5 Five-Star Fiction Reads for Fall
As the days get shorter and evenings longer, there’s nothing I enjoy more than curling up under a blanket with a good book. Offering a mix of pacing, length, and subject, these outstanding five-star novels are sure to provide some comfort as winter approaches.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
The long awaited new novel from the author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends. In Rooney’s latest, readers follow two very different brothers who come together for their father’s funeral. Peter is a lawyer in his thirties and Ivan is a twenty-two year old renowned chess player.
Peter and Ivan are in the depths of grief following the death of their father, while at the same time they’re each grappling with complex relationships that may just tear them apart for good. Intermezzo is Sally Rooney at her best. I highly recommend the audiobook narrated by Éanna Hardwicke.
The Women Behind the Door by Roddy Doyle
A beautifully moving novel following Paula Spencer, who many Roddy Doyle fans have come to know and love over the years. This is the third in a series spaced decades apart although it can be read as a standalone.
At sixty-six now, Paula is a mother and grandmother. Widowed after the death of her abusive husband and managing to stay sober, she has finally started to live her life. Then Paula's older daughter returns home and opens up to her about a family secret, forcing her to reckon with the past she's trying to forget.
Written in Doyle’s signature prose, and with themes of generational trauma and addiction, this is a powerful story about the love between a mother and her children.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
From the Nobel Prize winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, this masterful novel follows three students at an exclusive boarding school in the English countryside. Over the course of their lives, we come to know Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth, all former Hailsham students who are bound together by their secluded upbringing and predestined life path.
Selected as one of the New York Times best 10 books of the 21st Century, Never Let Me Go is a gut-wrenching and unforgettable read.
Evenings & Weekends by Oisín McKenna
In this gorgeous debut, we follow a multi-generational cast of characters through a heatwave in London. Maggie, who is thirty and pregnant, and yearning for her younger self. Her partner Ed, who's been hiding a part of himself that only comes to light when Maggie’s best friend Phil catches him out. Then there’s Phil’s mum, recently diagnosed with cancer and unable to tell her son. She, too, is looking back on the past and thinking of what could have been.
A vibrant, heartfelt and nostalgic read, perfect for a slice of summer on a cold winter night.
Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
After noticing this book front and centre in stores for over a year, I decided to give it a go. There’s a reason this title is still appearing on all the "best of" lists and has sold more than two million copies. For fans of A Man Called Ove, Van Pelt’s debut is centred around a woman named Tova Sullivan and an octopus she encounters at the aquarium where she works as a cleaner.
Tova is widowed and still grieving her son who died thirty-years prior, and Marcellus is an octopus in captivity, fully aware of his surroundings and the fact that life is closing in on him. The two form an unlikely bond out of which grows an unexpected discovery. A meditation on friendship, loneliness, and grief, this wonderful book should be at the top of your list.
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