12 Books to Cozy Up With This Fall

Hailed by critics, loved by readers of literary and historical fiction, and featuring what is arguably one of the most iconic covers of recent years, Beautiful Ruins is the story of an almost-love affair that begins on a rocky patch of the sun-drenched Italian coastline in 1962. Funny and romantic, the beauty and wisdom of Jess Walter’s writing in the last chapter alone will leave musical lines of prose engraved in your memory.

This debut of extraordinary distinction tells the story of the children of the Great Migration through the trials of one unforgettable family. Beautiful, devastating, and blazing with life, this novel is a searing portrait of surviving in the face of insurmountable adversity.

Acclaimed character actress Saoirse Ronan takes center stage as Eilis Lacey, a young woman who abandons small-town Ireland and the comfort of her mother's home for the anonymous shores of New York City. In Brooklyn, she finds a city in flux—a city where immigrants from Ireland and Poland live amongst Jewish and black communities—and just as she is beginning to fall in love with a young man, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her new life.

Release Date: November 6, 2015

This Pulitzer Prize–winning classic and Oprah Book Club selection paints an indelible portrait of the vast and sweeping changes in China. Beginning when the last emperor reigned and the vast political and social upheavals of the twentieth century were but distant rumblings, it is a universal tale of an ordinary family caught in the tide of history.

An ambitious literary novel set in Rome, New York, and the desert of the American West in the late 1970s, The Flamethrowers captures the idealism and hypocrisy of art, politics, and violence. A National Book Award finalist and selected as one of the ten best books of 2013 by The New York Times, it confirmed Rachel Kushner’s emerging reputation as a writer of spectacular talent and imagination.

A haunting exploration of friendship and loyalty from one of our most talented crime writers. The investigation into a handsome, popular boy's murder has gone cold, but when a clue is found at a girl's boarding school, detectives learn that the world of teenage girls can be more mysterious and dangerous than they imagined.

This powerful story of race and gender is centered on Ifemelu, a brilliant and self-assured young woman who departs military-ruled Nigeria for an American university where, for the first time, she is forced to grapple with her identity as a black woman. Ifemelu faces difficult choices and challenges, suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships, and eventually achieves success as the writer of an eye-opening blog about race in America. Fearless and gripping, Americanah is a richly told story set in today’s globalized world.

I didn’t really get into Orange Is the New Black till the second season when the stories began to feel more like fiction and less like reality. Maybe that’s because I prefer novels over memoirs. But Piper Kerman’s look at her own life behind prison walls has inspired the most diverse, relatable, and compelling cast of women to come along in years.

In this superb novel, a family and a community in a small New England town are tested when an arsonist begins setting fire to the homes of the summer residents. Suspenseful, sophisticated, rich in psychological nuance and emotional insight, this is Sue Miller at her inimitable best.

In this heartbreaking and redemptive novel, a young woman's only connection to the world after a childhood spent in the foster-care system is through the Victorian meanings of flowers: honeysuckle for devotion, red roses for love. Now emancipated from the system with nowhere to go, she realizes she has a gift for helping others through the flowers she chooses for them.

In a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night and then set fire to her home. When their lifelong neighbor Akhmed finds Havaa hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, A CONSTELLATION OF VITAL PHENOMENA is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance.