30 of the Best Fall Fiction Books of 2022 to Cuddle Up With (And Poetry Too)

After Jones’s 1975 debut novel, Corregidora, came out, Toni Morrison, Jones’s editor, declared: “No novel about any Black woman could ever be the same after this.” Jones became a literary darling, until disappearing from the scene for 21 years. She reemerged last year with the epic Palmares, a Pulitzer finalist, and this fall comes The Birdcatcher, a novel in which a gifted sculptor repeatedly tries to kill her husband, as their friend looks on, and intermittently tries to intervene. Brilliant and incendiary, Jones’s pairing of tragedy with dark humor cuts to the bone.

In his first collection of short fiction since 2013’s Tenth of December, one of our most inventive purveyors of the form returns with pitch-perfect, genre-bending stories that stare into the abyss of our national character. From brain-numb captives dramatizing Custer’s Last Stand to a vengeful writer to a boy trapped in a hellish amusement park, Saunders’s characters root around for redemption in the dark, “like stars, or a trio of folks falling from a great height.” An exquisite work from a writer whose reach is galactic.

The cosmic struggle between desires—erotic, aspirational, spiritual—and stone-cold reality arcs through McCarthy's lengthy, Nobel-worthy career. At 89, he’s still riffing, like a jazz virtuoso, on the American Nightmare, Faulkner’s mythmaking, and the cadences of Joyce. McCarthy’s flame burns bright and clear in two new works, his first since The Road, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize and an Oprah Book Club selection: The Passenger, wondrous in its architecture, and a companion piece, Stella Maris, a minimalist, edgy novella. He showcases a carnival of tormented souls, among them a Los Alamos scientist’s grown children—Alicia Western, a suicidal mathematics prodigy, and her older brother Bobby, a former physicist turned salvage diver—as well as a vaudevillian cast of schizophrenic hallucinations, including the emcee, known as the Thalidomide Kid, potty-mouthed, with flippers instead of hands. McCarthy toggles between books and across decades, sketching the contours of a love that dare not say its name. McCarthy’s art is transcendent even as it takes no prisoners, an achievement akin only to the oeuvres of his greatest peers, Toni Morrison and Philip Roth. He will endure.

In linked stories, this radiant debut, longlisted for the National Book Award, charts one Jamaican family’s fate before, during, and mostly after Andrew, a 1992 category 5 hurricane that levels entire Miami neighborhoods. Escoffery offers a master class in technique, twirling gracefully among his characters’ many conflicts and needs. Nevertheless, they persist: through demolished houses, painful divorces, and economic setbacks. In crystalline prose, Escoffery evokes the fluorescent textures of Miami, tapping Caribbean traditions, immigrant aspirations, and familial and communal bonds.

O’Farrell pivots off her award-winning Hamnet with a glittering new novel set in late-Renaissance Italy, amid the opulence and intrigue of dynastic politics. She limns the brief life and mysterious death of the aristocratic Lucrezia de’ Medici (1545-1561), youngest daughter of Cosimo, the Machiavellian Duke of Florence. At the age of 13, Lucrezia is married off to Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, a decade older, fulfilling her father’s wish for an alliance between the two city-states. Amid a winter’s chill, Lucrezia rides with her husband on horseback to a lodge in a secluded forest, appeasing his whim; but at their first dinner in the lodge, she’s struck, like a bolt out of the sky, with the realization that Alfonso wants her dead. O’Farrell shifts between Lucrezia’s final days at the lodge with the duchess’s backstory: She’s a daughter of privilege with a rebellious streak. This barter—a young woman’s future for enhanced prestige—fuels O’Farrell’s tale of yearning and betrayal.

This much we know: On a Delaware beach vacation, 12-year-old Cassandra Williams, nicknamed “Cee,” is swimming with her adored younger brother, Wayne, when the 7-year-old boy flounders among the waves of an incoming tide. They manage to make it to shore, where they collapse; when Cee awakens, there’s a stranger looming over her and no trace of Wayne. From this primal tragedy Serpell, the author of the widely praised The Old Drift, spins a decades-long incantatory dream; the facts change, but the bewildering grief remains the same. She weaves influences from noir masters to canonical authors to visionary filmmakers, most conspicuously Alfred Hitchcock. The Furrows embeds allusions to the director’s films—Strangers on a Train, The Birds, Vertigo—as Cee follows the trail of bread crumbs to her fate.The novel’s title references, in part, a line in Toni Morrison’s Paradise—“Beware the furrow in his brow”—which Serpell has described as “a contested and important sentence," alluding to a debate about God and our all-too-human frailties.

