Top Five Picks for Your Fall Reading List

How to describe The Likeness? Try a cross between Stephen King, Agatha Christie, and Donna Tartt—a nightmare wrapped in a mystery and done up in the collegiate trappings of a campus novel. Published in 2008, The Likeness lays its scene in Dublin, Ireland, where former murder detective Cassie Maddox is feeling lost after a rough case. Having fallen out with her partner, Rob, she’s stuck working a job she hates and longing for her days as an undercover cop. That is, until a body is found: Lexie Madison, a university student with eerie ties to Cassie’s time undercover and a striking resemblance to Cassie herself. For Lexie’s inner circle, it’s a tragedy. For Cassie, it’s the chance of a lifetime. The next 400 pages see Detective Maddox assume Lexie’s identity, infiltrating her group of friends, retracing her steps, and all but losing herself in order to solve the mystery. Through it all, French’s prose moves slowly, methodically, delivering a tight plot and a dark, sensual atmosphere. It’s a slow-burn, but one you’ll want to savor. 

With World Translation Day coming up, it feels appropriate to include a non-English-language title on this list. Originally published in German in 2025, this cozy, 200-page read explores 1960s Vienna through the microcosm of a neighborhood café and its staff. Seethaler assembles a rag-tag cast of characters, keeping the focus on the mundane while allowing a more serious subtext to show through. The shadows of World War II, fascism, and the Cold War loom large throughout Café, and yet the novel remains adorably deadpan, treating pain with the same clear, gorgeous frankness as joy. This even-handedness resonated with me especially as a movie lover, and fans of Amélie, Chocolat, and The Grand Budapest Hotel—itself a thinly-veiled adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s memoirs of WWII—will appreciate the camera-like quality of Seethaler’s narrative voice. While never saccharine, The Café with No Name manages to be truly, enduringly sweet.

Before anyone asks—yes, I have seen the trailers for the Emerald Fennell film and no, I don’t know how to feel. But since I’m a firm believer in reading the book before seeing the movie, I direct your attention to Emily Brontë’s 1847 classic: Wuthering Heights. This book has everything: star-crossed lovers, the moors, digging up your girlfriend’s dead body just to feel something, and a useless blonde twink who can’t sit in a chair (Oh Linton Heathcliff, what I wouldn’t give to sweep you off your feet). A favorite of English teachers and girls who unironically say “I can fix him!” Wuthering Heights is just the thing to spice up your fall reading. But like, it’s still literature. Value-added. We promise.

Kazuo Ishiguro is a lightning bolt of an author— he never strikes in the same place twice. Not many writers can pull off a grounded period-piece about a butler in the dying days of the English aristocracy (Remains of the Day) and a scifi novel about a sentient solar-powered AI (Klara and the Sun). But if anything ties Ishiguro’s oeuvre together, it’s his knack for the human: an eye for the little things that make us tick—a child on a swing, a favorite dress, an outstretched palm—and his ability to make those things ring true no matter the setting. His narrators are unlikely protagonists: frank, observant types who may not be entirely trustworthy, but who are utterly convincing nonetheless. A Pale View of the Hills may not be nobel-laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s most famous novel, but it is surely one of his finest. Called a “delicate, ironic, elliptical novel” by Edith Milton for the New York Times Review of Books, A Pale View of the Hills follows Etsuko, a Japanese immigrant to the United Kingdom, as she reflects on her lost life in Japan and her eldest daughter’s tragic death. The result is a subtle, beautiful, and brief read that will leave readers wanting more from this brilliant, emotionally fluent author. 

There are some books that just stick with you. Nervous Conditions is many things: a coming-of-age story, a family drama, an indictment of colonialism, and above all, a testament to the courage and beauty of its author. Nervous Conditions follows Tambu, a young Shona girl from rural Zimbabwe. After her older brother Nhamo’s death, Tambu takes his place at an English mission school in a bid to raise her family’s status. In the novel’s brief course, Tambu learns English, forgets Shona, gains privilege, and becomes increasingly estranged from both her family and her native language. Through it all, Dangarembga interrogates the costs of social assimilation and challenges the idea of English as default. She, like many multi-lingual authors, approaches English not as a fait accompli, but as one of many mediums—and she works it with flawless technique. Nervous Conditions is therefore not just one text, but two. It is Tambu’s story, and it is something more general— almost a myth: it is the story of forgetting. But as Dangarembga shows us, sometimes you must forget in order to start anew.