Rewriting History

THIS SEASON’S SLEEPER

REAMDE

By Neal Stephenson, 9/20

Stephenson is famous for epics about technology and information flow, but this is a slightly different animal: a spy thriller. It begins when an online game transmits a virus to a Russian gangster’s computer, and it snowballs until an international handful of hackers are chasing a murderous terrorist around the globe.

BOOMERANG: TRAVELS IN THE NEW THIRD WORLD

By Michael Lewis, 10/3

Practicing a kind of financial-disaster tourism, Lewis travels from country to country during the great cheap-credit epidemic of 2002–08, giving vastly entertaining chalk talks about exactly why everything went to hell where and when it did. Then he brings it all back home and gives us a fresh perspective on our own financial mess.

THE STRANGER’S CHILD

By Alan Hollinghurst, 10/11

Hollinghurst won the Booker Prize in 2004 for The Line of Beauty, and the buzz is running hot for his new novel, which sprawls across a century of life in England. George, a Cambridge undergraduate, and his sister Daphne both fall for George’s school chum Cecil, a poet who is killed in World War I. But his poetry lives on, and Hollinghurst’s novel follows the evolution of Cecil’s posthumous literary reputation, using it to reveal the complex love story that unfurled at the beginning.

ZONE ONE

By Colson Whitehead, 10/18

Life in postapocalyptic America is a mixture of horror and tedium. Our hero, a survivor of a plague that turns humans into zombies, does the day-to-day work of clearing Zone One–previously known as lower Manhattan–of infected stragglers. Whitehead uses the tropes of classic George Romero–style zombie movies to reflect on millennial disasters like Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina.

1Q84

By Haruki Murakami, 10/25

Originally published in three volumes in Japan, Murakami’s novel takes place in an alternate-history 1984 (the title is a play on Orwell’s 1984) and concerns the enigmatic, eerily evocative stories of a woman named Aomame, who commits a series of cold-blooded murders, and Tengo, a disaffected (and recognizably Murakamian) young math teacher.

PULPHEAD

By John Jeremiah Sullivan, 10/25

Sullivan’s essays have won two National Magazine Awards, and here his omnivorous intellect analyzes Michael Jackson, Christian rock, post-Katrina New Orleans, Axl Rose and the obscure 19th century naturalist Constantine Rafinesque. His compulsive honesty and wildly intelligent prose recall the work of American masters of New Journalism like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe.

INFERNO: THE WORLD AT WAR, 1939–1945

By Max Hastings, 11/1

The catastrophe of World War II was so vast that it’s virtually impossible to take in the big picture. Instead, Hastings looks at the small one. Inferno is built from first-person details, culled from a staggering collection of letters, journals and other eyewitness documents. Each is indelible. Consider this: after a battle at Rzhev in the terrible winter of 1942, a German officer strolling through the battlefield reported that “the hard frozen bodies clinked like porcelain.”

BLUE NIGHTS

By Joan Didion, 11/4

In 2007, Didion, one of America’s great cultural observers, published The Year of Magical Thinking, about the death of her husband and the grief that followed. Shortly before it was published, her only daughter Quintana Roo died as well. Blue Nights is Didion’s meditation on her daughter’s too-brief life, their complex relationship and her own old age.

11/22/63

By Stephen King, 11/8

Jake, an English teacher in Maine, discovers a portal in a friend’s diner that leads back to the year 1958–the age of Elvis–where Jake can try to avert President Kennedy’s murder (the date of his assassination gives the novel its title). In the process, Jake stumbles into a romance with a lovely librarian.

INHERITANCE

By Christopher Paolini, 11/8

Eragon, the first book in Paolini’s epic Inheritance Cycle, was published almost a decade ago. A bona fide literary wunderkind, Paolini began writing it when he was only 15. Nobody yet knows the details of this fourth and final volume, but look for the hero Eragon and his dragon Saphira to defeat the mad king Galbatorix and free the country of Alagaësia from his malevolent reign.

At Last! Books we hope will be worth the wait

7 years, 4 months

Lily Tuck

I MARRIED YOU FOR HAPPINESS

Tuck, whose last novel, The News from Paraguay, won the 2004 National Book Award, begins her new one with the death of Philip, a famous mathematician. Sitting by his body, his wife Nina spreads out the shards of their marriage in her mind–the happy memories and the awful ones, the fights and sex and secrets and betrayals–and tries to piece them together. 9/6

9 years, 1 month

Jeffrey Eugenides

THE MARRIAGE PLOT

Studying English at Brown in the 1980s meant immersion in the deconstructed universe of Derrida. But not for Madeleine, whose taste still runs to Jane Austen and George Eliot. In his first novel since 2002’s Middlesex, Eugenides asks if Madeleine’s faith in the traditional marriage plot can survive poststructuralist theory–or a love triangle with two fellow students. 10/11

12 years, 9 months

Susan Orlean

RIN TIN TIN

This is Orleans’ first book-length project since The Orchid Thief in 1998, and she’s found another rich and remarkable subject. The original Rin Tin Tin was a puppy adopted on a WW I battlefield by a passing GI. The soldier brought his dog to Hollywood and–by dint of inhuman persistence and near implausible events–made him into a canine king of all media. 9/27