In this unpredictable and propulsive romp of a thriller, after dedicating decades to eliminating the world’s most dangerous offenders, four female professional killers on the precipice of retirement find themselves in their agency’s crosshairs. Almost as maddening, no one can pinpoint the reason. In flashbacks, between thwarting their own assassinations and trying to ferret out why they’ve been targeted, we learn their stories—how this clandestine crew came into being, the challenges they faced, and how their spectacular success was finally turned against them. An inventive and distinctly feminist escapade.

Kate Atkinson’s career is a trajectory unto itself. Her debut novel, Behind the Scenes in a Museum, was a sensation, winning the Whitbread prize and launching an author whose genius for blending commercial concepts with literary panache was—and is—second to none. Her Jackson Brodie series stars a sexy, messed-up Edinburgh detective with more on his mind than cracking cases. Atkinson is best known for her panoramic, astounding sagas, Life After Life and A God in Ruins. And now she’s up to more mischief in her dexterous new novel, Shrines of Gaiety, an homage to the mannered realism of Dickens and Forster. Atkinson delves beneath the underbelly of the Roaring Twenties, when champagne corks popped and garters loosened. The queen of the London nightclub scene, Nellie Coker is both a glamorous impresario and shrewd businesswoman, building an empire on thievery and other crimes while raising six children as heirs to her fortune. But is she a good mother? Her older son unleashes a sequence of hijinks and double-crosses that embody a decadent era. Comedy, tragedy, genre, realism, postmodernism: Atkinson breaks through again and again as she evolves on the page.

A writer’s writer par excellence, McEwan has never shied away from explosive topics; his characters wrangle with unexpected and often murky ethical choices. His dazzling new novel, Lessons, flips the script on “grooming”: In this case, a predatory older woman, Miriam Cornell, initiates a covert, “consensual” sexual relationship with 14-year-old Roland Baines, her piano student, at an English boarding school in 1962. The novel shifts back and forth from Roland’s adolescence to his adulthood, shaped by historical events such as Chernobyl and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and his wife’s abandonment of him and their infant son. Lessons is a tour de force of language but also of ambition: A male writer charts, in consummate detail, the interior world of a male protagonist barely able to keep his chin above a tide of social ferment.

The Appalachian mountains are among the oldest on the planet, but their misty, mystical aura is timeless. Kingsolver’s ravishing ninth novel brilliantly reimagines David Copperfield among the region’s ridges and ravines and steely, poverty-stricken people. The novel’s first lines echo Dickens’s celebrated opening, but in a Southern register: “First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it.” Kingsolver’s hero captures our hearts and minds; his only weapons against the world are a handsome face and a savvy determination to prevail. She guides through the peaks and valleys of a saga whose empathy and gritty realism match the master’s epic.

A pointillist novel cunningly crafted by a writer at the height of her powers. Gil's a handsome, wealthy, laconic white guy who, in the wake of a doomed romance, abandons his life in Manhattan for a “castle” in a normie Phoenix neighborhood, hiking on foot from New York to Arizona. A picture-perfect family (or too perfect?) moves into a glass house next door, gradually drawing him into the dramas of their lives. Millet’s previous novel, A Children’s Bible, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award; here she metes out, in terse, Hemingway-esque paragraphs, a tale of menace and redemption and the wall that divides them like a transparent pane.

This sensual and sensuous debut is a kaleidoscopic character study, a polyphonic riff on the modern-day Casanova from the perspectives of the myriad women in his wake. When charismatic jazz trumpet player Circus Palmer learns that his free-spirited lover Maggie is pregnant, his first instinct is denial. His second is to flee. “I already got a kid barely talks to me,” he tells her; he’s not keen for another. The alternative—that he could do better by both— doesn’t seem realistic. And yet, regret is “the dread that stayed in his gut and grew solid.” Both visceral and finely observed, the novel captures social nuance and emotional wreckage with precision and compassion.

