Fall reads
Fall books: 10 surefire hits coming your way
Martin Levin
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published
Last updated
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The Cat’s Table
By Michael Ondaatje (McClelland & Stewart)
A new novel by Michael Ondaatje is always an event. When The Cat’s Table is published in two weeks, expect to see his visage everywhere, plus much talk of Gillers and other glittering prizes. Judging by the excerpt in a recent New Yorker, the hype will not be unwarranted. The novel, set in the early 1950s, follows an 11-year-old Ceylonese boy on a ship bound for England. As it makes its way through the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, his life becomes entangled with a cast of eccentrics and unwanteds. A novel about journeys more than arrivals.
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The Better Angels of Our Nature
Why Violence Has Declined, by Steven Pinker (Viking)
With his telegenic flowing locks and hyper-articulateness, Canadian Steven Pinker is the rock star of evolutionary psychology. He’s also on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. The self-assured Pinker burst into public awareness with the massive How the Mind Works, a Pulitzer Prize finalist that tracked an evolutionary origin for human behaviours. His new book counterintuitively argues that human violence has been on the wane for millennia, which could only have happened had human nature evolved. Sure to be much debated.
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Boomerang
Travels in the New Third World, by Michael Lewis (Norton)
This could also be called The Book of Bubbles. Michael Lewis – acclaimed author of Moneyball, Liar’s Poker and The Big Short – casts a gimlet eye on the endless economic follies of mankind. Lewis journeys around to world to discover why Iceland thought it could be a nation of bankers and not fishers, or why the Greeks thought the cash supply was so endless they could fail to collect taxes and have people retire at 50 on more than full pensions. Promises to be funny, angering and even tragic.
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Here Comes Trouble
Stories from My Life, by Michael Moore (Grand Central)
The cover features a slightly pudgy, yellow-capped toddler with a slightly mischievous expression pedalling some tricycle-like contraption. That’s Michael Moore all over. Moore’s confrontational assault on the bastions of authority is wildly cheered by some and annoys others. His new book is a little different. Moore describes it as an anti-memoir, a selection of 20 vignettes that, together, make up an irreverent life, from Moore’s founding an underground newspaper in Grade 4 to his learning how to perform his own exorcism.
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The Night Circus
By Erin Morgenstern (Doubleday)
This debut novel was this the talk of BookExpo America this year. It has already sold into more than 20 countries, acquired a film deal and has a huge first printing. U.S. writer Erin Morgenstern, who describes all her work as “fairy tales in one way or another,” has written a love story about duelling magicians, set in an enchanted circus – Le Cirque des Rêves – in the 19th century. Is the circus a garden of delights, or something more sinister, as in Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes?
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A Good Man
By Guy Vanderhaeghe (McClelland & Stewart)
This third of Guy Vanderhaeghe’s novels to be set on the Canada-U.S. Borderlands in the late 19th century – following The Englishman’s Boy and The Last Crossing – is the Saskatchewan writer’s first novel in nine years. Like its predecessors in what might have been called the Border Trilogy had Cormac McCarthy not already claimed that, it mixes fictional and real characters in a sweeping portrait of the end of an era and of the people caught up in a changing social order.
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The Little Shadows
By Marina Endicott (Doubleday Canada)
Marina Endicott didn’t come quite out of nowhere when her second novel, Good to a Fault, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book and was short-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She was a well-known actor and playwright before. And that world is the setting of her new novel, a vaudeville tale of the three Avery sisters, who begin as a singing act after their father’s untimely death and navigate their way to artistic adulthood through the shadowy shoals of showbiz.
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1Q84
By Haruki Murakami (Doubleday Canada)
When this massive work – more than 1,000 pages – was published in Japan, there were Harry Potter-like crushes at bookstores. More than a million copies sold in the first week. We don’t quite expect that for the English translation, but there is a lot of buzz building for this extended, very extended, riff on George Orwell’s 1984. Expect surrealism, mysterious characters and liberal doses of cult religiosity as well as quotidian matters of family and love. In short, expect miracles.
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Civilization
The West and the Rest, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press)
Dedicated to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali provocateuse, Civilization is the latest tome from Niall Ferguson, an early wunderkind of history writing and now a leading conservative historian. In this epic tale, he adduces six “apps” that enabled the West to rise to dominance: science, law, competition, the work ethic, consumerism and modern medicine. That dominance is now threatened by the rest of the world adopting the six-step program while the West loses its way.
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DarkMarket
Cyberthieves, Cybercops, and You, by Misha Glenny (House of Anansi)
Nobody writes more compellingly about contemporary international crime than the author of McMafia. Misha Glenny combines a terrific pace with the best journalistic practice and stylish writing. Here, he shakes any complacency left among the denizens of Digitalworld by trawling the globe in search of the crooks, cops and geeks engaged in an ever-morphing war involving cybercrime, cyberwarfare and cyberespionage, industrial-style. Illuminating and terrifying.
