8 can’t-miss fiction books for your Autumn reading list
Enough already with the summer fluff, it’s hardcore literary fiction season
Not everyone tears through 600-page doorstoppers in a long weekend so we’ll say this for our Autumn Fiction edit. There’s honestly enough here to last you all season with prize-winning big hitters like Olga Tokarczuk, Hernan Diaz and Barbara Kingsoliver, a new mind-blowing story from sci-fi darling Emily St John Mandel and a goddamn future classic from Marlon James, plus a few genuine surprises and short-form gems in there too.
Tell us what you’re reading in the comments.
Doom Painting (A.K. Blakemore)
If you read one book this autumn, read Doom Painting, the astonishing - and astonishingly fun - new historical fiction from A.K. Blakemore, based on the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt. The story of sixteen days that shook Essex, Kent, London and beyond, Blakemore brings leader Wat Tyler, preacher John Ball, King Richard II, Lord Mayor William Walworth (and the rest) fully to life, kicking and screaming, as ‘the commons’ rises up to burn the accounts of their debts and defaults, punish and steal from corrupt officials and try to tear down the lords of late Middle Ages England.
This is no dry homework book. It’s as gnarly and thrilling as it is moving. There’s blood, gore, fucking, fighting and yes, modern swearing (it works, honest). There’s also poetry and nature and awe in this maximalist, 650+ page epic (that deserves to be up there in the conversation with the likes of Hilary Mantel). You could quite nicely parcel Doom Painting out over a series of autumnal weekends. In fact, we’re sort of envious of anyone who hasn’t read this masterpiece of a novel yet, one of the best of the year. Yeah, it’s that good.
Exit Party (Emily St John Mandel)
Here’s some elegantly constructed speculative fiction from Emily St John Mandel, the author of Station Eleven. (And this book has already been snapped up for adaptation - noooo surprise there). We’re presented with visions of a future, post-collapse United States of the 2030s, in which both politics and climate emergency are ever-present, without being cloying or too on-the-nose.
As she toys with doubles, doppelgangers and ghosts, Mandel remains at something of a cool distance from her characters, including the protagonist, the mysterious ex-convict Ari, while also weaving in both sci-fi melancholy and potent emotional stings. While Station Eleven was full of Shakespeare, here Mandel challenges herself to go further with a fictional painting, titled Swan Dive, as something of a skeleton key which recurs again and again quite exquisitely. In Exit Party, the reader is always in the safest of hands.
Stations (Louise Kennedy)
When you regularly read a lot of contemporary fiction, character tropes and dynamics can start to smush into one big mush: not at all so with Irish writer Louise Kennedy’s second novel Stations, which follows 2022’s Trespasses. Her characters - most vividly the central friendship pair of Roisin and Red - feel real and lived in. They’re snort-inducingly dry and funny and, at times, capable of heart-breaking misunderstandings.
Spanning from the late 80s to the mid 2000s, and with quite a bit of the story set in London, Kennedy’s tender knack for incredibly specific detail helps to ground the piling-on of regrets big and small over the years: the pubs, the squats, Merv the Perv, digging up weeds... the potatoes! Loss is everywhere, but so is life. Stations is a novel which stays with you: you’ll no doubt be rolling the contours and complexities of Roisin and Red’s uncategorisable relationship over in your mind for days.
The Disappearers (Marlon James)
Wow. One of the most anticipated novels of the autumn is Jamaican-born author Marlon James’ The Disappearers and it does not disappoint. Already shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize and declared one of the books of the decade (and maybe the century) by the New York Times, James pulls you into his dark world of 1988 Kingston, Jamaica right from the first lines - and never lets up. It’s as sensitive as it is shocking, though.
The story: eight gay men meet to rehearse an openly gay prison-drama play before suffering a horrendous - and we mean horrendous - homophobic attack by a local gang of vigilantes. This is breath-takingly powerful fiction that, in dealing with the long and complicated aftermath of the attack, like his previous books, does not shy away from anger and violence, with slang, slurs, family bust-ups and sex on almost every page. Of which there are just over 600 of them as this is another large chunk of literary brilliance.
