Looking for something new to read? Browse our fiction picks for October! Includes titles by Ann Cleeves, Barbara Kingsolver, Elif Shafak and many more.
Want more suggested books? Take a look at our recommendations.
The Late Life
Bernhard Schlink
At seventy-six, Martin is devoted to his family life with his young wife and six-year-old son when he suddenly learns that he has only a few months to live.
Shocked, he searches for answers, wrestling with his feelings and existential questions about his legacy, the meaning of his love and what can be achieved in the short time he has left.
Martin wants to do everything right, but later life is full of surprises and unforeseen challenges that he must face.
Partita
Barbara Kingsolver
Livia Bohusz misses her big brother, Cyrus. But since the day he took his own life, a day that changed everything, eleven-year-old Livia has also known she has no choice but to survive.
Her solace is music. A gifted pianist, Livia’s only escape is the quiet rapture it brings as she practises, so when Livia starts college as a music major and scholarship prodigy, it feels as if a new life might begin. Immersing herself in her passions in a world where she excels, even as she struggles to fit in with more urbane classmates, she glimpses the possibilities of a life beyond the farm and her parents.
Then one springtime, as the smell of reviving grass and crocuses, and the sounds of songbirds fill the air, Livia catches a glimpse of shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, muscles you wouldn’t miss in the rear view: Who is that man? It is a question Livia may come to wish she had never asked.
The Dying Light
Ann Cleeves
Detective Matthew Venn is called to investigate when the body of a young woman is found in the swimming pool of Tide House, a luxurious holiday home in North Devon. The girl’s best friend has disappeared and the property belongs to rising political star Paul Armstrong, leading to intense media scrutiny.
As a scorching heatwave rages and further tragedy strikes, Venn and his team question a community brimming with secrets. The dead girl and her friend had been spotted at a music festival the previous day, an event which brought locals and outsiders together – some of whom may have been more connected with the Armstrong’s than first thought.
Caught between a powerful family’s secrets and a powder keg of local tensions, Venn must navigate a treacherous path – knowing that the real answers lie not in what people say, but in the silence that they keep.
Bad Words
Rioghnach Robinson
When Selina Chan, New York’s fiercest literary critic, slams Parker Navarro’s latest novel, he is pushed to his breaking point.
Once was painful enough. But this time, it’s personal.
What begins as a private feud quickly erupts into a viral online spectacle, captivating a bookish audience who are eager to fan the flames.
But it’s what’s left unsaid that could ruin them both.
As We Fall Through Time
Claire North
When Cal meets a soldier of the French Revolution, he knows his lover is destined to die. But what is the point of being a time traveller if you can’t make a few small tweaks to the course of history? A little paradox here, an alteration there – nothing Cal can’t fix, to save the man he loves.
When Fadimatu walks into a museum in 2018, she stumbles upon her own mummified corpse, setting her on the path to a betrayal that has already killed her, and a murder that has not yet come to pass.
And when a sudden rupture in the fabric of history rips through the lives these travellers have built, breaking both past and future, they must reckon with death foretold, love forsaken, and a secret that will shatter time itself.
Exhumation
Nicholas Binge
Private Investigator Arlo Abbas is broke, between cases, and running out of reasons to get off the couch. Then £10,000 lands in his bank account from a stranger, with a note: Find Sophie Banik. But Sophie Banik is dead. No suspects, no family, the case forgotten.
His investigation pulls him underground through London’s tunnels and into the orbit of an organization whose strange experiments blur the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness, between life and death. Whoever sent the money didn’t just want Arlo to find Sophie. They wanted him to find what she’d discovered.
Now Arlo must decide how deep he’s willing to dig into the case, the conspiracy, and the parts of his past he’s spent years trying to bury. Because he’s starting to suspect Sophie Banik might not be as dead as everyone thinks.
Life Out of Order
Audrey Niffenegger
Alba DeTamble is a time traveller, slipping unpredictably through decades like her father before her. But the hardest thing she carries isn’t the burden of futures she can’t understand, or pasts she cannot change – it’s a secret: she is in love with two different people.
Each of them offers a different life. Zach lives in the present and can’t follow her when she disappears. Oliver can travel through time, just like she can.
As Alba careens from time to time, moving from the riot-torn Chicago streets of her present to the eerie, timeless Yellow House, and into the digital corridors of the Museum of Lost Souls and a flooded future London, she must face a question she can no longer avoid: how is it possible to love, and live a meaningful life, in an increasingly troubled, fractured world?
In One Brief Moment All Eternity
Elif Shafak
Spanning decades and continents, from revolutionary 19th century France to Istanbul, Egypt and Beirut, this is a profound meditation on creativity in times of political crisis and war, asking what literature can hope to offer when the world feels broken.
Building a fascinating bridge between Western prose and Eastern poetry, this story offers a luminous portrait of the life of an iconic writer, Gustave Flaubert, author of ‘Madame Bovary’, told through the lives of the women – both real and fictional – who shaped him.
Sleepers in the Snow
Joanne Harris
Out on the moor, in the snow, a house stands beneath a pylon. It is a house full of memories, and full of old things. And, in the dark, when the pylon sings in the wind, it is a house full of ghosts and fading memories.
The house, Kirkhill, has a new occupant – just moved in, fresh from a bitter divorce and looking for a fresh start. The moor is the perfect place for it: isolated, beautiful in the changing seasons, peaceful, and with just enough of the previous owners belongings that it’s a perfectly self-contained and cosy home.
Only as the nights start to draw in, and the weather takes a turn, so does the house. The cosy isolation becomes menacing, animals begin acting strangely, and it seems someone could be watching the house.
The diaries of the previous owners begin to reveal a terrible tragedy which befell Kirkhill – one which its new occupant may be unable to escape.
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