Coming in October: Five Hit Novels & Story Collections and Five More to Look Out For

Place your holds now for October's most anticipated new releases.

Place your holds now on these upcoming hits:

  • Set in a North Dakota Ojibwe community, Louise Erdrich’s The Round House is the second installment in a planned trilogy that started with 2008’s Pulitzer finalist The Plague of Doves.
  • Best-selling mystery author Donna Leon takes a break from her Commissiario Guido Brunetti series, but still features the Venetian setting she’s famous for in her newest, The Jewels of Paradise.
  • Dennis Lehane’s newest thriller Live by Night is being described as “an utterly magnetic novel on every level, a reimagining of the great themes of popular fiction--crime, family, passion, betrayal--set against an exquisitely rendered historical backdrop” (Booklist).
  • New story collections from beloved award-winning authors: Sherman Alexie’s newest is Blasphemy; Emma Donoghue’s Astray follows her very popular 2010 novel Room.
  • It’s going to be a busy month: there are many more notable October releases from hailed authors, such as House on Mango Street author Sandra Cisneros; popular and versatile writer Walter Mosley; Booker winner John Banville; Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk; literary icon Tom Wolfe and worldwide bestselling crime novelist Jo Nesbo.

Now for a few books you might not hear so much about but are definitely worth checking out:

  • The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg has been receiving glowing advance reviews. It’s being called the “sleeper hit of the fall” (CBS This Morning), and “a sharp-tongued, sweet-natured masterpiece of Jewish family life” (Kirkus).
  • Fans of the cult favorite House of Leaves will be excited to hear that there’s a new book from Mark Z. Danielewski, The Fifty Year Sword. He’s known for his playfully experimental and postmodern use of text—not everyone’s cup of tea, but he does seem to have a devoted following.
  • Life Goes On is Hans Keilson’s 1933 autobiographical first novel, in English for the first time. Publisher’s Weekly gave it a starred review, calling the book “a wonderful achievement”. Keilson received a good deal of attention in 2010 for The Death of the Adversary and Comedy in a Minor Key. At the time he was 100 years old (he died the following year); Francine Prose called him a “genius” and one of “the world’s very greatest writers” in the New York Times.
  • Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles sounds intriguing: a darkly comic and Kafkaesque story of one man’s disastrous housesitting gig for an obsessive compulsive friend. Booklist says “readers who enjoy stories that make them simultaneously cringe and howl with laughter will not want to miss this book.”
  • T. Geronimo Johnson’s debut Hold It ‘Til It Hurts is about two African American brothers who have just returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. They have been welcomed by two surprises from their adoptive white parents: their father has just died, and their mother is offering the information they need to find their biological parents. Chitra Divakaruni writes in the San Francisco Chronicle: “this masterfully written book, filled with trenchant observations and unafraid of tenderness, marks Johnson as a writer to watch”.

Are you looking forward to an upcoming new release? Tell us about it!

The Round House
By Louise Erdrich
When his mother, a tribal enrollment specialist living on a reservation in North Dakota, slips into an abyss of depression after being brutally attacked, 14-year-old Joe Coutz sets out with his three friends to find the person that destroyed his family.

The Jewels of Paradise 
by Donna Leon
Caterina Pellegrini, a native Venetian with a doctorate in baroque opera, must determine the rightful ownership of two locked trunks belonging to a famous composer who has been dead for centuries.

Live by Night 
by Dennis Lehane
In 1926, during Prohibition, Joe Coughlin defies his strict law-and-order upbringing by climbing a ladder of organized crime that takes him from Boston to Cuba, where he encounters a dangerous cast of characters who are all fighting for their piece of the American dream.

Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories 
by Sherman Alexie
Combines fifteen of the author's classic short stories with fifteen new stories in an anthology that features tales involving donkey basketball leagues, lethal wind turbines, and marriage.

Astray 
by Emma Donoghue
A collection of short stories featuring a cross-section of society including runaways, drifters, gold miners, counterfeiters, attorneys, and slaves from Puritan Massachusetts and revolutionary New Jersey to antebellum Louisiana.

The Middlesteins 
by Jami Attenberg 
Two siblings with very different personalities attempt to take control of their mother's food obsession and massive weight gain to save her life after their father walks out and leaves her reeling in the Chicago suburbs.

The Fifty Year Sword
by Mark Z. Danielewski
Late one evening at a party at an East Texas ranch house, five orphans gather to hear a story about a quest for a terrible weapon. Before them lies a long black box with five latches. As the owner of the box settles into a curious tale of revenge, the children grow more and more captivated, even as we grow more and more afraid that a new crime may await them all, especially as clocks in Upshur County approach midnight.

Life Goes On
by Hans Keilson
Published when the author was just twenty-three, Life Goes On was Hans Keilson's literary debut, an extraordinary autobiographical novel that paints a dark yet illuminating portrait of Germany between the world wars. It is the story of Herr Seldersen--a Jewish storeowner modeled on Keilson's father, a textile merchant and decorated World War I veteran--along with his wife and son, Albrecht, and the troubles they encounter as the German economy collapses and politics turn rancid. The book was banned by the Nazis in 1934. Shortly afterward, following his editor's advice, Keilson emigrated to the Netherlands, where he would spend the rest of his life. Life Goes On is an essential volume for readers of Keilson's later work.

Care of Wooden Floors 
by Will Wiles
A British copywriter house-sits at his composer friend Oskar’s ultra-modern apartment in a glum Eastern European city. The instructions are simple: Feed the cats, don’t touch the piano, and make sure nothing damages the priceless wooden floors. Content for the first time in ages, he accidentally spills some wine. The apartment and the narrator’s sanity gradually fall apart in this unusual and satisfying novel.

Hold It ‘Til It Hurts
by T. Geronimo Johnson
by When Achilles Conroy and his brother Troy return from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, their white mother presents them with the key to their past: envelopes containing details about their respective birth parents. After Troy disappears, Achilles-always his brother's keeper-embarks on a harrowing journey in search of Troy, an experience that will change him forever. Heartbreaking, intimate, and at times disturbing, Hold It 'Til It Hurts is a modern-day odyssey through war, adventure, disaster, and love, and explores how people who do not define themselves by race make sense of a world that does.

Posted on 10/01/12 by Christy Thomas, Librarian, Main Library.

Comments

What do you think?

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
To prevent automated spam submissions leave this field empty.
http://oaklandlibrary.org/blogs/advice-for-readers/coming-october-five-hit-novels-story-collections-and-five-more-look-out
oaklandlibrary.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-47
27685
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:ZQRGKXUBFSGVWUNMAJIWTBAOXS73YCLO
<urn:uuid:e6593120-27ca-4aae-8ccb-4896bdc40901>
2018-11-18T00:37:55Z
69.16.250.65
text/html
sha1:WOYH2Y24TBAY2HSSW3HOD43SHVRLBN3Q
<urn:uuid:fbb4f683-c13a-41f8-bea8-90b9c489522f>
http://oaklandlibrary.org/blogs/advice-for-readers/coming-october-five-hit-novels-story-collections-and-five-more-look-out
response
<urn:uuid:172da024-b431-4e82-ab5b-4b0d53cdc82f>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-47
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for November 2018
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-71-205-234.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/