The Ultimate Fall 2022 Books Preview

A new season begins, and sure as the changing of the leaves, the recommended reading lists follow. And why not? Soon it will be winter, and you’ll need all the books you can get.

For this go-around, I read through a total of 25 lists from 22 outlets, which collectively recommended 354 different books—surely enough to keep the fires burning for a while yet. (Metaphorically, that is.) I then collated the results to figure out which books were most recommended across the literary universe this season. Celeste Ng’s latest, as you’ll see, blows every other book out of the water, though Cormac McCarthy has her beat with his combined number (though as you probably know, he has two connected novels coming out this year, several publications only listed the first one). You’ll find the list of most-listed books—and hopefully something good to read—below.

17 lists:

Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

12 lists:

Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

11 lists:

N.K. Jemisin, The World We Make
Ling Ma, Bliss Montage
George Saunders, Liberation Day

10 lists:

Namwali Serpell, The Furrows

9 lists:

Kate Atkinson, Shrines of Gaiety
Michelle Obama, The Light We Carry
Maggie O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait
Kevin Wilson, Now is Not the Time to Panic

8 lists:

Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You
Andrew Sean Greer, Less Is Lost
Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose
Lynn Steger Strong, Flight

7 lists:

Hua Hsu, Stay True
John Irving, The Last Chairlift
Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

6 lists:

Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
Matthew Perry, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing
Alan Rickman, Madly, Deeply
Kamila Shamsie, Best of Friends

5 lists:

Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves
Bono, Surrender
Stephen King, Fairy Tale
Ian McEwan, Lessons
Lydia Millet, Dinosaurs
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Song of the Cell
Paul Newman, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man
Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
Baek Sehee, tr. Anton Hur, I Want to Die, but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki
Elizabeth Strout, Lucy by the Sea
Alice Wong, Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life

4 lists:

Fredrik Backman, The Winners
Katherine Dunn, Toad
Bob Dylan, The Philosophy of Modern Song
Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man
Adam Hochschild, American Midnight
Elizabeth McCracken, The Hero of this Book
Jon Meacham, And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle
Annie Proulx, Fen, Bog & Swamp
Deanna Raybourn, Killers of a Certain Age
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, On the Rooftop
Dani Shapiro, Signal Fires
Jann S. Wenner, Like a Rolling Stone

3 lists:

Hilton Als, My Pinup
Russell Banks, The Magic Kingdom
Kate Beaton, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
Buzz Bissinger, The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II
S.E. Boyd, The Lemon
Graham Boynton, Wild: The Life of Peter Beard
Blair Braverman, Small Game
Margaret Burnham, By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners
Candice Carty-Williams, People Person
Brandi Collins-Dexter, Black Skinhead
Edward Enninful, A Visible Man
Ross Gay, Inciting Joy
Kerri F. Greenidge, The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family
Jasmine Guillory, Drunk on Love
Ralph Macchio, Waxing On: The Karate Kid and Me
Chelsea Manning, Readme.txt
Ernesto Mestre-Reed, Sacrificio
Richard Osman, The Bullet That Missed
David Quammen, Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus
Gwendoline Riley, My Phantoms
Jerry Saltz, Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night
Prince Shakur, When They Tell You to Be Good
Adam Silvera, The First to Die at the End
Courtney Summers, I’m the Girl
Nina Totenberg, Dinners With Ruth
Laura Warrell, Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm
Ryan Lee Wong, Which Side Are You On
Constance Wu, Making a Scene

*

The list of lists surveyed:

Kirkus’s 150 Most Anticipated Books of the Fall • Esquire’s The Best Books of Fall 2022 • TIME’s The 33 Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2022 • The New York Times’s 33 Works of Fiction and Poetry Coming This Fall, 15 Works of Nonfiction to Read This Fall, and 15 Memoirs and Biographies to Read This Fall • The Los Angeles Times’s 30 Books We Can’t Wait For This Fall • BookPage’s Fall 2022 Preview: Most Anticipated Fiction and Most Anticipated Nonfiction • Good Housekeeping’s 15 Best Fall Books of 2022 You Have to Read This Season • The Boston Globe’s Here are the 20 new books we’re most excited to read this fall • USA Today’s 20 fall books we can’t wait to read • The New York Post’s These are the 28 books you’ll want to read this fall • Cosmopolitan’s 17 Best Fall 2022 Books That You Won’t Be Able to Put Down • BuzzFeed News’s 35 New Books You Won’t Be Able To Put Down • The Houston Chronicle’s Here are fall’s most-anticipated books • The Chicago Tribune’s Books for fall 2022: Our 65 titles for the season • AARP’s 45 of Fall’s Best New Books • BookRiot’s 30 of the Buzziest, Best Fall Books of 2022 • The Observer’s Fall Arts Preview 2022: Books • Town & Country’s The 45 Must-Read Books of Fall 2022 • Shereads’s Best Books Coming in Fall 2022 • Vogue’s The Best Books to Read This Fall • The Orange County Register’s 17 books coming in fall 2022 • The Week’s 9 books to read this fall.