Freshen up your fall reading list with 6 new paperbacks

Gail Collins, a longtime editorial writer for The New York Times, here takes a lighthearted look at noteworthy American women of a certain age, beginning with Martha Washington in the colonial era and ending with the 90th birthday party of National Organization for Women co-founder Muriel Fox. A Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote, “This enjoyable and informative historical survey will delight Collins’s fans and bring in some new ones.”

Hoffman, whose many novels often feature a delicate magic realism, here combines that trademark with a story rooted in history. This novel takes place in Germany and France in the 1940s, following a young girl escaping the Gestapo with the aid of a magical creature of Jewish myth. Hoffman, wrote a Kirkus Reviews critic, “employs her signature lyricism to express the agony of the Holocaust with a depth seldom equaled in more seemingly realistic accounts.”

A winner of the National Outdoor Book Award, Macfarlane’s book examines the Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory and the land itself. Reviewing for The Guardian, William Dalrymple called it “one of the most ambitious works of narrative nonfiction of our age,” noting that it took Macfarlane 10 years to complete.

British author Smith has long been acclaimed for her novels (“White Teeth,” “On Beauty,” “Swing Time”) and essays (“Feel Free”); this is her first collection of short stories, which includes both previously unpublished new work and stories from early in her career. New York Times reviewer Rebecca Makkai wrote, “Some of these stories provide hints that everything we’ve seen from her so far will one day be considered her ‘early work,’ that what lies ahead is less charted territory, wilder and less predictable and perhaps less palatable to the casual reader but exactly what she needs to be writing.”

Stuart’s debut novel, about a boy growing up in public housing in 1980s Glasgow, was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize. It is, wrote reviewer Leah Hager Cohen in The New York Times, a wrenchingly sad novel: “the book would be just about unbearable were it not for the author’s astonishing capacity for love.”

The staff writer for The New Yorker makes her debut essay collection, which won the 2020 Whiting Award for Nonfiction. The selection committee for that award wrote, “These essays are compulsively readable, and shot through with surprise, offering us the delights of eloquence and the satisfactions of her deep, inquiring mind.”

No. 1 New York Times bestselling author Nicholas Sparks returns with the story of an injured Navy doctor. Trevor Benson never intended to move back to New Bern, North Carolina. But when a mortar blast outside the hospital where he worked sent him home from Afghanistan with devastating injuries, the dilapidated cabin he’d inherited from his grandfather seemed as good a place to regroup as any. Trevor isn’t prepared to fall in love with a local ... yet, from their very first encounter, Trevor feels a connection with deputy sheriff Natalie Masterson that he can’t ignore.

Shy, uptight East Coast socialite Clara Wheaton has been lured cross-country by her childhood crush, a bait-and-switch that finds her sharing a summer sublet with a charming stranger, Josh. Things are going fine until Clara’s curiosity about her roomie gets the better of her and she looks him up online and finds out what he does for a living. Uh oh. Turns out, Josh is an actor ... in adult films. His professional prowess inspires her to take tackling the stigma against female desire into her own hands. They may not agree on much, but Josh and Clara both believe women deserve better sex. What they decide to do about it will change both of their lives, and if they’re lucky, they’ll help everyone else get lucky, too.

The world may know Marcus Caster-Rupp as Aeneas, star of the biggest show on television, but fan fiction readers call him something else: Book!AeneasWouldNever. Marcus gets out his frustrations with the show through anonymous stories about the internet’s favorite couple, Aeneas and Lavinia. But if anyone discovered his online persona, he’d be finished in Hollywood. April Whittier has secrets of her own. A hardcore Lavinia fan, she’s long hidden her fanfic and cosplay hobbies from her “real life” — but not anymore. When she dares to post her latest costume creation on Twitter, her plus-size take goes viral. And when Marcus asks her out to spite her internet critics, truth officially becomes stranger than fanfiction.

Byron Robidoux is running for a U.S. Senate seat. He’s got the backing of some powerful political connections, but his plans are suddenly upended when a blackmailer surfaces wielding a secret that Byron’s kept for over a decade. Trouble is, the secret is also a lie. And revealing the truth could have terrible repercussions for the person he told that lie to protect. Zoe Hammond, now a strong and confident single mother, was Byron’s friend in his college days. As their mutual attraction grows, he’ll need to figure it out or risk losing everything.