Partita (Barbara Kingsoliver)
Best known for Demon Copperhead, her spin on Dickens which co-won the Pulitzer in 2023, Barbara Kingsoliver is a master writer of rural communities in Appalachia and the American South. Partita is set in Tennessee where we flash forward and backward throughout the life of Livia Bohusz - from virtuoso young pianist off to music college on a scholarship to a middle-aged wife, back in farm country and sorting through the detritus of her dead mother’s home.
More Autumn Fiction Releases
- Safe Spaces - Tice Cin (out now)
- The Newer World - Sebastian Barry (out now)
- Golden Crumbs - Mary Ruefle (out 8th Oct)
- Switzy - Emma Kline (out now)
- In Your Heart A Devil - Vanessa Santos (out 8th Oct)
Partita is a novel that’s shot through with music, mostly classical - there’s even a listening list at the end, detailing specific pieces by Bach, Mozart, Satie etc. And Kingsoliver uses Livia’s (almost) all-consuming passion for music to devastating effect, as she illuminates the stickiness of the place of social class within the arts, the compatibility (or otherwise) of vocations in romantic relationships and lineages of ambitions and disappointments from parents to children. Fair warning: this is literary fiction at its most intense, at times, but there’s so much hard-won wisdom in these pages, the journey is well worth it.
Out 6th October / Order it here
Primeval And Other Times (Olga Tokarczuk)
Yes, yes, yessssss. Any Olga Tokarczuk book tends to be an “all of life is there” situation - in Primeval’s case “there” is, you guessed it, a Polish village in the countryside, whose events we drop in on from about the 1910s to the 1960s, following the fates of generations of various interconnected families. If you loved last year’s House of Day, House of Night, you’ll dig this - they were both actually published in the mid to late 90s in Polish, here in an English translation from Fitzcarraldo by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
Don’t let the author’s recent controversial comments about AI put you off. There is inventive language, hyper-local turns of phrase and idiosyncratic character beats here at every turn, all rooted in place, whether that’s an old woman shouting at the moon or a priest’s battle with a river. Commonplace tragedies are dealt with swiftly and pack a punch. Some of Tokarczuk’s particular inclinations - superstitions, games, mushrooms! - are also here in the typically kaleidoscopic Primeval. Some sentences you’ll read twice or more to relish them, others will just about stop your heart.
The Bishop of Durham Attempts To Surrender The City (Susannah Clarke)
A perfect gem of a short story-novella fantasy from Susannah Clarke, at just under 100 pages, with gorgeous black and white, medieval manuscript-style illustrations by Victoria Sawdon, full page and lining the text. Her publisher Bloomsbury describes this as a “long-lost chapter in the lore” of Clarke’s best-selling Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell as the fairy tale-like The Bishop... features the Raven King/ King of the North character from that world.
Hollywood take note, because *this* is how you do a considered slice of origin story. The Bishop... has something to say about the King, his world and the genre in general. There’s also a lovely afterword on fantasy, ‘childish things’, landscape and animacy by the author to complement the story. An autumn treat to savour when the rain is lashing down outside. And for those clamouring for more, more, more: Clarke’s book Piranesi is, excitingly, getting an RSC staging due for summer 2027.
Out 22nd October / Order it here
Ply (Hernan Diaz)
Hernan Diaz’s Ply is set in a near-future New York City and it’s concerned with big, huge ideas about science and society. Trust us, we’re talking like CERN-sized ideas. You might know Diaz from his excellent novel Trust, from 2022, but this latest offering is very different indeed - literary experiments with perspective aside. Specific intentional choices in the book are dividing literary critics. It’s certainly a big swing and if you’re intrigued by the premise, we’d say give it a go and make your own mind up.
We follow an unnamed protagonist, known only as ‘the pincher’, as she sneaks electricity away from the grid to power her favourite bands’ live music shows in this sci-fi blend of dystopia - brutal security apparatus, low life expectancy, non-existent healthcare - and utopia - community sharing and repairing of resources, freedom to experience art unencumbered. The way Diaz writes about both music and particle physics - yep - gets at a kind of bodily transcendence that’s rarely put down in words. A fascinating piece of work.
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