As the leaves turn, so do pages, and we have been blessed this autumn with a tremendous amount of great reads. Weather’s getting colder, but worry not! I’ve got hot news for you in the form of real page-turners – the three trending must-reads this season!
1. Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
From the author of internationally bestselling Conversations with Friends and Normal People, Rooney’s new novel follows the lives of four people and their friendships and relationships, trying to find beauty in the world even in the slightest. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young and dear to each other as well as delude one another, get together, and break up as there is no escape from life and worrying about the world they live in. The emotional prose truly gets under one’s skin in the form of slight anxiety. Rooney grasps the question of finding hope in the most hopeless of all places and the outcome is prose written with pure talent.
Find the book here.
2. Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
Whitehead presents an entertaining novel of shakedowns and rip-offs set in New York City’s Harlem in 1960s. This book has it all: it is a family saga masked with crime fiction that meets an uproarious morality play combined with social aspects of race and power. Following the narrative of Ray Carney, a furniture salesman, married to Elizabeth whose parents don’t approve of Ray or their slightly cramped apartment at the wrong side of the subway tracks. Since cash is tight, Ray’s cousin Freddie occasionally stops by with an odd necklace or a ring. Later on, Freddie falls in with the wrong crew and thus, Ray finds himself navigating his way through a double life. The story shows that the facade of normalcy will always have cracks – and they always become bigger and bigger.
Find the book here.
3. The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
In this timely novel, a funny ghost story meets a complex marriage and a tale of passion. It begins on All Souls’ Day in 2019 and ends exactly a year after. Flora, the most annoying customer in a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis, dies on All Souls’ Day and simply won’t leave the store. Tookie, a previously convicted felon, lands a job selling books and has to solve this mystery of a haunting ghost whilst trying to understand grief, furious reckoning and isolation aside everything else that occurs in the city during the year. This timely book shows the effect of talented writing and questions what we owe to the living, the dead, a book and a reader.
You can find the book here.