O Magazine's Fall Reading List
This fall brings dark (and delicious) books, from a stunning new mystery that explores the persistence of the past, to a postapocalyptic novel that wonders what happens to those left behind.
O, The Oprah Magazine | August 12, 2011
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Joan Didion
208 pages
Blue Nights does what memoirs can do best: illuminate a crucial portionand not the entiretyof a human life. In this case, prose master Joan Didion focuses on her relationship with her daughter, Quintana Roo, who she adopted in the late 1960s.
Diana Abu-Jaber
362 pages
A family confronts its secrets and lies.
Kathleen Sharp
432 pages
A true legal drama featuring the attorney who took on carcinogen-dumping corporations in 1996's A Civil Action; this time he's going after a pharmaceutical giant peddling a deadly drug.
Elissa Schappell
304 pages
These smart and provocative linked stories are as recognizable as a friend but constantly surprising.
Aravind Adiga
A ruthless real estate mogul in booming modern-day Mumbai clashes with the one man who dares to stand between him and his ambition.
Emmanuel Carrere
256 pages
While Lives Other Than My Own (Metropolitan) might have been just another "why me?" memoir, it is, in the French novelist and biographer's hands, a wise study of the roots and rewards of altruism.
Helen Oyeyemi
336 pages
In a make-believe world of talking animals and courtly love, you might expect a dastardly plot or two. But as Helen Oyeyemi's vibrant novel Mr. Fox (Riverhead) makes clear, even pretend danger can be dangerous.
Lucette Lagnado
352 pages
A memoir by a young woman who had to learn to leave the past behind.
Michael Ondaatje
288 pages
In this nostalgic, seagoing adventure story, a boy crosses from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to England without the burden of parental supervision.
Alice Hoffman
512 pages
The lives of four bold, sensuous, and magical Jewish women in ancient Judea intersect when their desert community is attacked by Roman soldiers.
Anne Enright
263 pages
Casting aside cultural bromides about the immorality of affairs, Enright puts us squarely in the center of a terrible truth: Love can be miraculous—and still destroy everything in its path.
Jeffrey Eugenides
416 pages
It's the Reagan years, and the hypereducated students at Brown University in Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot (FSG) are hungry for revolutionary ideas to replace the "wholesome, patriotic" values of their parents' generation.
Theresa Weir
240 pages
What do those perfectly round, shiny red apples really cost? This poignant memoir of love, labor, and dangerous pesticides reveals the terrible true price.
Iris Krasnow
288 pages
"Boyfriends with boundaries," separate summers, and other therapeutic strategies for maintaining wedded bliss over the long haul.
Hillary Jordan
352 pages
With a nod to The Scarlet Letter, this chilling futuristic novel is set in a punitive society where a convict's skin is color-coded according to her crime. Our heroine gets red, for murder.
Laura Lippman
352 pages
You may not want to go home again, but sometimes you have no choice.
Julie Otsuka
144 pages
Think America is full of promise? These women had to think again.
Tom Perrotta
368 pages
The suburban American dream run amok.
Kevin Wilson
320 pages
What can you say for a novel about performance artists that begins "Mr. and Mrs. Fang called it art. Their children called it mischief"? That it reads like a cross between The Addams Family and Arrested Development. That it's totally weird, and pretty wonderful. Most of all, that it manages to be brainy without sacrificing heart.
Justin Torres
144 pages
Mayhem en route to manhood.
Chad Harbach
528 pages
Lessons number one, two, and three: You can't win 'em all.
Vanessa Diffenbaugh
336 pages
A young woman blossoms under loving care.
Jesmyn Ward
272 pages
Esch Batiste is the only female in the Pit, a hardscrabble patch of bayou country she has shared with her father and three brothers since their mother died in childbirth.
Amy Waldman
320 pages
In this of-the-moment novel, anger erupts when a jury unwittingly chooses an American Muslim architect to design a memorial to victims of 9/11.
Alexandra Fuller
256 pages
Fuller celebrates her mother's unconventional life in Africa with a book that's both prequel and sequel to her acclaimed memoir Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight.
Maxine Swann
272 pages
The city of Buenos Aires dazzles in this novel about three women who find sex, adventure, and more sex in the Paris of South America.
Kristen Wolf
368 pages
What if Jesus were a tomboy named Anna living with a secret society of women in the desert? Impossible? This imaginative novel may make you a believer.
Erin Morgenstern
528 pages
The newest in a list of popular historical circus novels centers on two gifted young magicians who go from being rivals to lovers, despite the disapproval of their controlling mentors.
Miriam Toews
272 pages
In this poignant novel set in an insular Mennonite enclave in Mexico, a young woman, cast out by her family, gets her first taste of the wider world when a film crew comes to town.
Julian Guthrie
288 pages
An inspiring true story set in the 1990s tells how a Catholic congregation in San Francisco, including its anti-Establishment priest, worked together to save their church—from the Church.
Julie Salamon
480 pages
Playwright Wendy Wasserstein lived creatively, died young, and left an impressive body of work. This exhaustive biography reveals her public triumphs and private heartaches.
Erica Heller
288 pages
What was it like to grow up the daughter of author Joseph Heller? This memoir suggests it was a catch-22.
Patricia Marx
256 pages
A funny boy-meets-girl novel in witty, quick bits that read like your best friend's best tweets.
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Printed from Oprah.com on Tuesday, May 21, 2013
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