The Ultimate Preview: The Most Recommended Books of Fall

Labor Day has come and gone, which means the end of summer Fridays, the unofficial start of Autumn, and our passage into the season of the Big Fall Novel. Everyone has an opinion about which books you should be reading in the months ahead, and recommendations are flying left and right. So where is a discerning reader to start? Well, right here, of course. I looked at 17 fall literary previews from various websites and publications to see which books were being most frequently recommended, and tallied them up below.

Of the 174 books on the whole list, only 66 got more than one recommendation—108 others were mentioned only once. By my count (acknowledging that I may not be aware of how every author on this list identifies), 92 of the 174 books were written or co-authored by female or non-binary writers, and 38 were written by people of color. There are 89 works of fiction (16 of which are story collections) and 75 works of nonfiction, in addition to 8 works of poetry, one “collection of experimental graphic scores,” and one box set of Akira.

All that isn’t particularly surprising (though I’m glad to see the gender balance). But things get pretty interesting if you just look at the top tier. Of the ten most recommended books, only one is by a white man, and that white man is Jeffrey Eugenides. The really ubiquitous books are all women and/or writers of color. Whatever else is going on on this list, that much is good news.

Overall, from the list of 174, a grand total of 62 books came from independent presses. The imprint with the most recommended books was Knopf (11), followed by Little, Brown (8). FSG and Ecco both had 7 nods, and W.W. Norton and HMH were tied with 6 each.

For the record, the previews surveyed were: Vulture’s “44 New Books to Read This Fall“; BuzzFeed’s “28 Exciting New Books You Need to Read This Fall“; BOMB’s “Fall Books Preview“; The Millions’ “Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2017 Book Preview” (starting with September); NYLON’s “Bookstore Employees Share The Fall Books They’re Most Excited For“; Publisher’s Weekly’s “The Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2017“; Elle’s “27 of the Best Books to Read This Fall“; Southern Living’s “Books Coming Out in the Fall That We Can’t Wait to Read“; Today’s “6 Must-Read Books for Fall“; Popsugar’s “The 25 Must-Read Books Hitting Bookshelves This Fall“; EW’s “20 Books to Read This Fall“; The Miami Herald’s “Fall Books You Should Be Reading“; Out’s “15 Essential Books to Read This Fall“; BookPage’s “Most Anticipated Fall Fiction“; SFWeekly’s “Fall Arts 2017: Books“; Huffington Post’s “28 New Fiction Books to Add to Your Must-Read List This Fall“; and The New York Times’s “Book World Hopes for Literary Breakthrough in Fall,” which is just a Fall Books Preview wearing an unflattering outfit.

(Note: a few of these lists originally included books published in August; I trimmed those, because first of all, it’s already September, and second of all, August is not fall, people. I also cut off the list at the end of December, so no 2018 books. At least one list (BOMB, you arty thing) also included non-books, and I cut those too, for clarity of purpose here.)

Now, without further ado, the most popular books of the season:

The Most Recommended Fall Books:

14 mentions:
Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach (October)

12 mentions:
Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (October)
Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere (September)
Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (September)

9 mentions:
Jeffrey Eugenides, Fresh Complaint (October)
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties (October)
James McBride, Five-Carat Soul (September)

8 mentions:
Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God (November)
Nicole Krauss, Forest Dark (September)
Salman Rushdie, The Golden House (September)

7 mentions:
Hillary Clinton, What Happened (September)

5 mentions:
Nathan Englander, Dinner at the Center of the Earth (September)
Tom Hanks, Uncommon Type (October)
Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others (September)

4 mentions:
Myriam Gurba, Mean (November)
John Hodgman, Vacationland (October)
Stephen King and Owen King, Sleeping Beauties: A Novel (September)
John le Carré, A Legacy of Spies (September)
Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour (September)
Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness (October)
Matthew Weiner, Heather, the Totality (November)
Andy Weir, Artemis (November)

3 mentions:
Chantel Acevedo, Living Infinite (September)
Daniel Alarcón, The King Is Always Above the People: Stories (October)
Renee Gladman, Houses of Ravicka (November)
John Green, Turtles All the Way Down (October)
Alice Hoffman, The Rules of Magic (October)
Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban (November)
Josephine Rowe, A Loving, Faithful Animal (September)
Robin Sloan, Sourdough (September)
Matt Taibbi, I Can’t Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street (October)

2 mentions:
Naomi Alderman, The Power (October)
Juli Berwald, Spineless (November)
Joe Biden, Promise Me, Dad (November)
Dan Brown, Origin (October)
Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (September)
Ron Chernow, Grant (October)
Jenny Diski, The Vanishing Princess (December)
Jonathan Eig, Ali: A Life (October)
Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim, Poppies of Iraq (September)
Janet Fitch, The Revolution of Marina M. (November)
Cristina García, Here in Berlin (October)
Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (October)
Stephen Greenblatt, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (September)
Elizabeth Hardwick, The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, ed. Darryl Pinckney (October)
Eleanor Henderson, Twelve-Mile Straight (September)
László Krasznahorkai, The World Goes On (November)
David Lagercrantz, The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye (September)
Nicola Lagioia, Ferocity (October)
Attica Locke, Bluebird, Bluebird (September)
Bill McKibben, Radio Free Vermont (November)
John McPhee, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process (September)
Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (September)
Eileen Myles, Afterglow (a dog memoir) (September)
Annalee Newitz, Autonomous (September)
Andrew O’Hagan, The Secret Life (October)
Alexis Okeowo, A Moonless, Starless Sky (October)
Ross Raisin, A Natural (October)
Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts (October)
Edward St. Aubyn, Dunbar (October)
Lily Tuck, Sisters (September)
Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (October)
Joanna Walsh, Worlds from the Word’s End (September)
Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, The Vietnam War: An Intimate History (September)
Jasmine Warga, Here We Are Now (November)
Alice Waters, Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook (September)

