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BLUE NIGHTS
By Joan Didion, 11/4
In 2007, Didion, one of America's great cultural observers, published The Year of Magical Thinking, about the death of her husband and the grief that followed. Shortly before it was published, her only daughter Quintana Roo died as well. Blue Nights is Didion's meditation on her daughter's too-brief life, their complex relationship and her own old age.
11/22/63
By Stephen King, 11/8
Jake, an English teacher in Maine, discovers a portal in a friend's diner that leads back to the year 1958--the age of Elvis--where Jake can try to avert President Kennedy's murder (the date of his assassination gives the novel its title). In the process, Jake stumbles into a romance with a lovely librarian.
INHERITANCE
By Christopher Paolini, 11/8
Eragon, the first book in Paolini's epic Inheritance Cycle, was published almost a decade ago. A bona fide literary wunderkind, Paolini began writing it when he was only 15. Nobody yet knows the details of this fourth and final volume, but look for the hero Eragon and his dragon Saphira to defeat the mad king Galbatorix and free the country of Alagaësia from his malevolent reign.
At Last! Books we hope will be worth the wait
7 years, 4 months
Lily Tuck
I MARRIED YOU FOR HAPPINESS
Tuck, whose last novel, The News from Paraguay, won the 2004 National Book Award, begins her new one with the death of Philip, a famous mathematician. Sitting by his body, his wife Nina spreads out the shards of their marriage in her mind--the happy memories and the awful ones, the fights and sex and secrets and betrayals--and tries to piece them together. 9/6
9 years, 1 month
Jeffrey Eugenides
THE MARRIAGE PLOT
Studying English at Brown in the 1980s meant immersion in the deconstructed universe of Derrida. But not for Madeleine, whose taste still runs to Jane Austen and George Eliot. In his first novel since 2002's Middlesex, Eugenides asks if Madeleine's faith in the traditional marriage plot can survive poststructuralist theory--or a love triangle with two fellow students. 10/11
12 years, 9 months
Susan Orlean
RIN TIN TIN
This is Orleans' first book-length project since The Orchid Thief in 1998, and she's found another rich and remarkable subject. The original Rin Tin Tin was a puppy adopted on a WW I battlefield by a passing GI. The soldier brought his dog to Hollywood and--by dint of inhuman persistence and near implausible events--made him into a canine king of all media. 9/27