Books you’ll want to read in the Fall:
• Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood (Oct. 23) is set in Miami, with a Cuban mayor and black police chief, after the financial meltdown.
• Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy (Sept. 27) is a dark comedy about politics in a small British town.
• Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace is due Oct. 2. Bookseller Cathy Langer of Denver’s Tattered Cover says: “Every year there’s a really well-written, well-published memoir by an aging rocker that hits the market with a bang. It’s Neil’s turn.”
Other memoirs stirring interest:
• Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall (Oct. 1)
• Penny Marshall’s My Mother Was Nuts (Sept. 18)
• Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton (Sept. 18). The title comes from the secret security code he used while in hiding after Iranian clerics issued a fatwa against him.
Sequels will be big:
• Ken Follett’s Winter of the World (Sept. 18) continues his 20th century trilogy.
• Justin Cronin’s The Twelve (Oct. 12) revisits the post-apocalyptic zombie world that he introduced in The Passage.
Kennedys, Streisand, Churchill:
• After their best-selling Killing Lincoln, Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard move on to Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot (Oct 16).
•David Nasaw takes on Joseph P. Kennedy, JFK’s dad, in The Patriarch (Nov. 13).
•William Mann wrangles a legend in Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand (Oct. 9).
• And due Nov. 20: The Last Lion, the third and final volume on Winston Churchill, begun by William Manchester, who died in 2004, and completed by Paul Reid.
Crime novels with buzz:
• Lee Child’s A Wanted Man (Sept. 25)
• Jo Nesbo’s Phantom (Oct. 2)
• Michael Connelly’s The Black Box (Nov. 25)
• From the grave emerges The Cocktail Waitress (Sept 18), the long-lost final novel by James M. Cain, the master of noir, who died in 1977.
And then there’s Pippa’s party style:
Celebrate: A Year of Festivities and Friends (Oct. 30) by Pippa Middleton, sister-in-law of Prince William.