And the rest:

Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (September)
A.R. Ammons, The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons, Vols. 1 & 2 ed. Robert M. West (October)
Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History (September)
M. T. Anderson, Landscape with Invisible Hand (September)
Michael Anzuoni and Lea Bertucci (eds.), The Tonebook (September)
Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (October)
Michael Ausiello, Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Other Four-Letter Words (September)
Nicole Baart, Little Broken Things (November)
Alec Baldwin and Kurt Andersen, You Can’t Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year as President Donald J. Trump (A So-Called Parody) (November)
John Banville, Mrs. Osmond (November)
Martha Batalha, The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao (trans. Eric M.B. Becker) (October)
Robert Bausch, In the Fall They Come Back (December)
Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On (November)
Natasha Boyd, The Indigo Girl (October)
T.C. Boyle, The Relive Box and Other Stories (October)
Julie Cantrell, Perennials (November)
David L. Carlson and Landis Blair, The Hunting Accident: A True Story of Crime and Poetry (September)
Robyn Carr, The Summer That Made Us (September)
Wiley Cash, The Last Ballad (October)
Lee Child, The Midnight Line (November)
Rodrigo Corral, Alex French, and Howie Kahn, Sneakers (October)
Stephen Davis, Gold Dust Woman: A Biography of Stevie Nicks (November)
Ashley Dawson, Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change (October)
Hernan Diaz, In the Distance (October)
Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity (October)
Roddy Doyle, Smile (October)
Anouck Durand, Eternal Friendship (October)
Tongo Eisen-Martin, Heaven Is All Goodbyes (September)
Scott Esposito, The Doubles (September)
Eve L. Ewing, Electric Arches (September)
Anne Fadiman, The Wine Lover’s Daughter (November)
Ana Faris, Unqualified (October)
Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, It Devours! (October)
Ken Follett, A Column of Fire (September)
John Freeman (ed.), Tales of Two Americas (September)
Emily Fridlund, Catapult (October)
David Friend, The Naughty Nineties: The Triumph of the American Libido (September)
Santiago Gamboa, Return to the Dark Valley (trans. Howard Curtis) (September)
Meryl Gordon, Bunny Mellon: The Life of an American Style Legend (September)
Camilla Grudova, The Doll’s Alphabet (October)
Joe Hagan, Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine (October)
Jenna Bush Hager and Barbara Pierce Bush, Sisters First (October)
Garth Risk Hallberg, A Field Guide to the North American Family (October)
Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (November)
George Hawley, Making Sense of the Alt-Right (September)
Elin Hilderbrand, Winter Solstice (October)
Liska Jacobs, Catalina (November)
Andrea Jarrell, I’m the One Who Got Away (September)
Rachel Jeffs, Breaking Free: How I Escaped Polygamy, the FLDS Cult, and My Father, Warren Jeffs (November)
Sorayya Khan, City of Spies (September)
Kapka Kassabova, Border (September)
Rupi Kaur, The Sun and Her Flowers (October)
Christoph Keller and Jan Heller Levi (eds.), We’re On: A June Jordan Reader (September)
Scott Kelly, Endurance (October)
Hannah Kent, The Good People (September)
Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (November)
Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters (December)
David Litt, Thanks, Obama (September)
Peter Manseau, The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost (October)
Simeon Marsalis, As Lie is to Grin (October)
Brendan Mathews, The World of Tomorrow (September)
Mike McClelland, Gay Zoo Day (September)
Mike McCormack, Solar Bones (September)
Marissa Meyer, Renegades (November)
Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf (October)
Guillaume Morissette, The Original Face (October)
Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden, Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby (October)
Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding (eds.), Nasty Women (October)
Elvira Navarro, A Working Woman (October)
Sofi Oksanen, Norma (September)
Olaf Olafsson, One Station Away (December)
Meghan O’Rourke, Sun in Days (September)
Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira: 35th Anniversary Box Set (October)
Ellen Pao, Reset (September)
Nancy Pearl, George and Lizzie (September)
Esther Perel, The State of Affairs (October)
Sarah Perry, After the Eclipse: A Mother’s Murder, a Daughter’s Search (September)
Ricardo Piglia, The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years (November)
Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. 1: 1940–1956 (October)
Ivy Pochoda, Wonder Valley (November)
Philip Pullman, The Book of Dust (October)
Sally Quinn, Finding Magic (September)
Elif Şafak, Three Daughters of Eve (December)
James Salter, Don’t Save Anything (November)
Lauren Sanders, The Book of Love and Hate (September)
Patty Schemel, Hit So Hard (October)
Lynne Segal, Radical Happiness (November)
Maria Sharapova, Unstoppable: My Life So Far (September)
Karen Shepard, Kiss Me Someone (September)
Adam Silvera, They Both Die at the End (September)
Emily Skillings, Fort Not (October)
Danez Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead (September)
Alexander McCall Smith, The House of Unexpected Sisters (November)
Susan Sontag, Debriefing: Collected Stories (November)
Pete Souza, Obama: An Intimate Portrait (November)
Magda Szabó, Katalin Street (September)
Amy Tan, Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir (October)
Tori Telfer, Lady Killers (October)
Madeleine Thien, Dogs at the Perimeter (October)
Marin Thomas, The Future She Left Behind (September)
Ivana Trump, Raising Trump (October)
Katy Tur, Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History (September)
Sam Wasson, Improv Nation: How We Made a Great American Art (December)
Lara Williams, A Selfie as Big as the Ritz (October)
Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (November)
David Yaffe, Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell (October)
Karen Tei Yamashita, Letters to Memory (September)
Lidia Yuknavitch, The Misfit’s Manifesto (October)