Literary star Celeste Ng’s third novel advances a once unthinkable proposition: Americans racked by insecurity embrace authoritarian solutions. In a time not far in the future, in the wake of economic and political meltdown, discrimination, censorship, and fear run rampant under the guise of “peace-keeping.” As "challenging" books are removed from shelves, and dissidents are wrested from their families, a 12-year-old boy searches for his missing mother, an artist who might hold the key to a better future. With a chilling premise and frequently stunning prose, this dystopian drama is a jolt to the system and a booster of hope.

The singular author of the bestselling Queenie—whose protagonist some dubbed the Black Bridget Jones—returns with a nuanced and endearing family saga featuring a hapless deadbeat dad, Cyril (he drives a shiny gold jeep!), and his five children with multiple baby mamas. One of his kids is the almost-famous social media influencer Dimple Pennington, who, like her four half-siblings, has Daddy issues that lead to a family crisis. Carty-Williams has said the idea for the book emerged from a conversation she had with her eldest half-sister about who would rescue her from trouble if push came to shove. From that chat Dimple sprung. And when she accidentally kills her boyfriend, she must figure out who, among the family members she hasn't seen for 16 years, will come to her rescue. Fresh, funny, poignant—of the moment.

During the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 90s, Cuba placed infected people in sanitariums isolating them from the general population in a bid to prevent the disease from spreading. In Sacrificio, as in life, some deliberately injected themselves with HIV in order to receive regular meals and the relative comfort of institutionalization. Set in a time of upheaval after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mestre-Reed’s protagonist, Rafa, moves from a rural area in Cuba to the capital, where he waits tables at a café owned by his boyfriend Nicolas's mother. Through these characters and their desperation to move their country forward, we witness a complex Cuban history rife with political intrigue and plagued by the long shadow of poverty.

Homes’s first novel in a decade is an all-too-real satire in which antihero the Big Guy responds to the election of Barack Obama by scheming with a group of fellow fat cats to plot how they will reclaim power. Meantime, the Big Guy’s wife rues the life she never got to live, while his daughter learns the hard way that Dad doesn’t know all. A dazzling daredevil of a novel.

Strout’s stalwart, engimatic heroine, Lucy Barton, is back in this gossamer novel set in the early days of the pandemic. As sirens wail across Manhattan, Barton, a writer, and William, her ex-husband and intimate friend, decamp to Maine, hoping to ride out the plague with a minimum of fuss. But as days turn to weeks, she grapples with an unprecedented emotional frailty, reflected in the people around her. A triumph of astute observation and elegant simplicity by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge.

In 2018 Ling Ma’s debut novel, Severance, blazed across the literary firmament, winning that year’s Kirkus Prize for fiction. Her new collection, Bliss Montage, confirms that promise: stories seeded by dreams and mostly drafted during the first year of the pandemic. Dark and experimental, Bliss Montage boldly conjures our zeitgeist. Her men are predatory and irredeemable—among them a violent serial lover and a stable of faceless ex-boyfriends—and her women are both victims and victors, such as a couple of Chinese-American girls rebelling against their mothers’ expectations. Beneath the bleakness there’s a vein of whimsy, as in the mordantly funny “Yeti Lovemaking.” An immersive work from an emerging talent.

Gurnah, the recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature—and the first Black writer to win the award since Toni Morrison in 1993—centers this sweeping epic in Tanzania when the country is under brutal German rule in the early part of the 20th century. And while this is a novel spotlighting the devastation wrought by colonization, it is the intimacy with which Gurnah renders his characters that makes it a heartrending and eye-opening standout.

His lover is a continent away; he’s serving on an awards committee with a nemesis; he’s also broke and on the verge of losing his long-time San Francisco apartment. What’s a 50-year-old queer white minor novelist to do? Hit the road! In the sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Less, Greer’s eponymous Everygay drives cross-country with his pug, Polly, in a sleeper van named Rosina, stumbling into misadventures while traversing the deserts of Arizona, the byways of the South, and an East Coast that’s anything but laid-back, on a search for the father who abandoned him. Assured, comic storytelling at its finest.