October 3, 2020
This week’s collection underscores how a variety of storytelling styles can entertain, emotionally satisfy, and surprise. From new works by beloved writers to a remarkable debut, these books reflect the seasonal abundance of fall 2020.
Happy reading,
Melanie Fleishman
Buyer, Center for Fiction Bookstore
Featured Books
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Bestiary
By K-Ming Chang
Published by One World
A subversive debut novel that will definitely shake you up—it’s full of magic, mythology, tiger spirits, humor and serious whimsy. The author is a poet and Kundiman fellow (a great organization dedicated to the creation and cultivation of Asian American creative writing), and her first novel pours the reader into the lives of three generations of women from an immigrant family. Their journeys through life, queer love, and the passage from Taiwan to California is recorded with outrageous style.
Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize!
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The Searcher
By Tana French
Published by Viking
This much-loved mystery writer combines two great locations when a Midwestern policeman relocates to Ireland in French’s new stand-alone novel. (Did you watch The Dublin Murders series on TV?—it is a wonderful adaptation of two previous works.) In The Searcher her cop flees the urban violence of Chicago and two decades of brutal, dedicated police work for an idyllic Irish village—but as many stories go, he is pulled back into solving crimes by his altruistic sense of justice. French fans and new converts will be well-rewarded by this fish out of water story.
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Jack
By Marilynne Robinson
Published by FSG
Readers will be happily thrust back into the lives of Robinson’s characters from Gilead, Iowa, the setting of three previous prize-winning novels. This is the poignant story of the doomed romance between Jack, a white preacher’s son, and Della, the Black daughter of a minister. We’ve met these characters before, but Robinson sets this tale before the events of Gilead, Home, and Lila so that our hearts break even more as we follow the tender beginnings of their relationship.
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Leave the World Behind
By Rumaan Alam
Published by Ecco
A great premise initiates this propulsive novel that almost reads like a play (Six Degrees of Separation, anyone?) when strangers turn up at a doorstep claiming to be in need of help. From there, the story plays out in the claustrophobia of one Long Island rental house over a long weekend. What is unclear (among many things) is whether some catastrophic event has happened in the world that has set the novel’s events in motion. Alam’s novel is already longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award in Fiction and his cleverly crafted tale of race and class proves a worthy nominee.
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The End of the Day
By Bill Clegg
Published by Scout Press
Everyone in Bill Clegg’s new novel is hiding something—secrets that become toxic enough to shatter or alter the lives of this cast of characters. A Connecticut family of great wealth, the hired Mexican family who works for them, and a cohort of childhood friends carry on stoically with lives shaped by events long ago. Almost Shakespearean in the intricacies of their relationships and plots to undermine those near and dear, in the end it is a powerfully moving examination of the years-long ripple effects our poor choices can have.
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For Now
By Eileen Myles
Published by Yale University Press
A meditation on the creative process with reflections on how the author developed as a poet, essayist, critic, librettist and all around towering force of nature. It is part of the wonderful Yale series “Why I Write“ that includes books by Patti Smith and Karl Ove Knausgaard, and a great addition to Myles’ growing body of work.
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