This Season’s Most Anticipated Books, With Just a Few Spoilers

Gun Island
A novel by Amitav Ghosh

From the book:

As with hieroglyphs, some symbols and motifs recurred again and again, in different combinations. The most prominent of these were a couple of turbaned figures, each paired with a distinctive symbol. One of these symbols was easy to decipher: it was an image of the palm of a hand, sheltered by a cobra’s hood.

Deen is living a fairly settled life as a rare books and antiques dealer when, during a visit with his family, he hears a version of a Bengali folk tale that he knew as a child — about a merchant forever running from the goddess of snakes — and ends up taking an epic trip of his own. As he makes his way from Los Angeles to Venice, environmental disasters loom, threatening, along with everything else, his faith in order and logic. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on Sept. 10.

The Memory Police
A novel by Yoko Ogawa (translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder)

From the book:

I’m sure we had things we wanted to say, but it seemed as though something weighed on our chests, preventing the words from coming out the moment we opened our mouths. The flickering flame, visible through the round window in the heater, was bright red.

On an island that, thanks to the machinations of a totalitarian regime, has been made free of everything from perfume to hats to birds — as well as memories of what once was — a novelist turns a crawl space in her home into a secret hideaway for her editor, who has a dangerously firm grasp on the past. Shut away from the world, they work together to preserve a long-ago version of it in writing. Published by Pantheon on Aug. 13.

Love and I
Poems by Fanny Howe

From the book:

Split lips for laughter to be released or songs
or bleats, memories ejected onto canvas or score
or brains where they burned
their impressions in.

In this collection, Howe speculates about beings in transit — what they might be hoping to leave behind in the realm beneath the clouds, even as they grapple with emotional attachments to things that are themselves bound to morph or disappear. The passage above is from a poem called “The Lamb,” in which she reminds us of those either unsure of where to go or unable to move freely. To be published by Graywolf Press on Oct. 1.

Plus, two other books on our radar:

Quichotte
A novel by Salman Rushdie

From the book:

Beauty allied to drive and aggression: still not enough. When you wanted to pitch a restricted drug to board-certified oncologists, you needed to add a raft of additional techniques. Incentives: that was a better word than techniques. A group of additional incentives.

A retelling of Miguel de Cervantes’s classic set in our own upside-down times, “Quichotte” follows an out-of-work salesman who is in love with a television star. He embarks on a road trip (with his imaginary son) to win her heart, encountering guns, racism and a talking cricket along the way — though he and his adventure turn out to be the musings of a middling thriller writer with troubles of his own. Published by Random House on Sept. 3.

Middle England
A novel by Jonathan Coe

From the book:

“I’m so glad that my son has found you,” she said. “His last two girlfriends were not at all suitable — although a mother is bound to say that, of course. I would so love for him to have a steady companion; a life companion. Speaking for myself, I feel the lack of that very keenly, even though it’s — goodness! — more than twenty years since my lovely Graham passed away.”

In the final installment in Coe’s trilogy about Benjamin Trotter and friends, who came of age in England’s West Midlands, the action spans from the financial crash of 2010 to the aftermath of Brexit. As the government teeters and the very notion of Englishness is called into question, politics can’t help but feel deeply personal. Benjamin, for one, heads to the country to finish a very long autobiographical novel. Published by Knopf on Aug. 20.

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