The Must-Read Books of Fall

After lazy days of reading fat thrillers on the beach, it’s time to get serious with the annual fall reading bonanza when publishers release all their marquee names, big stars, and prize contenders. The good news: serious does not mean dull. Expect stars to return in top form (Charles Frazier, Lee Child), stunning debuts (Chad Harbach, Erin Morgenstern), juicy political memoirs (Condoleezza Rice on her WH years), sweeping history (Simon Sebag Montefiore on Jerusalem, Robert Hughes on Rome), charming celebrity memoirs (Harry Belafonte, Judy Collins), and more. We’ve sifted through the avalanche to identify 10 books you won’t want to miss (but we couldn’t resist adding another 10 on The Daily Beast).

Stephen King, 11/22/63

The horror king delivers a trip down the rabbit hole of history with a novel that reimagines that watershed moment: the Kennedy assassination. Jake, a high-school English teacher, finds a portal to the past and goes back to Texas in 1958, where he becomes George Amberson, finds the love of his life, and tries to stop Oswald, all in 842 pages.

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

As with most Murakami novels, things begin in ordinary ways--a woman sits in a taxi in a traffic jam--and then quickly warp out of control: the woman winds up in an alternate universe before the cars begin to move. Add a novelist rewriting the work of a 13-year-old girl, a militant religious cult, a reclusive dowager who runs a battered-women's shelter, and a very ugly detective, and the result is top-drawer Murakami.

Aravind Adiga, Last Man in Tower

The Booker Prize-winning author of The White Tiger delivers a masterful portrait of booming Mumbai told through the struggle over an apartment building between an ambitious property developer and a humble, defiant schoolteacher. With this gripping, amusing glimpse into the contradictions and perils of modern India, Adiga cements his reputation as the preeminent chronicler of his country's messy present.

Ron Suskind, Confidence Men

Three years after the financial meltdown, the American economy is still limping along. How the recovery went awry is the subject of Ron Suskind's reported account of the Obama White House's struggle to fix the economy--and the response of the financial titans in New York. Still under wraps, Suskind's book is likely to deliver fascinating revelations and a hard look at Obama's leadership.

Joan Didion, Blue Nights

The master of American prose turns her sharp eye on her own family once again in this breathtaking follow-up to The Year of Magical Thinking. With harrowing honesty and mesmerizing style, Didion chronicles the tragic death of her daughter, Quintana, interwoven with memories of their happier days together and Didion's own meditations on aging.

Diane Keaton, Then Again

Most celebrity memoirs are read either for juicy revelations or as monuments to impregnable egos. Diane Keaton's memoir, like the actress herself, is altogether different-a moving, thoughtful, and genuine tribute to her mother and a revealing glimpse into the surprising choices and iconic roles of her own life.

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

Pulitzer Prize winner (Middlesex) Eugenides returns with a knowingly old-fashioned love story: Madeleine Hanna, an out-of-step English major in the '80s who tilts toward Thackeray and Dickens when everyone else tilts toward Derrida, is wooed by not just one but two suitors, both wildly romantic in their respective ways, and maybe a little mad.

Umberto Eco, The Prague Cemetery

Eco imagines a late-19th-century Europe ruled by conspiracies, none of them pretty. Jesuits, Freemasons, devil worshipers, forgers, anarchists, freethinkers, and anti-Semites-everybody had an enemy, and paranoids were realists. The thrilling question posed here is, what if one man were behind all the conspiracies, from the Paris Commune to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

Robert K. Massie, Catherine the Great

Crowning his biographical portrait gallery of Russian royalty, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian delivers a rich, nuanced examination of Russia's lone female leader, the 18th-century woman so wily that she kept at bay the winds of revolution sweeping Europe even as she allowed in the spirit of the Enlightenment that ushered Russia into the modern world.

Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve

Can a poem change the world? Harvard professor and best-selling Shakespeare biographer Greenblatt ably shows in this mesmerizing intellectual history that it can. A richly entertaining read about a radical ancient Roman text that shook Renaissance Europe and inspired shockingly modern ideas (like the atom) that still reverberate today.