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.

Monocle Podcast on Zadie Smith's 'The Fraud'

In more than two decades since Zadie Smith burst onto the literary scene with her debut novel, White Teeth, her books, essays and short stories have continued to enjoy commercial and critical success. Her latest novel brings to life the story of the Tichborne case – one of the lengthiest trials in British history and one that enthralled Victorian England. I joined Robert Bound and Alex Preston to review Smith’s first exuberant foray into historical fiction.

We also made recommendations for further reading and watching.

Unpacking the motherhood debate

Since Rachel Cusk’s ground-breaking memoir A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, was published in 2001, books about the reality of motherhood have proliferated. Recently, however, the subject of whether to become a mother or not at all has been foregrounded in fiction. Cusk’s book, in her own words, “set out to describe the physical events of childbirth and early motherhood” and she was castigated for it — with one reviewer suggesting that if everyone read her book, the propagation of the human race would basically end as it made the whole business sound so unpleasant.

“Complaining” about motherhood is now commonplace, as it should be — from Mumsnet talk forums to bestselling fiction. Claire Kilroy’s coruscating novel Soldier Sailor (2023) is possibly the most striking new example: the narrator briefly leaves her newborn son in a forest glade after a vitriolic row with her husband. She believes she is protecting her child from the bleakness she feels inside by abandoning him, albeit temporarily.

(c) Ben Bailey Smith

Intimations by Zadie Smith

Let’s get envy out of the way first. While many of us struggled to achieve anything during the first weeks of lockdown, barely baking a loaf of banana bread or completing a workout with Joe Wicks, Zadie Smith managed to write a whole book. It is a very slim book – 82 pages; six essays – but it’s a book, nonetheless. Anyone who feels piqued that this might be a money-spinner, though, should note that the author’s royalties are being donated to charity. Besides, Smith generously suggests that writing is simply something to do, no better or worse than baking, sewing a dress or completing “all the levels on Minecraft”.

These essays have been written from the standpoint of an impassioned reader. This is not new territory for Smith, who declared in an earlier collection of essays, Changing My Mind (2009), that: “Reading has always been my passion, my pleasure, and I am constitutionally drawn to any thesis that gives power to readers, increasing their freedom of movement.” 

How to Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs

The title of this debut collection of short stories might mimic that of a “How to” manual but Alexia Arthurs’s prose is anything but didactic. In the opening story, “Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands,” the narrator Kimberley observes of her friend Cecilia that she was the “kind of black girl who didn’t think about her race as much as I did.” Although Kimberley initially views her friend as “a white girl trapped in a black girl’s body—an Oreo,” her judgment comes to seem too easy. Kimberley had also been labelled “an Oreo” at school because she liked spending time in the ceramics classroom.

Some of Arthurs’s protagonists live in Jamaica, others have been transplanted to North America and a few inhabit, at least psychologically, the limbo between the two.

Don't judge a book by (the awards on) its cover

Anyone looking to the Booker Prize this year to affirm that dreams can come true would have seized on the example of Fiona Mozley, the 29 year bookseller who wrote the first chapter of her longlisted novel on a train. Her story seemed impossibly romantic: an unknown debut novelist, who wrote her book virtually in secret, was recognised alongside Paul Auster and Zadie Smith by one of the most famous literary prizes in the world. But while Mozley rather touchingly has said ‘I already feel like I’ve won,’ what about those writers who are always the bridesmaid but never the bride when it comes to literary prizes?