Meg's Picks: October 2017, part 1

I am always so excited to share my picks with you, readers! Here are some gems coming up next month, from some of my very favorite authors. If you're tired, bored with your usual authors, or feel as though it's been ages since you read something that really captured you, I urge you to try one of these.

Strange Weather, by Joe Hill. In this collection of four short novels, Hill (Horns, The Fireman, etc.) carries on his tradition of describing the darkness just beneath the surface of everyday life. Snapshot is the tale of a Silicon Valley adolescent who finds himself threatened by a thug who owns a camera which can erase memories one snapshot at a time. In Aloft, a young man goes skydiving only to find himself a castaway on a cloud made of impossibly substantial vapor. Rain explores the apocalyptic event of a rain of bright nails from the sky, starting in Boulder, Colorado and spreading around the globe. Finally, Loaded is the story of a heroic mall security guard who stops a mass shooting, only to find his story, and sanity, unraveling under the bright lights of fame that follow. I'm a huge Joe Hill fan, and I'm very much looking forward to this collection.

Manhattan Beach, by Jennifer Egan. Egan's latest (following Look at Me, A Visit from the Goon Squad, etc.) has already been long-listed for the National Book Award for Fiction (A Visit from the Goon Squad has already won her a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction). One day Anna Kerrigan, aged twelve, accompanies her father to visit a man called Dexter Styles. What Anna will take away from this meeting is a strong memory for the ocean waves beyond the house, and the charged mystery between the two men. Years later, Anna's father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna is working at the Brooklyn Naval Yard; with so many men off to war, women are being hired to fill these jobs. When she meets Dexter Styles again, this time in a nightclub, she begins to understand the complexity of her father's life, and the reasons he may have disappeared. This is Egan's first historical novel and it has a distinct noir edge by the sound of things. I expect this to be on the bestsellers' list in short order. Also available in Large Print.

Paris in the Present Tense, by Mark Helprin. Following In Sunlight and In Shadow (2012), Helprin's new novel is set in present-day Paris, caught between violent unrest and its inescapable glories. Seventy-four-year-old Jules Lacour, a maitre at Paris-Sorbonne, cellist, widower, veteran of the war in Algeria, and child of the Holocaust, must find a balance between the obligations of his past and the light and beauty of his present. He in confronted all at once by a series of circumstances which challenge his principles, livelihood and home. And yet, he also finds love and defends his family. Helprin's work is full of truth and beauty, and readers are missing out if they pass this one up.