The Ultimate Fall 2018 Books Preview

School has started, the weather has cooled, and we’re officially in fall reading season. But with all the reading lists and recommendations flying around, it can be hard to figure out which of the many so-called must-reads you actually, well, must read. Not to worry: I’ve got you covered. Rather than just give you my own recommendations, I thought I would survey the internet to see if some kind of consensus would emerge.

To put this list together, I collated 20 fall previews from various online publications, large and small, to see which books were most frequently recommended by critics. I tracked a total of 280 recommended books, but only included those with at least two mentions among the 20 lists. In the end, the top recommended books are a mix of big-name standbys and buzzy new writers—to no one’s surprise, heavy-hitter and book club favorite Barbara Kingsolver leads the pack, but while the second tier is also fairly predictable, with books by Michelle Obama, Haruki Murakami, and Susan Orlean, it also includes Nicole Chung’s debut memoir. And things get more interesting the further down the list you go, so with that, I’ll leave you to it.

13 recommendations:
Barbara Kingsolver, Unsheltered

11 recommendations:
Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know
Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen, Killing Commendatore
Michelle Obama, Becoming
Susan Orlean, The Library Book

10 recommendations:
Kate Atkinson, Transcription

9 recommendations:
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black
Kiese Laymon, Heavy
Gary Shteyngart, Lake Success

7 recommendations:
Lucia Berlin, Evening in Paradise
Jonathan Lethem, The Feral Detective
Sarah Weinman, The Real Lolita
Kathy Wang, Family Trust

6 recommendations:
Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, the Serial Killer
Esi Edugyan, Washington Black
Tana French, The Witch Elm
Wayétu Moore, She Would Be King

5 recommendations:
Chaya Bhuvaneswar, White Dancing Elephants
Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Small Fry
Merve Emre, The Personality Brokers
Nuruddin Farah, North of Dawn
Sally Field, In Pieces
Claire Fuller, Bitter Orange
Lydia Kiesling, The Golden State
Olivia Laing, Crudo
Jill Lepore, These Truths
Liane Moriarty, Nine Perfect Strangers
Samuel Park, The Caregiver
Sarah Smarsh, Heartland
Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk

4 recommendations:
Elliot Ackerman, Waiting for Eden
Edward Carey, Little
Deborah Eisenberg, Your Duck is My Duck
Leif Enger, Virgil Wander
Therese Anne Fowler, A Well-Behaved Woman
Jonathan Franzen, The End of the End of the Earth
Abby Geni, The Wildlands
Casey Gerald, There Will Be No Miracles Here
Jasmine Guillory, The Proposal
Stephen King, Elevation
Yukiko Motoya, tr. Asa Yoneda, The Lonesome Bodybuilder
Idra Novey, Those Who Knew
Sarah Perry, Melmoth
Jodi Picoult, A Spark of Light
Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived
Rebecca Serle, The Dinner List
Sharlene Teo, Ponti
Colm Tóibín, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know
Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad
Reese Witherspoon, Whiskey in a Teacup
Bob Woodward, Fear

3 recommendations:
Katya Apekina, The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish
Andre Dubus III, Gone So Long
Diana Evans, Ordinary People
Liana Finck, Passing for Human
Lisa Gabriele, The Winters
Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken, My Struggle, Book 6
Anne Lamott, Almost Everything
Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor
DeRay Mckesson, On the Other Side of Freedom
Brian Phillips, Impossible Owls
Phoebe Robinson, Everything’s Trash, but It’s Okay
Helen Schulman, Come With Me
Nicolas Sparks, Every Breath
May-Lan Tan, Things to Make and Break
Natasha Trethewey, Monument
Neil deGrasse Tyson and Avis Lang, Accessory to War
Markus Zusak, Bridge of Clay

2 recommendations:
Camille Acker, Training School for Negro Girls
Laura Adamczyk, Hardly Children
Gina Apostol, Insurrecto
Shane Bauer, American Prison
Karen E. Bender, The New Order
David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
Patti Callahan, Becoming Mrs. Lewis
Katrina Carrasco, The Best Bad Things
Lee Child, Past Tense
Michael Connelly, Dark Sacred Night
Patrick DeWitt, French Exit
Claudia Dey, Heartbreaker
Vince Flynn, Red War
Robert Galbraith, Lethal White
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership: In Turbulent Times
Imogen Hermes Gowar, The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock
John Grisham, The Reckoning
Yuval N. Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Charlaine Harris, An Easy Death
Heather Havrilesky, What If This Were Enough?
Elin Hilderbrand, Winter in Paradise
Eugenia Kim, The Kinship of Secrets
Maxwell King, The Good Neighbor
Ursula K. Le Guin, So Far So Good
Jane Leavy, The Big Fella
Mark Leibovich, Big Game
Ada Limon, The Carrying
Karina Longworth, Seduction
Jason Lutes, Berlin Book Three
Daniel Mason, The Winter Soldier
Jack Miles, God in the Qur’an
Heather Morris, The Tattooist of Auschwitz
Eileen Myles, Evolution
Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind
Busy Philipps, This Will Only Hurt a Little
Martin Riker, Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return
Cristina Rivera Garza, tr. Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana, The Taiga Syndrome
Alice Robb, Why We Dream
David Small, Home After Dark
Octavio Solis, Retablos
Daniel Torday, BOOMER1
Tina Turner, My Love Story
Juan Gabriel Vásquez, tr. Anne McClean, The Shape of the Ruins
Eric Vuillard, tr. Mark Polizzotti, The Order of the Day
R. J. Young, Let it Bang

Full list of publications surveyed:

“Fall preview: the 20 books you need to read this season” (EW); “The 21 Books You’ll Want to Read This Fall” (NYLON); “17 New Books You Won’t Want to Miss This Fall” (Vogue); “60 New Books to Read This Fall” (Vulture); “Here Are 34 Fall 2018 Books We Can’t Wait to Read” (HuffPost); “These Are The Best Books of Fall 2018” (BuzzFeed News); “The Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2018” (Publishers Weekly); “What books to read this fall” (The Washington Post); “23 hot picks for cool fall books” (Boston Globe); “12 best new books to read this fall” (Newsday); “Fall 2018 Books We’re Excited to Read” (Southern Living); “Fall Books Preview 2018” (USA Today); “Don’t miss these 10 fall books” (Chicago Tribune); “The Top 20 Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2018” (Parade); “The Most Anticipated Books of Fall” (Omnivoracious); “17 new books to seek out in fall 2018” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel); “The 28 Best New Books to Curl Up With This Fall” (POPSUGAR); “The Great Second-Half 2018 Book Preview” (The Millions); “The Best Books of Fall 2018” (People); “The Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2018 That Are Actually Worth Your Time” (MyDomaine)