Before the onslaught: reading for Autumn

The finest slither in the publishing calendar, Autumn bridges the gap between lightweight beach reads and the conveyor belt of ghostwritten celebrity bilge that threatens to ruin every Christmas. The following are all you need to sustain you until November when the first of seven Lewis Hamilton biographies will finally reveal what he’s been up to for his first 21 years.

Book groups up and down the land rejoice; Alice Sebold is back. The writer of the Lovely Bones (an Oprah-approved novel narrated from heaven by a murdered girl) returns with the Almost Moon. Opening with matricide, family secrets spill out in another mix of murder and mawkish sentimentality.

One national treasure takes on another as Alan Bennett writes a novel about the Queen, or more specifically her literary habits in An Uncommon Reader. Her Majesty is best known for liking Dick Francis thrillers but here Bennett portrays her as a woman in love with Proust and Genet. From a chance look in a mobile library Elizabeth becomes a raging bibliophile, to the detriment of her public duties.

For a rather less cosy take on a British figurehead, Robert Harris ends his friendship with Tony Blair once and for all with The Ghost. A recently-retired British PM is trying to make sense of his time in office and justify his decisions as he writes his memoirs (or at least have them written for him).

Another British author, Jonathan Coe, best known for his satires of the 70s and 80s in The Rotters’ Club and What A Carve Up respectively, enters new territory with his eight novel, The Rain Before It Falls. In a set up not far from an Anne Tyler novel, a grandmother lies dying, ready to unravel fifty years worth of secrets and lies. Some hardcore fans aren’t convinced about Coe’s latest but it should open him up to new audiences.

Another swooping, generation-spanning novel comes from highly acclaimed (in his native America at least) writer Denis Johnson. Tree of Smoke revisits Vietnam, through the eyes of CIA operative Skip Sands. Opening the day after Kennedy was shot, the book follows Sands for seven years and 614 pages. While the ‘Nam myth can leave Britain cold, the real strength of Tree of Smoke is in the writing which dazzles, bewilders and overwhelms.

As the Internet buzzes with rumours of his demise, Fidel Castro aims to put the record straight. Behind the dull title the book, My Life tells of Fidel’s assumption of power, his relationship with Che Guevara and the Bay of Pigs. His turbulent relationship with the United States also comes in for scrutiny, including those alleged 638 assassination attempts by the CIA. Spooled together from interviews with famed Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramonet, the book isn’t mere hagiography; Castro is challenged on human right issues and his labour camps for “social deviants”.

Meanwhile, what to do about the children – a subject never far from Dave Eggers’ mind. Having set up a charity promoting reading and writing in New York, he’s got Zadie Smith involved as chief fundraiser. She’s editing the Book of Other People, a short story collection where each story must revolve around a single character. Contributors include David Mitchell, Hari Kunzru and AM Homes. For a collection which benefits precisely no deserving children, Richard “The Sportswriter” Ford follows up his previous anthology of American fiction with the New Granta Book of the American Short Story. A bookshelf-buckling 750 pages it sets the obvious choices (Carver, Cheever etc) with new writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Sherman Alexie and the much-admired ZZ Packer.

From new American writing to classic as Jack Kerouac’s much-started, rarely-finished On The Road is republished in its original form for the book’s 50th anniversary. Subtitled, the Original Scroll (Kerouac wrote the book in a three week burst on 119 feet of paper) new material includes scenes too salacious to include half a century ago.