Big Books of the Fall
The fall season gets into gear next week with the release of David Mitchell’s Bone Clocks, (Random House; Recorded Books) A profile of the author in today’s NYT notes, “Mr. Mitchell has evolved from being a cult author with a small but rabid fan base to a major literary figure whose work has been compared to that of Nabokov, Pynchon and Dostoyevsky.”
The #1 IndieNext title for September, it rose to #153 (from #296) as a result.
Over 600 pages long, it’s a big book in more ways than one and competes for serious review attention, as well as readers’ time, with another 600-plus-page, very different novel, We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas, (S&S; S&S Audio). Released two weeks ago, this debut has heavier holds than Mitchell’s book and is now at #74 on Amazon. It’s received a string of laudatory reviews, beginning with Entertainment Weekly and continuing with the NYT‘s Janet Maslin, the L.A. Times‘s David Ulin, and USA Today. The New Yorker uses it a springboard to “reassess the burgeoning genre” of books about Alzheimer’s, beginning with Still Alice by Lisa Genova. and giving the highest marks to “Thomas’s realist epic [because it] … exceeds the usual boundaries of fiction on the subject [and] offer the truest and most harrowing account of a descent into dementia …”