Business Insider India has updated its Privacy and Cookie policy. We use cookies to ensure that we give you the better experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we\'ll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies on the Business Insider India website. However, you can change your cookie setting at any time by clicking on our Cookie Policy at any time. You can also see our Privacy Policy.
The 12 best books you'll want to read this October, according to Amazon's editors
The 12 best books you'll want to read this October, according to Amazon's editors
Ciannah GinOct 1, 2019, 21:11 IST
Alyssa Powell/Business Insider
Advertisement
Every month, Amazon's book editors choose a number of new titles as part of the Best Book of the Month section.
This October, the list includes "Wild Game" by Adrienne Brodeur and "Life Undercover" by Amaryllis Fox.
Below, you'll find all 12 of the team's picks this month along with short summaries provided by Amazon's book editor, Erin Kodicek.
Fall is hands-down my favorite season. Crisp air, cool weather, leaves changing color, and a significant increase in pumpkin and apple-flavored foods and drinks make for the greatest and most whimsical season.
Fall also happens to be book publishers' favorite season to release outstanding titles, which is great if you want to pick up a new book and read it in a coffee shop with a festive and warm drink in hand.
With so many great options to choose from, it's no wonder that the Amazon team chose 12 titles as part of the best books of October instead of their typical 10, something they did last month as well.
Memoirs make up half of this month's selection and include titles such as "Wild Game" by Adrienne Brodeur who recounts her complicated relationship with her mother as well as Ahmet Altan's "I Will Never See the World Again," penned from inside his prison cell.
Advertisement
Amazon editor Erin Kodicek exclaims, "Lightning rarely strikes twice, but for the second month in a row we have selected twelve best of the month picks instead of the usual ten, a testament to the bevy of extraordinary book releases this fall. Bon appétit."
Captions have been provided by Erin Kodicek, editor of books and Kindle at Amazon.
Beginning at the tender age of fourteen, Adrienne Brodeur's mother manipulated her into becoming an accomplice in the cover-up of a long-term extramarital affair. "Wild Game" is Brodeur's provocative and surprisingly compassionate account of how this corroded her sense of self and her own intimate relationships, and how she extricated herself from her mother's toxic grip.
Megan Phelps-Roper is a member of the family infamous for picketing military funerals and protesting homosexuality (among other things). In "Unfollow," she reflects on her extreme upbringing, explains why she left the church, and argues that exercising humility is the key to healing divisiveness.
Bestselling author Leigh Bardugo spins a tale of dark intrigue amongst the Ivy League elite in her enthralling adult debut. "Ninth House" follows a troubled young woman, the only survivor of an unsolved murder, who is recruited by a mysterious benefactor to attend Yale and investigate the school's secret societies.
"Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl" by Jeannie Vanasco
In a powerful reckoning that adds a different dimension to the #MeToo conversation — one more intimate, insidious, and full of improbable grace — Jeannie Vanasco interrogates her rapist, a man who had once been a long-time friend.
"Grand Union" is the first short-story collection from award-winning author, Zadie Smith. These eleven new and previously published works demonstrate her virtuosic skill in observation and genre-bending, as she illuminates the pleasures and perils of navigating our complicated world.
In this unsettling, but powerful, family saga, there is no love lost when the patriarch of the Tuchman family finds himself on death's door. As his daughter and son reckon with his dubious legacy, they must resolve to make sure that his past transgressions don't taint their futures.
Elizabeth Strout's 2008 novel "Olive Kitteridge" won the Pulitzer Prize and spawned a hit HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand and Bill Murray. In "Olive, Again" she resurrects the endearing curmudgeon from Crosby, Maine in thirteen interconnected stories that remind us that you're never too old to grown up.
Written from a prison cell only four meters long, one of Turkey's most lauded authors has penned a stirring and surprisingly uplifting account of being a casualty of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's crackdown on freedom of speech. It's also a powerful tribute to the consolation of words.
You know her as the frontwoman of Blondie, a band whose unique blend of rock, punk, disco, reggae and hip-hop became the soundtrack of 1970s New York. But Debbie Harry's memoir "Face It" goes well beyond that, charting the dramatic highs and lows of a career whose creative and cultural influences are still felt today.
Who can resist a story about a down-and-out donkey getting a second chance at life? (Not you.) The bestselling author of "Born to Run" tells the heartfelt tale of how he took in a rescue from an animal hoarder, and trained him to run in the World Championship of burro racing.
All is not quiet on the Midwestern front in Ben Lerner's introspective auto-fiction, "The Topeka School", a deft exploration of adolescence, masculinity and violence, and of the enduring imprints parents make on their children's lives, that follow them into adulthood.
By day she was a covert CIA operative trying to stop nuclear weapons from getting into the hands of terrorists; by night, a pregnant newlywed living far from home, navigating an already imploding marriage to a co-worker. No, this isn't the plot to a new, "Alias"-like TV show (though it could be!). It's the crux of Amaryllis Fox's fascinating memoir.
