Fall Reading 2020 Fiction Recommendations

A devastating, beautiful, and timely novel. Franny Stone is a strong but lost soul, damaged, desperate, infuriating, irresistible. She's on a mission to follow the final migration of arctic terns in a world where extinction has become the norm. The narrative of this mesmerizing sea journey is relentless. It produces a cold longing that burns in your core. This is a meditation, a mystery, an action-adventure, a character study, and a love story. It's gut-wrenching and breath-taking. I loved it.  —Trey

This book is part of our Fall Reading Challenge. Read more here.

Hozar’s debut novel is a sprawling, historical delight. Aria is an orphaned girl, abandoned on the streets of Tehran just before the 1953 coup and subsequent regime change. Her journey weaves through the myriad socio-political upheavals that characterized Iran in the latter half of the 20th century, culminating in the explosive Revolution of 1979. With a robust cast of characters that include Communists, religious fanatics, paupers, and elites, Aria is a deeply moving meditation on belonging. This is a must-read for fans of family sagas and intertwining life stories. —Travis

This book is part of our Fall Reading Challenge. Read more here.

Translated from the Russian, Three Apples is a story of an isolated, close-knit village community in the Armenian mountains, where all younger people have long since left or were lost to the famine and war, and only the older folks remain—until a budding romance between the only two single residents shakes everything up and breathes new life into this dying village. Soul-warming and endlessly charming, this fable-like novel is a trip to the countryside unreservedly worth taking. —Ksenia

This book is part of our Fall Reading Challenge. Read more here.

This book has fangs. They sink in unapologetically. Our heroine tumbles into an open marriage where she stumbles through conventions but finds comfort in the in-between spaces. Luster is a tangle of relationships, teetering and swaying held by unstable threads. It meditates on how to form and hold connections while it fills and pours out the heart simultaneously. —Celeste

This book is part of our Fall Reading Challenge. Read more here.

In the Nigeria of this story, to be one’s true self can be ostracizing. The story itself is simple but the implications of Vivek’s death are the real tragedy. It is about family, friendship, and authenticity. This book asks us to question what we assume are infallible beliefs, and embrace the beauty of the true self. —Celeste

This book screams breakout hit! It’s fun, mysterious, and totally genre defying. Is it a coming-of-age murder mystery? Or literary fiction about female friendship involving serial killers? Kate Reed Petty is an innovator. I loved the way she shifts points of view and deviates from standard forms (an entire chapter told through emails) while never losing the story. Fans of The Goldfinch or Gone Girl will love this dark, beautifully-written tale. —Jason

This immersive dive into our autistic protagonist’s psyche reveals a judgmental, self-aware, and acerbically observant woman over the course of the night at a party. By turns profound and naive, this book of contradictions pulls you into its orbit and alters your awareness. A Room Called Earth pushed the margins of my comfort zone and left its impression in my mind for days afterwards. —Celeste

A man discovers he identifies as a cactus, a model is controlled by an ugly addiction, and an apprentice photographer can’t get one sensual eyelid out of their mind. Overwhelming compulsions and warped relationships with the human body bring bursts of color and tense stretches of loneliness to the desperate souls in these six strange stories translated from the original Spanish. I put Bezoar down and immediately ordered another of Nettel’s books, excited to read more. —Tori

This book is part of our Fall Reading Challenge. Read more here.

This darkly comedic eco-thriller is an urgent, ingenious commentary on climate change, global capitalism, the First World’s morbid interest in the areas devastated by poverty and disasters. The novel, translated from the Korean, tells the story of a remote island under the risk of oblivion. Desperate to keep the tourist business, the locals are secretly working on a plan to fabricate a catastrophe—but only a few understand the real cost of such a risky endeavor… Unputdownable!  —Ksenia

What if I told you that your heart will bloom with the particular fusion of hope and sadness that only the feeling of being seen by a book can produce, when you read Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet? Summer is the end of that quartet, and it incorporates a love for the mail, the cyclical atrocities of internment camps, and the effect that political windbags are having on our children, while somehow also re-instilling faith in the power of human connection. —Jess