Transplanted New Yorker Julia del Mar Ortiz is trying to make the best of Dallas after being ditched there by her boyfriend shortly after moving. She’s landed a great job running the charitable foundation of Sturm’s, an iconic family-owned high fashion department store, and she’s started a meetup group for “Gotham Exiles” like herself. But when Sturm’s decides to go public, the CEO hires fellow New Yorker Rocco Quinn as a consultant to tighten up profitability, which involves — you guessed it — shutting down the foundation. Library Journal nailed it when it said, “Herrera hits the mark again with a sizzling enemies-to-lovers romance that deftly charts the struggles of finding love and friendship in unexpected places.”

Moving to Starlight to work at her aunt’s coffee shop was supposed to be Mara Reed’s new start after her devastating divorce. But had she known she’d find Parker Johnson, her ex-husband’s ruthless divorce attorney, there, she might have chosen differently. This was the man who enabled her ex to do such hefty damage. Parker says he was just doing his job; nothing personal. But beneath their antagonism toward each other is an attraction that’s impossible for them to resist. As they get to know each other better, Mara begins to realize Parker has many qualities that make him more than just the no-strings fling they’ve embarked on.

Adelaide Song has shed her teenage party girl ways, has a freshly minted MBA, and is ready to take the world of fashion design by storm at Hansol Incorporated — if only she can convince her family to let her. She enlists the help of the firm’s PR hottie Michael Reynolds, who just happens to have been her childhood crush and her brother’s best friend. Together they work on a plan to wow her way into the executive suite. As their connection grows, the chemistry is undeniable, but Adelaide has a lot to prove — including the maturity to keep it strictly business. If only her heart doesn’t get in the way.

Readers rejoice: It’s the most wonderful time of the year for book lovers — pandemic notwithstanding.

In fact, this year promises an even deeper bounty than usual, given publishers’ shuffling of release dates due to the novel coronavirus.

“Beautiful Ruins” author Jess Walter will release what appears to be another page-turner with “The Cold Millions.” Marilynne Robinson is back with “Jack,” a new installment in her “Gilead” novels. And Phil Klay, who won the 2014 National Book Award for his story collection “Redeployment,” is publishing his debut novel, “Missionaries.”

Read on for more best bets, presented in order of publication date. We can’t possibly get to them all, but given the strange way time bends these days, we hope you will.

Nonfiction

Nonfiction

‘Just Us: An American Conversation’ by Claudia Rankine

In “Just Us,” Claudia Rankine continues the urgent conversation about race she started with her National Book Award-winning poetry collection “Citizen: An American Lyric.” By combining poetry, essay, visual elements and other forms, Rankine finds language to excavate this nation’s deepest hurt. (Graywolf, 352 pages, $30, out now)

‘Zorro’s Shadow: How a Mexican Legend Became America’s First Superhero’ by Stephen J.C. Andes

Historian Stephen J.C. Andes argues the mark of Zorro brands even the most modern American superheroes as he traces the character’s sword-slashing roots to 1919 pulp fiction. Andes aims to reclaim the character’s Latinx roots as an avenger in Old Spanish California. (Chicago Review, 304 pages, $18.99, out now)

‘His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life’ by Jonathan Alter

Jonathan Alter offers a sweeping biography of 95-year-old Jimmy Carter, from his farm-boy childhood in the 1920s through his single-term presidency and his innovative post-presidency as a champion for human rights. The biography promises to “change our understanding of perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history” — and one whose decency stands out in today’s political climate. (Simon & Schuster, 800 pages, $37.50, Sept. 29)

‘How to Write One Song: Loving the Things We Create and How They Love Us Back’ by Jeff Tweedy

Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy offers a primer on the creative promise of songwriting. It works to both demystify the process of divining song, lyrics and the process of putting the two together while observing the wonder and joy in human artistic endeavor. (Dutton, 176 pages, $23, Oct. 13)

‘White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America’s Racist History’ by Jane Dailey

Jane Dailey asserts that fear of interracial sex drove white supremacists to fight against civil rights for Black Americans. The book explores how anxiety surrounding sexuality influenced racial violence between Reconstruction and the U.S. Supreme Court’s verdict in Loving v. Virginia, which finally struck down bans on interracial marriage. (Basic, 368 pages, $30, Nov. 17)

‘One Life’ by Megan Rapinoe

Soccer star Megan Rapinoe’s book publishes the Tuesday after the 2020 U.S. presidential election, but it’s teased as “a thoughtful and unapologetic discussion of social justice and politics.” Rapinoe, an Olympic gold medalist and two-time World Cup champion, was raised in a conservative Northern California town but has since become an outspoken advocate for equal pay for women, LGBTQ rights and racial equality. (Penguin, 240 pages, $27, Nov. 10)

Fiction

And here are six more paperbacks worth checking out.