FICTION
Marquee names
Commonwealth
by Ann Patchett
Harper
A drunken kiss in 1960s Los Angeles implodes two families, then twines them together for life in this big-hearted, gimlet-eyed domestic epic.
(September)
Moonglow
by Michael Chabon
Harper
His own grandfather’s deathbed storytelling was the inspiration for Chabon’s latest tale, which careens through a 20th century whose Greatest Generation wasn’t always that.
(November)
Swing Time
by Zadie Smith
Penguin Press
The childhood friendship of two girls from Smith’s beloved North West London, both biracial, both eager to dance, propels this novel about race and where we’re rooted.
(November)
Splashy debuts
The Mortifications
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by Derek Palacio
Crown/Tim Duggan
Soledad leaves Cuba in 1980 to make a new life with her children in the alien environs of Hartford, even as her husband, Uxbal, insists on staying behind.
(October)
The Mothers
by Brit Bennett
Riverhead
A summer romance, an unintended pregnancy, and the secrecy that tests the bond between two young women figure in this much talked about first novel, set in Southern California.
(October)
all about the stories
Virgin and Other Stories
By April Ayers Lawson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Sex mingles with Southern Christianity in this debut, whose title piece — about the intimate anxieties of a pair of newlyweds — won The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction.
(November)
Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?: Stories
by Kathleen Collins
Ecco
An obscure African-American artist and filmmaker, who died at 46 in 1988, gets her long-delayed moment with this slender, previously unpublished collection of stories.
(December)
Stage-struck
The Lesser Bohemians
by Eimear McBride
Hogarth
This second novel from the author of the bruising debut “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing” tells the story of a troubled entanglement between a young Irish drama student and an older actor in 1990s London.
(September)
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Hag-Seed
by Margaret Atwood
Hogarth
No Shakespeare play has been harmed in the making of this novel, which reworks “The Tempest” with a betrayed and exiled theater director at its center. Part of the excellent Hogarth Shakespeare series.
(October)
Holed up
Shelter in Place
by Alexander Maksik
Europa
A young man’s bipolar disorder and his mother’s imprisonment for murder shape this story of a family in the Pacific Northwest, from the author of “A Marker to Measure Drift.”
(September)
The Terranauts
by T.C. Boyle
Ecco
In the Arizona desert, a group of 1990s scientists live out an in-vitro experiment inside a prototype for the kind of colony humans might need to consider if climate change ruins the planet.
(October)
Cue laughter
A Gambler’s Anatomy
by Jonathan Lethem
Doubleday
The career of a globetrotting backgammon hustler, who may or may not be telepathic, hits the skids just as some unsightly health trouble sends him back to Berkeley, Calif.
(October)
Today Will Be Different
by Maria Semple
Little, Brown
A stressed-out heroine resolves to change her rather plush life in this comedy, whose precious Seattle setting is as ripe a target for Semple’s satire as it was in “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?”
(October)
War stories
The Gustav Sonata
by Rose Tremain
Norton
Growing up in postwar Switzerland with his widowed, bitterly anti-Semitic mother, a lonely boy named Gustav forms a deep friendship with a new child at school, a Jewish pianist named Anton.
(September)
Perfume River
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by Robert Olen Butler
Atlantic Monthly Press
Butler drew on his army experience in the Vietnam War to write his Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain.” Here, he traces the legacy of that war inside one Florida family.
(September)
In translation
Reputations
by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean,
Riverhead
A political cartoonist, whose pen holds great moral sway in his country, is jostled into questioning his own past. From the Colombian author of “The Sound of Things Falling.”
(September)
Memoirs of a Polar Bear
by Yoko Tawada, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky,
New Directions
The Tokyo-born, Berlin-based Tawada weaves a tale of three generations of circus-performer celebrity polar bears, each with a talent for literary autobiography.
(November)
Mysteriously
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper
edited by Otto Penzler,
Vintage
Crime/Black Lizard
More than 40 classic and contemporary tales about the elusive serial killer appear in this anthology, alongside grisly nonfiction elements including autopsy reports and witness statements.
(October)
The Trespasser
by Tana French
Viking
Most of the others on the murder squad would like Detective Antoinette Conway to go away, and the hostility is getting to her. Also, why does the latest corpse look so familiar?
(October)
Chaos: A Scarpetta Novel
by Patricia Cornwell
William Morrow
A dead body on the banks of the Charles River. Lightning that couldn’t have struck. A cyber-poet who refuses to stop. Kay Scarpetta will put it all together and figure it out.
