The big books of fall are like tomatoes, or zucchini: You look forward to them all summer and when they finally arrive, in a rush, you have more than you can handle. This week we recommend new fiction from Sally Rooney, Richard Powers and the Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, among others, along with Ina Garten’s memoir and two fresh takes on Impressionist art. Any or all of them would make perfect company while the zucchini bread bakes and the tomato sauce simmers on the stove. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles
INTERMEZZO
Sally Rooney
Rooney’s latest novel is about grown brothers, a successful barrister and a competitive chess player, who are mourning the death of their father and navigating the lingering bitterness between them. But its primary subject, as in all of Rooney’s work, is love in its various permutations, the minutiae of falling in and out of it.
PLAYGROUND
Richard Powers
The wonders of the ocean and the terrors of A.I. meet in Powers’s new novel, which considers the future of an environmentally challenged Polynesian island by way of the intersecting stories of a professional diver, a tech billionaire and an idealistic NGO worker who lives on the island with his family.
THE EMPUSIUM:
Olga Tokarczuk
In 1913, at a health resort in what is now Poland, a shy and sickly student discovers a terrible secret: Every year around the first full moon in November, a man, sometimes two, is torn to pieces in the nearby forest. This novel by the 2018 Nobel laureate (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) pits nature against the state and the social world, with a particular emphasis on gender.
BE READY WHEN THE LUCK HAPPENS:
Ina Garten
Garten’s gift has been to make everything look effortless: the recipes in her 13 cookbooks; the glorious array of salads and cupcakes in her former food store, Barefoot Contessa; the many occasions when she’s advised viewers to substitute store-bought items for homemade on the Food Network. In this memoir, however, she shows how much luck and labor it took to achieve the success that she clearly enjoys.
PARIS IN RUINS:
Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism
Sebastian Smee
In this deeply researched and suavely written book, a Pulitzer-winning critic traces the lives and careers of Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Berthe Morisot during the Franco-Prussian War. Along the way, we learn how Manet and Morisot responded to the escalating chaos around them, which shook the foundations of their lives and their art.
MONET:
Jackie Wullschläger
By excavating the painter’s unexpectedly messy inner life, the author shows that Claude Monet was a tormented rebel, not the placid voluptuary we have imagined. Her lively biography argues that his art was continually spurred and redirected by tempestuous relationships with the three most important women in his life.
SCAFFOLDING
Lauren Elkin
The first novel by the author of “Art Monsters” and “Flâneuse” is about a grieving Parisian psychoanalyst who wanders the gentrifying streets of Belleville, remodels her kitchen and engages in one long Socratic dialogue with her younger neighbor Clémentine. Elkin’s layered plot involves intertwined love affairs a generation apart, her prose as sensual as it is cerebral.
TWO-STEP DEVIL
Jamie Quatro
Set in rural Alabama in 2014, Quatro’s Southern Gothic novel features a dying 70-year-old man who calls himself the Prophet and takes it upon himself to “rescue” a teenage girl being held captive and drugged by sex traffickers. In a page-turning plot, Quatro skillfully mines the gray areas between good and evil, optimism and realism, punishment and redemption.
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