a story of a bakery in Houston and two friends whose bond helps one of them get through the death of his lover.

Happiness Falls

Angie Kim. Hogarth, Sept. 5 ($28, ISBN 978-0-593-44820-5)

A young Korean American woman frantically tries to determine what happened to her father after her younger brother returns from a park near their Virginia home without him, covered in blood and unable to speak.

The Maniac

Benjamin Labatut. Penguin Press, Oct. 3 ($28, ISBN 978-0-593-65447-7)

Chilean writer Labatut, author of the International Bookershortlisted When We Cease to Understand the World, unspools a story involving Hungarian polymath John von Neumann and the roots of AI.

My Work

Olga Ravn, trans. by Jennifer Russell. New Directions, Sept. 4 ($18.95, ISBN 978-0-8112-3471-9)

Danish writer Ravn returns after the speculative workplace novel The Employees with a hefty mixed-genre meditation on birth, motherhood, and writing.

Tom Lake

Ann Patchett. Harper, Aug. 1 ($30, ISBN 978-0-06-332752-8)

Set in Northern Michigan in the spring of 2020, Patchetts latest centers on a woman and her three adult daughters as they pepper her with questions about her past during a visit home.

The Unsettled

Ayana Mathis. Knopf, Oct. 24 ($29, ISBN 978-0-525-51993-5)

In another long-awaited return, Mathis follows up 2012s The Twelve Tribes of Hattie with the story of a familys resilience after moving from Alabama to Philadelphia in the 1980s.

The Wren, the Wren

Anne Enright. Norton, Sept. 19 ($27, ISBN 978-1-324-00568-1)

A young writer, the descendant of a famous Irish poet, has a much different relationship with her maternal grandfathers poems than her mother does, setting the stage for a story about great art by a perhaps not-so-great man.

Literary Fiction longlist

Algonquin

The New Naturals by Gabriel Bump (Nov. 14, $27, ISBN 978-1-61620-880-6). Bumps sophomore novel is a tragicomedy of an underground Black utopia in western Massachusetts, where a young woman from Boston settles, hoping for a sense of community and a better life.

Astra House

Do You Remember Being Born? by Sean Michaels (Sept. 5, $27, ISBN 978-1-66260-232-0). An acclaimed 70-something poet of modest means takes up an unexpected new career with a tech company, where she collaborates with an AI program to write poetry.

Avid Reader

One Woman Show by Christine Coulson (Oct. 17, $25, ISBN 978-1-66802-778-3) follows up Coulsons collection, Metropolitan Stories, with another book inspired by her work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this time a novel with a character portrait in the form of gallery wall text.

Ballantine

The Bookbinder by Pip Williams (Aug. 1, $28, ISBN 978-0-593-60044-3). After The Dictionary of Lost Words, Williams chronicles two sisters working as bookbinders in 1914 Oxford whose horizons are expanded as WWI draws the men away from home.

Berkley

All You Have to Do Is Call by Kerri Maher (Sept. 19, $28, ISBN 978-0-593-10221-3) draws on the true story of the Jane Collective, which helped women gain access to abortions before the Roe v. Wade decision.

Bloomsbury

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (Oct. 17, $28.99, ISBN 978-1-63973-193-0). Malaysian writer Tan is back 11 years after the Booker Prizeshortlisted The Garden of Evening Mists with the tale of a married couple visited in 1921 Penang by author Somerset Maugham, who picks up on his friends unhappiness.

Catapult

The Book of Ayn by Lexi Freiman (Nov. 14, $27, ISBN 978-1-64622-192-9). In this satire, Ayn Rand becomes a source of inspiration for a disillusioned debut writer after her novel is dismissed by critics.

Coffee House

Nefando by Mnica Ojeda, trans. by Sarah Booker (Oct. 24, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-56689-689-4) combines a morality tale with a deep dive into the gamer world, as a group of Barcelona artists gets sucked into a horror game called Nefando that blurs their sense of reality.

Counterpoint

The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto, trans. by Asa Yoneda (Oct. 3, $24, ISBN 978-1-64009-371-3). Japanese writer Yoshimotos 1988 novel, translated for the first time, involves a young woman struck by an unsettling feeling about her childhood.

Crooked Media Reads

Mobility by Lydia Kiesling (Aug. 1, $28, ISBN 978-1-63893-056-3). The daughter of an American diplomat has written a novel about privilege and the Caspian Sea oil boom, centered on a teenage girl growing up with her foreign service family in 1998 Azerbaijan.

Doubleday

Normal Rules Dont Apply: Stories by Kate Atkinson (Sept. 12, $28, ISBN 978-0-385-54950-9) is a thematically linked collection featuring protagonists as diverse as a queen, a secretary, and a gambler.

Ecco

Brooklyn Crime Novel by Jonathan Lethem (Oct. 3, $30, ISBN 978-0-06-293882-4) returns to the terrain of Lethems most celebrated work and covers five decades of a Brooklyn neighborhoods economic upheaval and racial tensions.

Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo (Aug. 1, $30, ISBN 978-0-06-320726-4). The YA authors adult debut follows a clairvoyant woman and her Dominican American family in Santo Domingo and New York.

Europa

A Volga Tale by Guzel Yakhina, trans. by Polly Gannon (Sept. 19, $28, ISBN 978-1-60945-934-5). Russian writer Yakhina draws on the history of a 17th-century German settlement in Russia with a love story involving the composer Jakob Bach, who spins a series of fairy tales for his daughter.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Absolution by Alice McDermott (Nov. 7, $28, ISBN 978-0-374-61048-7). The National Book Award winner chronicles two women who meet in Vietnam during that war, where one of their husbands is a Navy lawyer and the other a corporate bigwig. In the present day, they reexamine their commitment to their husbands work.

Blackouts by Justin Torres (Oct. 10, $27, ISBN 978-0-374-29357-4). The author of We the Animals draws on an early-20th-century book called Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns in this tale of a young man caring for an older man at the end of his life.

Feminist Press

The Singularity by Balsam Karam, trans. by Saskia Vogel (Jan. 24, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-55861-193-1). A woman takes care of a family of refugee children after their mother dies by suicide in Swedish writer Karams latest.

Graywolf

Im a Fan by Sheena Patel (Sept. 5, $17 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-64445-245-5) is told from the perspective of an unnamed young woman as she strikes up an unbalanced relationship with a powerful married man.

Grove

So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men by Claire Keegan (Nov. 14, $20, ISBN 978-0-8021-6085-0). The title story of this triptych on regret and secrets has already appeared in the New Yorker, which previously ran Keegans novella Foster.

Grove/Gay

Hot Springs Drive by Lindsay Hunter (Nov. 7, $27, ISBN 978-0-8021-6145-1) delves into themes of body issues and hunger in a tale of friendship and jealousy based on a real murder.

Harpervia

People Collide by Isle McElroy (Sept. 26, $28.99, ISBN 978-0-06-328375-6) follows up their hit debut, The Atmospherians, with a fantastical novel about a man who wakes up in his wifes body.

Hogarth

Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham (Jan. 23, $27, ISBN 978-0-593-44823-6). Theater critic Cunningham makes his fiction debut with a bildungsroman about a Black man working on an Obama-like senators presidential campaign.

Kensington

When the Jessamine Grows by Donna Everhart (Jan. 23, $16.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-4967-4070-0). A North Carolina woman tries to keep her family out of the Civil War.

Knopf

Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, trans. by the author and Todd Portnowitz (Oct. 10, $27, ISBN 978-0-593-53632-2). Originally written in Italian, Pulitzer winner Lahiris stories convey a series of perspectives on Italys capital from locals and tourists alike.

Wellness by Nathan Hill (Sept. 26, $30, ISBN 978-0-593-53611-7) centers on a married couple dealing with the 21st centurys rapid cultural changes 20 years after meeting in college in the 1990s.

Little, Brown

The Apology by Jimin Han (Aug. 1, $28, ISBN 978-0-316-36708-0) is a South Korean ghost story set over several decades of the countrys history. It features a late matriarch tasked in the afterlife with reversing her familys curse.

Liveright

The Pole by J.M. Coetzee (Sept. 19, $26, ISBN 978-1-324-09386-2). A journeyman Polish pianist attempts to seduce a wealthy Spanish patron of the arts in the Nobel Prize winners latest, which poses questions about the pairs shifting power dynamic.

Mariner

America Fantastica by Tim OBrien (Oct. 24, $32, ISBN 978-0-06-331850-2). The National Book Award winner returns to fictionafter the memoir Dads Maybe Bookwith a picaresque of a down-and-out journalist who commits a bank robbery and becomes a fugitive.

Morrow

The Leftover Woman by Jean Kwok (Oct. 10, $30, ISBN 978-0-06-303146-3). A mother travels from China to New York City to search for her daughter, who was taken away from her as a result of Chinas one-child policy.

New York Review Books

Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt (Sept. 19, $17.95 trade paper, ISBN 978-1-68137-781-0). British writer Boyt makes her U.S. debut with a novel about a woman who takes care of her granddaughter while her daughter deals with a drug addiction.

One World

The Golem of Brooklyn by Adam Mansbach (Sept. 26, $18 trade paper, ISBN 978-0-593-72982-3). The author of Go the F**k to Sleep returns to adult fiction with a tale of antifascists who reanimate a golem to help fight white supremacists after a rally in Charlottesville, Va., reminiscent of Unite the Right.

Overlook

The Men Cant Be Saved by Ben Purkert (Aug. 1, $26, ISBN 978-1-4197-6713-5) traces the rise, fall, and reinvention of a young copywriter for an ad agency, who, after he gets fired, burrows into the kabbalah and abuses prescription pills.

Pantheon

A House for Alice by Diana Evans (Sept. 12, $28, ISBN 978-0-593-70108-9) draws on the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London for an account of a British Nigerian family affected by the disaster.

Penguin Press

The Fraud by Zadie Smith (Sept. 5, $29, ISBN 978-0-525-55896-5) gathers a disparate set of characters in 1873 London for the trial of an Australian man accused of fraud.

The Wolves of Eternity by Karl Ove Knausgrd (Sept. 19, $35, ISBN 978-0-593-49083-9) takes another step away from My Struggle with a dual-timeline narrative involving a Norwegian man in the mid-1980s who wonders about his fathers identity and a woman working as a biologist in present-day Russia.

Random House

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Fall 2023 Adult Announcements: Literary Fiction - Publishers Weekly