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(November)
NONFICTION
Lives, Past and Present
Born to Run
by Bruce Springsteen
Simon & Schuster
In one of the most highly anticipated musical memoirs in years, the New Jersey troubadour tells his own story with all the grit and grace of his songs’ lyrics.
(September)
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
by Ruth Franklin
Liveright
Book critic Franklin presents a fresh look at one of our most underrated writers, “The Lottery” author Jackson, as well as a portrait of her midcentury milieu.
(September)
Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs
by Robert Kanigel
Knopf
The first biography of Jacobs, an icon of urban design and perhaps the most important voice in helping Americans understand and appreciate cities, published to coincide with the centennial of her birth.
(September)
Mary Astor’s Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936
by Edward Sorel
Liveright
This vintage treasure captures a Depression-era tabloid sensation in gorgeous cartoon form.
(October)
The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship
by Alex Beam
Pantheon
Great artists can be both passionate and petty, as Globe columnist Beam demonstrates in this engaging account of the falling out between two of the 20th century’s most fearsome literary lions.
(December)
Arts and ideas
Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders
by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton
Workman
Richly illustrated, delightfully strange, this compendium of off-beat destinations should spark many adventures, both terrestrial and imaginary.
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(September)
Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why
by Sady Doyle
Melville House
In this smart, funny, and fearless debut, Doyle examines society’s obsession with punishing women who break the rules.
(September)
John Derian Picture Book
by John Derian
Artisan
Gorgeously wordless, a collection of favorite images curated by the designer whose career began in the thrift shops and flea markets of Massachusetts.
(October)
Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Riverhead
Popular PBS and BBC host Johnson (“How We Got to Now’’) is a master storyteller; the tale he spins is about how nearly every important human creation sprang from the very human need to have fun.
(November)
Here and now
Waging War: The Clash Between Presidents and Congress, 1776 to ISIS
by David J. Barron
Simon & Schuster
Barron, a judge and former Harvard Law professor, chronicles the eternal tug-of-war between our executive and legislative branches when it comes to putting American troops into warfare — the topic is both timely and timeless.
(October)
Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives
by Gary Younge
Nation
By looking closely at one day’s toll in American gun violence, Younge examines just how much individual heartache, societal damage, and grieviously lost potential we accept in the name of self-defense.
(October)
They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement
by Wesley Lowery
Little, Brown
Lowery, the Washington Post reporter whose coverage helped the nation understand what was happening in Fergusion, Mo., now looks beyond the protests to a growing movement of young activists for racial justice.
(November)
Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move
by Reece Jones
Verso
In an era of terrorism, global inequality, and rising political tension over migration, Jones argues that tight border controls make the world worse, not better.
(October)
Science and Medicine
Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who
Helped Win the Space Race
by Margot Lee Shetterly
William Morrow
Engrossing account of the previously little known story of the hundreds of women, including scores of African-American women, hired just after World War II to lend their mathematical skills to the nascent space program.
(September)
Being a Dog: Following the Dog into a World of Smell
by Alexandra Horowitz
Scribner
Few forces are more powerful than a dog’s sense of smell; in this follow-up to her acclaimed 2009 “Inside of a Dog,” Horowitz focuses on this canine superpower, and what we humans might learn from it.
(October)
How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS
by David France
Knopf
Based on the author’s Oscar-nominated documentary of the same name, a sweeping yet intimate look at how gay people and their straight allies came together in the face of an unforgiving disease.
(November)
The Wood for the Trees: One Man’s Long View of Nature
by Richard Fortey
Knopf
Part naturalist, part essayist, Fortey writes a “biography” of his own four acres of England woodland; the result is a book that blends scientific inquiry and an almost spiritual wonder.
(December)
Sporting news
Fields of Battle: Pearl Harbor, the Rose Bowl, and the Boys Who Went to War
by Brian Curtis
Flatiron
Following the players on the best two college football teams in 1941, veteran sportswriter Curtis charts a group biography of young athletes interrupted by war.
(September)
The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football
by S. C. Gwynne
Scribner
Best-selling biographer Gwynne (“Rebel Yell,” “Empire of the Southern Moon”) tells the story of Hal Mumme, the coach of a small college whose belief in the superiority of the passing game revolutionized football.
(September)
The Boys of Dunbar: A Story of Love, Hope, and Basketball
by Alejandro Danois
Simon & Schuster
As the city of Baltimore suffered through crack and crime in the early 1980s, one high school basketball team triumphed through determination and teamwork; four members ended up in the NBA.
(September)
KATE TUTTLE