The 5 Books You Need to Know About This Month

The big-deal novel, the brainy read, the guilty pleasure, and the coffee-table eye candy—plus a classic that's about to get a lot of attention all over again.

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The Big-Deal Novel

Any new work from the lauded author Zadie Smith can be considered an event, and the release of Swing Time, her fifth novel, is no different. The engrossing book follows an unnamed narrator—the novel is Smith's first published work in the first person—from the weeds of a defining, problematic childhood friendship through a life of… well, more or less the same. It's a compelling, readable and weighty novel that ponders what our relationships say about us and how complicit we are in our own fate. If there's one novel to bring up this month, this is it.

The Smart Read

Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation put the late British museum director, art historian, and cultural titan under the microscope. While Clark published two memoirs in his lifetime, this new work by former Sotheby's chairman James Stourton—written with access to Clark's archives and cooperation from his daughter—likely reveals far more about him than his own words ever did.

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The Coffee Table Book

A collection of archival documents, collages and watercolors, Beautiful People of the Café Society recreates the scrapbooks of Baron de Cabrol, which charted the swirl around the European upper crust from the 1920s through the 1960s. With a social circle that included everyone from Maharani of Kapurthala to Queen Amelia of Portugal, Cabrol had no shortage of material to illustrate, and this beautiful book shares nearly 300 pages of his work.

The Guilty Pleasure

Carrie Fisher—movie star, writer, and subject of a soon-to-air HBO documentary—isn't known for keeping her opinions to herself. So, when she discovered her diaries from the period when she was filming Star Wars she did the only logical thing: She published them. The Princess Diarist offers an unfiltered look into Fisher's unusual life and a delightfully dishy peek behind the scenes of one of the most important films of all time.

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The Classic

This November marks the 50th anniversary of Truman Capote's legendary Black and White Ball, which drew some of the world's most glamorous revelers just months after the release of In Cold Blood. And what better time to revisit the "non-fiction novel," as Sundance TV is planning a 2017 documentary series titled Murder in the Heartland: In Cold Blood Revisited to reexamine the shocking crime that inspired the book.

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