Your Fall 2019 Reading List
This Fall New Book Release list is chock-full of upcoming releases from tried and true authors. Below are the new books that I’m the most excited about- and I think you should be too! And if you can’t wait, I’m giving you a related title to read to tide you over in the meantime. Which one tops your list?
Your Fall 2019 Reading List
When America won the Revolutionary War, its people offered General George Washington a crown. Two and a half centuries later, the House of Washington still sits on the throne. Like most royal families, the Washingtons have an heir and a spare. A future monarch and a backup battery. Each child knows exactly what is expected of them. But these aren't just any royals. They're American.
As Princess Beatrice gets closer to becoming America's first queen regnant, the duty she has embraced her entire life suddenly feels stifling. Nobody cares about the spare except when she's breaking the rules, so Princess Samantha doesn't care much about anything, either . . . except the one boy who is distinctly off-limits to her. And then there's Samantha's twin, Prince Jefferson. If he'd been born a generation earlier, he would have stood first in line for the throne, but the new laws of succession make him third. Most of America adores their devastatingly handsome prince . . . but two very different girls are vying to capture his heart.
American Royals | Katharine McGee | Release Date: September 3rd, 2019 | I am an absolute sucker for anything Royal and I can’t wait to read this author’s interpretation of what America would look like with a monarchy. In the meantime- pick up The Royal We, a breezy romance based on William and Kate that I really enjoyed.
“If I know why they are the way they are, then maybe I can learn why I am the way I am,” says Alex Tuchman of her parents. Now that her father is on his deathbed, Alex—a strong-headed lawyer, devoted mother, and loving sister--feels she can finally unearth the secrets of who Victor is and what he did over the course of his life and career. (A power-hungry real estate developer, he is, by all accounts, a bad man.) She travels to New Orleans to be with her family, but mostly to interrogate her tightlipped mother, Barbra.
As Barbra fends off Alex’s unrelenting questions, she reflects on her tumultuous life with Victor. Meanwhile Gary, Alex’s brother, is incommunicado, trying to get his movie career off the ground in Los Angeles. And Gary’s wife, Twyla, is having a nervous breakdown, buying up all the lipstick in drug stores around New Orleans and bursting into crying fits. Dysfunction is at its peak. As each family member grapples with Victor’s history, they must figure out a way to move forward—with one another, for themselves, and for the sake of their children.
All This Could Be Yours | Jami Attenberg | Release Date: October 22nd, 2019 | Jami Attenberg is one of those authors that just gets it. She’s known for creating relatable and real characters and I’m excited to see what type of family drama she’s got in store for us in this one. In the meantime, pick up All Grown Up, a story about a woman in her NY in her late twenties who is forced to decide what she really wants out of life when her niece is born with a rare medical condition. Very smart.
Soon after her twenty-fifth birthday, Libby Jones returns home from work to find the letter she’s been waiting for her entire life. She rips it open with one driving thought: I am finally going to know who I am.
She soon learns not only the identity of her birth parents, but also that she is the sole inheritor of their abandoned mansion on the banks of the Thames in London’s fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, worth millions. Everything in Libby’s life is about to change. But what she can’t possibly know is that others have been waiting for this day as well—and she is on a collision course to meet them.
Twenty-five years ago, police were called to 16 Cheyne Walk with reports of a baby crying. When they arrived, they found a healthy ten-month-old happily cooing in her crib in the bedroom. Downstairs in the kitchen lay three dead bodies, all dressed in black, next to a hastily scrawled note. And the four other children reported to live at Cheyne Walk were gone.
The Family Upstairs | Lisa Jewell | Release Date: November 5th, 2019 | Lisa Jewell a master of writing a book that will keep you turning the pages. Generally her books take a bit to build but in my experience, they always come together in a beautiful way. In her latest, a woman that was orphaned as a child finds out who she really is. And as it turns out, she’s someone that’s quite wealthy. In the meantime, catch up on my favorite from her, I Found You, in which a mysterious man turns up on a single mother’s beachfront with no memory of where he came from.
