10 September Books Worth Anticipating

Through websites like Goodreads, NetGalley and Edelweiss, I get a bit of a sneak peek at some of the biggest titles set for release in upcoming months. Here are ten of the books being published this September that I’m most looking forward to:

1. Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut (September 2nd)

This fictionalized biography of E.M. Forster from a South African novelist focuses on his years in India, also examining his traumatic English upbringing and repressed homosexuality.

2. Conversations with Beethoven by Sanford Friedman (September 2nd)

Finished just before Friedman’s death, this novel imagines the last year of Beethoven’s life via a notebook of questions and comments the deaf musician’s friends and family wrote in.

3. The White Nile Diaries by John Hopkins (September 4th)

Hopkins and his fellow Princeton grad Joe McPhillips concocted the idea of riding a motorbike across North Africa in 1961. The resulting memoir is a road trip with a difference.

4. Waking Up by Sam Harris (September 9th)

This has been described as a book for the “spiritual but not religious”: an introduction to meditation and the teachings of great religious figures from the “New Atheist” spokesman.

5. The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters (September 16th)

Waters’s sixth novel vividly portrays class, romance, and true crime in 1920s London. When a mother and daughter in reduced circumstances take in lodgers, eroticism and violence erupt.

6. Flirting with French by William Alexander (September 16th)

As something of a Francophile, I always enjoy books about Anglos adapting to the French language and culture. Alexander’s sounds like it will be a true comic delight.

7. Pilgrimage to Iona by Claire Nahmad (September 18th)

This may turn out to be a bit New-Agey for my liking, but I’d like the chance to learn more of the history of Iona, a Scottish island I’ve visited once before and found a very peaceful, spiritual place.

8. Juliet’s Nurse by Lois Leveen (September 23rd)

Leveen’s second novel imagines a backstory for the Nurse from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Angelica joins Verona’s Cappelletti family as wet-nurse for baby Juliet in 1360.

9. A Deadly Wandering by Matt Richtel (September 23rd)

The cautionary tale of two rocket scientists who died in a texting-while-driving car accident inspired a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist to undertake a study of the effects of technology.

 

10. Gutenberg’s Apprentice by Alix Christie (September 23rd)

Christie’s debut follows a fifteenth-century scribe who gets an inside look at the development of the printing press when he goes to work for Johann Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany.