Autumn Reads 2023

Autumn is the perfect time to pick up a new book. It’s when publishing’s so-called Super Thursday occurs – the single day when the highest number of best-selling hardback titles is estimated to hit the shelves.

This year, in the lead up to Christmas, new books from Richard Osman, Stephen King and JK Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith, will appear. There will also be memoirs from Britney Spears, Barbara Streisand and Jada Pinkett Smith. If these aren’t to your taste, here’s our choice of Autumn’s other hottest books.

The Fraud Zadie Smith

Another banger from Willesden’s finest export and possibly the most anticipated novel of the year. This is Zadie Smith’s first attempt at historical fiction, and she has said how much pleasure writing The Fraud gave her: “Every day I sat down at my desk I was happy and laughing to myself and satisfied.” It shows, although her enjoyment is not at the expense of the reader’s.

Islands of Mercy by Rose Tremain

Rose Tremain has followed her masterly The Gustav Sonata with an altogether different novel. In 1865, Clorinda Morrissey, a 38-year-old woman from Dublin, arrives in Bath and sells a ruby necklace in order to set up Mrs Morrissey’s High Class Tea Rooms. Mrs Morrissey believes that ‘the future was going to be perfumed with raspberry jam and freshly baked scones and fragrant lemon cake’.

The tea rooms also, however, once open, become the scene of Jane Adeane — a highly skilled nurse — rejecting a proposal from Dr Valentine Ross, her colleague at her father’s surgery. Jane has achieved a near-mythic status as a nurse in Bath and ‘was described as “The Angel”, or sometimes as “The Tall Angel” or “The White Angel’ or, more frequently, as ‘The Angel of the Baths”’. Jane flees to London after Dr Ross’s proposal to stay with her unconventional aunt — an unmarried painter called Emmeline Adeane and is soon seduced by a married Italian beauty, Julietta Sims.