9-year-old Levi King knew he should have left for home sooner; now he's alone in the darkness of vast Caddo Lake, in a boat whose motor just died. A sudden noise distracts him - and all goes dark. Darren Matthews is trying to emerge from another kind of darkness; after the events of his previous investigation, his marriage is in a precarious state of re-building, and his career and reputation lie in the hands of his mother, who's never exactly had his best interests at heart. Now she holds the key to his freedom, and she's not above a little maternal blackmail to press her advantage.
An unlikely possibility of rescue arrives in the form of a case down Highway 59, in a small lakeside town where the local economy thrives on nostalgia for ante-bellum Texas - and some of the era's racial attitudes still thrive as well. Levi's disappearance has links to Darren's last case, and to a wealthy businesswoman, the boy's grandmother, who seems more concerned about the fate of her business than that of her grandson. Darren has to battle centuries-old suspicions and prejudices, as well as threats that have been reignited in the current political climate, as he races to find the boy, and to save himself.
Heaven My Home | Attica Locke | Release Date: September 17th, 2019 | New Attica Locke! If you like police procedurals, then it’s very likely that you’re already familiar with this author. But on the off chance you’re not, she’s best known for Bluebird, Bluebird but also writes for television (including Empire). Flawed Texas Ranger Darrin Mathews is one of my favorite characters and I can’t wait to see what he tackles in Book 2. In the meantime, her article on Meghan Markle blackening of Widsor and why that matters on live TV is not to be missed.
In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis’s parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents—telekinesis and telepathy—who got to this place the same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and ten-year-old Avery Dixon. They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, “like the roach motel,” Kalisha says. “You check in, but you don’t check out.”
In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don’t, punishment is brutal. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute.
As psychically terrifying as Firestarter, and with the spectacular kid power of It, The Institute is Stephen King’s gut-wrenchingly dramatic story of good vs. evil in a world where the good guys don’t always win.
The Institute | Stephen King | Release Date: September 10th, 2019 | I don’t think this one needs a lot of introduction. It’s new Stephen King! Kids with powers a la Stranger Things! I can’t wait. In the meantime, Firestarter would be a good one to revisit, as there are supposed to be parallels.
Two families from different social classes are joined together by an unexpected pregnancy and the child that it produces. Moving forward and backward in time, with the power of poetry and the emotional richness of a narrative ten times its length, Jacqueline Woodson's extraordinary new novel uncovers the role that history and community have played in the experiences, decisions, and relationships of these families, and in the life of this child.
Red at the Bone | Jacqueline Woodson | Release Date: September 17th, 2019 | Jacqueline Woodson is a prolific author in both the adult and young adult realms. Her latest is a story about young adults and the decisions they have to make, ready or not, that will reverberate throughout their lives. In the meantime, her story If You Come Softly about a couple in high school in an interracial relationship is one of a kind.
The Starless Sea | Erin Morgenstern | Release Date: November 5th, 2019 | Like a lot of avid readers, I’ve been waiting for Erin Morgenstern’s next book for a long time. I really didn’t even read the synopsis before pre-ordering (but for those that like a little more information, think an under the sea love story that starts in a library. With pirates). In the meantime, if you haven’t tried The Night Circus yet- you must! It really is so captivating.
When the van door slammed on Offred's future at the end of The Handmaid's Tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead for her—freedom, prison or death. With The Testaments, the wait is over. Margaret Atwood's sequel picks up the story fifteen years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.
The Testaments: A Novel | Margaret Atwood | Release Date: September 10th, 2019 | New Margaret Atwood! It’s the follow up to The Handmaid’s Tale and we get to see what really happened to Offred. I love the show but I hope to catch up and read the original before the sequel comes out.
Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her—but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known.
So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures.
This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children—the violent and capricious separation of families—and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today’s most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.
The Water Dancer | Ta-Nehisi Coates | Release Date: September 24th, 2019 | This is Coates’ debut novel. He’s best known for his non-fiction. In the meantime, catch up on Between the World and Me, a book that was called required reading by Toni Morrison.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again- the collection of new books that have come out in 2019 is an embarrassment of riches! I’m so happy to be a reader.
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