You’ll “Fall” for this Season’s New Books
ALMOST A DOZEN REASONS TO GRAB A BOOK Shelley Laurence, Main Point Books
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HAT A DIFFERENCE A YEAR MAKES. LAST fall, Covid-19 upended the publishing world, but this season, your choices are endless! Many of your favorite authors will release new books in the next few months. Whatever your interest or passion, you’ll find some great reads at your independent bookstore this fall. Here’s a small sample. TOP PICKS Amor Towles (“A Gentleman in Moscow”) returns with another multi-layered novel, this one set in 1950s America. “The Lincoln Highway” tells the tale of an 18-year-old orphan, just released from a work farm in Nebraska after serving 15 months for involuntary manslaughter. Emmett Watson just wants to grab his younger brother and head to California for a fresh start. But two friends from the work farm have other ideas ... and they blow up his plans in a big way. Anthony Doerr (“All the Light We Cannot See”) is back with another lovely story about outsiders and dreamers. In “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” we meet children on the verge of adulthood, trying to navigate different worlds. Two are living through the 1453 siege 28
County Lines | September 2021 | CountyLinesMagazine.com
of Constantinople, another is in the center of an attack on a public library in present day Idaho, and the fourth is on a spaceship decades in the future. They’re connected by an ancient text as the story moves back and forth in time. Fans of “Normal People” rejoice! Irish novelist Sally Rooney brings us another coming-of-age story of life and love among a group of friends in Dublin. “Beautiful World, Where are You?” follows four young adults as they cope with pressures of relationships, work, politics and their future. In other words, life. In “Apples Never Fall,” Liane Moriarty asks the question: If your mother was missing, would you tell the police? Even if the most obvious suspect was your father? If Moriarty’s blockbuster “Big Little Lies” is on your bookshelf (or your DVR), this one’s for you. Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Colson Whitehead (“The Underground Railroad” and “The Nickel Boys”) takes a crack at a crime story set in Harlem in the 1960s. In “Harlem Shuffle,” Ray Carney may look like an upstanding furniture salesman and family man, but he actually comes from a long line of shady, uptown characters. Carney dabbles in dubious doings here and there, but when money gets tight, he agrees to fence jewels from a Harlem hotel heist. And, you guessed it. Things don’t go according to plan.
