The Ultimate Fall 2019 Books Preview

Fall always feels like a time of possibility: new school year, new wardrobe, new weather patterns, and of course: lots of brand new books. The literary season tends to be packed with big name authors, and this year is no different—but one can’t read everything, so how’s a newly-booted bookworm to choose? Well, you could poll all of your friends and get their recommendations—or you could succumb to your introversion (you know you want to) and simply poll the internet.

To create this list, I read fall previews from a total of 24 sources to figure out which books were most frequently recommended (or anticipated, as it were): Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, Pacific Standard, Marie Claire, Parade, SheReads, Autostraddle, The Week, Shondaland, BuzzFeed News, WWD, People, Chicago Tribune, Woman’s Day, Vogue, Kirkus (fiction and nonfiction), Popsugar, Good Housekeeping, Alma, TIME, NYLON, Goodreads, Bustle, and BookPage. I counted 281 books in total; 61 were recommended 3 or more times.

So now, with all that math behind me, these are the most recommended books of the season:

17 recommendations:
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

14 recommendations:
André Aciman, Find Me
Margaret Atwood, The Testaments
Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives
Ann Patchett, The Dutch House
Zadie Smith, Grand Union: Stories
Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

12 recommendations:
Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn
Carmen Maria Machado, In The Dream House

11 recommendations:
Elizabeth Strout, Olive, Again

10 recommendations:
Jami Attenberg, All This Could Be Yours

9 recommendations:
Stephen King, The Institute
Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

7 recommendations:
Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House
Alice Hoffman, The World That We Knew
Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

6 recommendations:
Stephen Chbosky, Imaginary Friend
Ben Lerner, The Topeka School
Attica Locke, Heaven, My Home
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, The Revisioners
Jenny Slate, Little Weirds
Ali Wong, Dear Girls

5 recommendations:
Adrienne Brodeur, Wild Game
Steph Cha, Your House Will Pay
Carolina De Robertis, Cantoras
Jaquira Diaz, Ordinary Girls
Talia Hibbert, Get a Life, Chloe Brown
Christina Lauren, Twice in a Blue Moon
Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept
Jeannie Vanasco, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl
David Yoon, Frankly in Love

4 recommendations:
Hanif Abdurraqib, A Fortune for Your Disaster
Tracy Chevalier, A Single Thread
Angie Cruz, Dominicana
Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers
Debbie Harry, Face It
Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey, She Said
Jasmine Guillory, Royal Holiday
Jojo Moyes, The Giver of Stars
Megan Phelps-Roper, Unfollow
Gabby Rivera, Juliet Takes a Breath
Jonathan Van Ness, Over the Top
Lindy West, The Witches Are Coming
Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here

3 recommendations:
Tomi Adeyemi, Children of Virtue and Vengeance
Jokha Alharthi, tr. Marilyn Booth, Celestial Bodies
Jesse Ball, The Divers’ Game
Amber Cowie, Raven Lane
Lilly Dancyger, ed., Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger
Emma Donoghue, Akin
Akwaeke Emezi, Pet
Etgar Keret, Fly Already
John Le Carré, Agent Running in the Field
Mhairi McFarlane, Don’t You Forget About Me
Barbara Natterson-Horoqitz and Kathryn Bowers, Wildhood
Dina Nayeri, The Ungrateful Refugee
Morgan Parker, Who Put This Song On?
Tommy Pico, Feed
Shannon Pufahl, On Swift Horses
Rainbow Rowell, Wayward Son
Salman Rushdie, Quichotte