THIS SEASON'S SLEEPER
REAMDE
By Neal Stephenson, 9/20
Stephenson is famous for epics about technology and information flow, but this is a slightly different animal: a spy thriller. It begins when an online game transmits a virus to a Russian gangster's computer, and it snowballs until an international handful of hackers are chasing a murderous terrorist around the globe.
BOOMERANG: TRAVELS IN THE NEW THIRD WORLD
By Michael Lewis, 10/3
Practicing a kind of financial-disaster tourism, Lewis travels from country to country during the great cheap-credit epidemic of 2002--08, giving vastly entertaining chalk talks about exactly why everything went to hell where and when it did. Then he brings it all back home and gives us a fresh perspective on our own financial mess.
THE STRANGER'S CHILD
By Alan Hollinghurst, 10/11
Hollinghurst won the Booker Prize in 2004 for The Line of Beauty, and the buzz is running hot for his new novel, which sprawls across a century of life in England. George, a Cambridge undergraduate, and his sister Daphne both fall for George's school chum Cecil, a poet who is killed in World War I. But his poetry lives on, and Hollinghurst's novel follows the evolution of Cecil's posthumous literary reputation, using it to reveal the complex love story that unfurled at the beginning.
ZONE ONE
By Colson Whitehead, 10/18
Life in postapocalyptic America is a mixture of horror and tedium. Our hero, a survivor of a plague that turns humans into zombies, does the day-to-day work of clearing Zone One--previously known as lower Manhattan--of infected stragglers. Whitehead uses the tropes of classic George Romero--style zombie movies to reflect on millennial disasters like Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina.
1Q84
By Haruki Murakami, 10/25
Originally published in three volumes in Japan, Murakami's novel takes place in an alternate-history 1984 (the title is a play on Orwell's 1984) and concerns the enigmatic, eerily evocative stories of a woman named Aomame, who commits a series of cold-blooded murders, and Tengo, a disaffected (and recognizably Murakamian) young math teacher.
PULPHEAD
By John Jeremiah Sullivan, 10/25
Sullivan's essays have won two National Magazine Awards, and here his omnivorous intellect analyzes Michael Jackson, Christian rock, post-Katrina New Orleans, Axl Rose and the obscure 19th century naturalist Constantine Rafinesque. His compulsive honesty and wildly intelligent prose recall the work of American masters of New Journalism like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe.
INFERNO: THE WORLD AT WAR, 1939--1945
By Max Hastings, 11/1
The catastrophe of World War II was so vast that it's virtually impossible to take in the big picture. Instead, Hastings looks at the small one. Inferno is built from first-person details, culled from a staggering collection of letters, journals and other eyewitness documents. Each is indelible. Consider this: after a battle at Rzhev in the terrible winter of 1942, a German officer strolling through the battlefield reported that "the hard frozen bodies clinked like porcelain."