We might not want to admit it, but the nights are drawing in and what counted as summer 2024 is nearly over. Which means it’s time to start thinking about lighting the fire and settling in with a good book.
Autumn promises several high-profile releases from bestselling authors like Ali Smith, Haruki Murakami, and Nobel Prize in Literature winner Olga Tokarczuk.
Here’s our pick of seven of the best books released in time for autumn.
1. We Solve Murders by Richard Osman (12 September)
Released earlier this month, quiz show co-host, TV producer, and author Richard Osman returns with a new cosy-crime series.
Osman achieved global success and critical acclaim with his first foray into crime fiction, The Thursday Murder Club. Now, he is bravely leaving Joyce, Elizabeth and the rest of the gang to their own devices to begin a brand new series, We Solve Murders.
Amy works as a private security officer, currently tasked with protecting bestselling author Rosie D’Antonio on an exclusive island. But when Amy is framed for a string of grisly murders, things get complicated. She calls on her widowed father-in-law Steve for help.
As danger, death, and intrigue follow the unlikely group, they must solve the murders and prove Amy’s innocence, all before Steve’s Wednesday night pub quiz.
2. Entitlement by Rumaan Alam (17 September)
Alam’s 2020 novel Leave the World Behind was recently made into a film for Netflix that starred Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke.
In the author’s latest, an elderly white philanthropist hires a black graduate to help plan the best way to give away the former’s billions.
A tense, slow burn of a novel, the social drama shares the nervy tone of Leave the World Behind. Especially once it becomes clear that at least one party isn’t being entirely truthful.
3. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (24 September)
Rooney’s debut, Conversations with Friends arrived in 2017, but it was the follow-up, Normal People, that arguably rocketed her to superstardom.
She returns this autumn with the story of two grieving brothers. One is a lawyer struggling to manage his relationship with two very different partners, the other is a socially awkward chess player who begins courting an older woman.
In the wake of their father’s death, the brother’s lives – and those of the women they love – become quickly entwined.
4. The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (26 September)
Polish author Olga Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019 for a “narrative imagination that with encyclopaedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”.
After 2018’s word-of-mouth success with Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and her more recent epic The Books of Jacob, Tokarczuk returns with The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story.
A retelling of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the novel is set in the mountains of Silesia in the build-up to the first world war. A sanatorium houses an inebriated group of male TB patients, while outside in the woods, something is stirring.
5. Gliff by Ali Smith (31 October)
Scottish author Ali Smith is arguably best known for her Seasonal Quartet. Gliff, though, is part of a doubleheader due to conclude next year with the similarly titled Glyph.
Gliff follows two children in the not-so-distant future who return home to find a red circle painted around their house. As the siblings set out on a border-crossing adventure, the reader snatches glimpses of a state addicted to technology, surveillance, and hostility to outsiders – and those classed as “unverifiables”.
6. The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel (19 November)
If a romantic quest for a lost love working at a dream library in a unicorn-filled city isn’t your bag, you might opt to avoid Haruki Murakami’s latest.
Written in lockdown, The City and Its Uncertain Walls applies the bestselling author’s own brand of magical realism to a love story about books and the buildings we use to house them.
Look beyond the fantastic, though, and you’ll find a parable with universal appeal.
7. The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke (24 October)
Incredibly, it’s 20 years since the release of Susanna Clarke’s sprawling debut novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Set in an alternate 19th-century England in which magic is employed to help win the Napoleonic Wars, the book was a huge critical and commercial success.
The strained relationship between England’s leading “practical magicians” was made into a 2015 series for the BBC.
Now, Clarke returns with The Wood at Midwinter, of which little is known. Except that it’s set in the same world as her two-decades-old debut, which is sure to delight fans old and new.
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