What to Read in October and Other Book News

Also new and notable, in brief:

How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark or Difficult Days by Kari Leibowitz (Oct. 22). Psychologist Leibowitz offers ways to rethink the season.

American Heroes by James Patterson & Matt Eversmann (Oct. 21). The coauthors share first-person war stories from U.S. soldiers.

The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern  by Lynda Cohen Loigman (October 8). A retired pharmacist moves to Florida and runs into an old flame who elicits some difficult memories in this novel, written with humor.

For more of this season’s most anticipated releases, check out our fall books preview.

Big band bios

The next several weeks also bring some deep dives into the stories of iconic bands from yesteryear, including:

Dreams: The Many Lives of Fleetwood Mac  by Mark Blake (Oct. 1). The author interviewed Mick Fleetwood, Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, and the late Peter Green and Christine McVie to get at the heart of Fleetwood Mac. Blake has also written books on Queen, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.

The Silver Snarling Trumpet: The Birth of the Grateful Dead — The Lost Manuscript of Robert Hunter (Oct. 8). The late Grateful Dead lyricist Hunter, who died in 2019, left this manuscript in an attic; his wife Maureen has decided it’s time to share it with fans. It offers vivid snapshots of the 1960s — including back when Jerry Garcia and the other musicians had so little money they would sit at a coffee shop and share one cup.

The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.  by Peter Ames Carlin (Nov. 5). This is obvious catnip for we Gen Xers who came of age listening to these eccentric, groundbreaking musicians from Athens, Georgia — college dropouts who blew teenagers’ minds (and others’, surely) with their breakthrough album Murmur and others to follow. Journalist Carlin didn’t interview the four founding band members, now all in their 60s — Michael Stipe, Peter Buck, Mike Mills and Bill Berry — but he spoke with, among many others, session musicians who’ve played with them.

Read more about fall’s biggest celebrity memoirs and biographies here.

Isabel Allende has a Barbie doll!

Mattel has created a Barbie doll in the image of Allende, 82, the beloved Chilean-American author of novels such as 2023’s The Wind Knows My Name and, back in 1995, a beautiful, wrenching memoir about her late daughter, Paula. Allende helped Mattel design the Barbie, available for purchase on Oct. 25 as part of the brand’s Inspiring Women Series (among them: Billie Jean King, Rosa Parks and Eleanor Roosevelt).

The doll, which, sadly, can’t stand up without support (bad message for little girls, Mattel!), sports a bright-red sleeveless dress with a cap draping her left shoulder — one of Allende’s favorite outfits, according to her publicist — plus black high heels and big gold earrings “to match her vibrant, iconic writing,” Mattel notes. She holds a tiny, presumably unreadable, copy of her debut The House of the Spirits and a tiny dog representing her pup Perla, “who inspired her first children’s book.”

Cool. But we’re more excited about the fact that Allende has a new book coming out in May. It’s called My Name is Emilia Del Valle, about a writer in the late 19th century who travels from San Francisco to cover a civil war in Chile, the land of her paternal ancestry.

More news in brief 

• Oprah’s Book Club’s latest pick is Elizabeth Strout ’s Tell Me Everything (Sept. 10), which gives me yet another chance to sing the praises of the novel (and, for that matter, Oprah: She picks fantastic reads). It’s a wonderful and wise story, featuring familiar Strout characters such as Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton.
• The movie version of Colson Whitehead’s gripping, Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel The Nickel Boys hits theaters on Oct. 25. The author (who also received a Pulitzer for 2016’s The Underground Railroad) centers his story around a scholarly teen who suffers stunning injustices at a reform school for boys in Florida. It’s based on the horrific happenings at a real-life segregated reform school, the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida.
• AARP’s The Girlfriend Book Club’s October selection is The Briar Club by Kate Quinn (July 9), known for her historical fiction (The Rose Code, The Diamond Eye). Set in 1950s Washington, D.C., the story begins at a women’s boardinghouse, where police are investigating a possible murder in one of the apartments. Publishers Weekly dubbed it “a stellar historical mystery.” Join Girlfriend editor in chief Shelley Emling for a live discussion with Quinn on Oct. 15 at 7:30 p.m. ET. It’s free, but you need to be a member of The Girlfriend Book Club, a private Facebook group, to watch. It’s easy to join. 
• From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir  by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough comes out on October 8. Before Presley passed away in 2023 at age 54, she asked her daughter, Riley Keough, 35, to complete her memoir for her. The book recounts her troubled youth, marriage to Michael Jackson, drug addiction, music career and more. Julia Roberts will narrate the audiobook version alongside Keough.

Book award announcements

It’s book award season, folks, and a few prestigious prizes will be bestowed in the next six weeks or so. If you wanted to bet on the strongest fiction contender, note that one book is a finalist on each of the three big prize-givers’ lists: Percival Everett’s  James , the brilliant 2024 novel that revisits Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim. Here’s the scoop on some of the other books being considered and when the winners for each award will be announced:

On Oct. 16, the Kirkus Prizes will be announced at an in-person ceremony in New York. The shortlist, along with James: Jennine Capó Crucet’s  Say Hello to My Little Friend , Louise Erdrich’s  The Mighty Red , Paul Lynch’s  Prophet Song (2023), Richard Powers’ riveting Playground , and Rufi Thorpe’s  Margo’s Got Money Troubles . Nonfiction finalists include Adam Higginbotham’s  Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space and Tessa Hulls’  Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir (one of our top books of 2024 so far). See the full list at KirkusReviews.com.

Britain’s Booker Prizes will be awarded Nov. 12, with its judges considering fiction published in English from October 2023 through September 2024. The recently announced shortlist includes an unprecedented five women authors — among them American Rachel Kushner for Creation Lake and the British novelist Samantha Harvey for her atmospheric story set in an international space station, Orbital  — and one man (yup, Everett), from five different countries. Check the Booker site for more.

The winners of the National Book Foundation’s National Book Awards will be announced on November 20. The finalists for fiction are: James (as noted above)

Martyr!, a widely praised debut novel by poet Kaveh Akbar 

My Friends by Hisham Matar 

Ghostroots, a collection of short stories set in Nigeria, by Pemi Aguda

All Fours by Miranda July one of my favorites, about a middle-aged woman’s very strange journey

The nonfiction contenders are:

Whisky Tender, a memoir by Deborah Jackson Taffa

Unshrinking: How to Face Fat Phobia by Kate Manne

Circle of Hope: A Reckoning With Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church by Eliza Griswold

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, Salman Rushdie’s memoir

Jason De León’s Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling