By Hannah Harlow, Co-Owner The Bookshop of Beverly Farms
It’s difficult to capture the many, many new works of nonfiction publishing this fall, but in this round-up I’ve tried to touch on a little something for everyone.
September saw some exciting new nonfiction land. Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari immediately hit the bestseller lists when it published on September 10. An historian and author of Sapiens, Harari now explores how information networks have affected our world, from the Stone Age to our current use of AI.
There are many more veteran authors with new books out in September. On Freedom by Timothy Snyder, whose previous titles include On Tyranny and Our Malady, looks at what freedom is and how it’s been misunderstood—and how we can preserve and fight for it.
Here at the Book Shop, we sold a ton of copies of Sonia Purnell’s A Woman of No Importance, about Virginia Hall, the American spy who helped change the course of World War II, after it published in 2019. Now Purnell is back with The Kingmaker, a rollicking and deeply researched biography of Pamela Churchill Harriman, the British aristocrat whose life intersected with everyone from the Kennedys to the Clintons.
Ben MacIntyre’s previous bestsellers include Agent Sonya, The Spy and the Traitor, and Prisoners of the Castle, among others. Now he’s back with The Siege, an in-depth account of the six days in 1980 when armed gunmen took 26 people hostage at the Iranian embassy in London, and the thrilling rescue that ended the ordeal.
Not to be outdone, October is coming in hot with The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me. In three essays, Coates visits sites of conflict to look at how the stories we tell affect our understanding of the truth. His writing mixes politics and art by looking at extreme injustice while also examining the art we make from it.
We know and love John Grisham for his legal thrillers; now he’s teamed up for a nonfiction book with Jim McCloskey, founder of Centurion Ministries, the first organization in the world devoted to freeing the wrongly convicted, to tell ten harrowing stories of the wrongly convicted in Framed.
Big names in politics love putting out big books in the fall and this year both Hillary and Bill Clinton have offerings. Something Lost, Something Gained by Hillary Rodham Clinton is already on shelves. It includes essays on friendship, 50 years of marriage, memories from her days as Secretary of State, moving past her dream of being President and into her next phase of life. Citizen by Bill Clinton comes out November 19 and details Clinton’s life after the presidency.
Alexei Navalny began writing Patriot shortly after his near-fatal poisoning in 2020. In it, he tells the full story of his life, including never-before-seen correspondence from prison, as well as a call to action to continue the work that cost him his life.
On a lighter note, readers of food memoirs will be delighted to have the first narrative from Ina Garten, Be Ready When the Luck Happens, about her path to authoring thirteen bestselling cookbooks, as well as the lessons she learned along the way. Taste by Stanley Tucci was his hugely popular account of a life working and living with food. Now he’s back with What I Ate in One Year, chronicling a year’s worth of food with his signature wit and style.
Later on in the season, look for The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. The Braiding Sweetgrass author writes a thought-provoking manifesto on how and why we might reorient our current form of capitalism toward a service economy, using the serviceberry as a metaphor. How can we better embrace generosity, gratitude, and abundance for a more equitable world? At just 128 pages, it’s necessary and highly consumable reading.
If you’re having trouble deciding, just pick up all of them and you’ll be set for the long winter.
Hannah Harlow is owner of The Book Shop, an independent bookstore in Beverly Farms. Harlow writes semi-regular recommendations for our readers. See more of what she recommends reading at thecricket.com.
