There's a tradition in publishing that says the reading public gets distracted during an election season - best to stay away from "major" book releases. Like so much else, this crumb of conventional wisdom has been swept under the rug. There's new fiction out this fall by Stephen King, Toni Morrison and John le Carre; and new nonfiction by best-selling prognosticators Thomas L. Friedman and "Tipping Point" author Malcolm Gladwell. Michael Lewis, the "Liar's Poker" author, wins the Perfect Timing award with "Panic: the Story of Modern Financial Insanity," about the five most violent financial upheavals of recent history. Get going on that update, Michael!

This list of upcoming books looks from mid-September forward, but like a bird-parent pushing the strongest fledglings out of the nest first, many of this fall's books have already been released.

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Fiction

 

September

"Guernica" by Dave Boling (Bloomsbury). An Olympic Peninsula writer makes his debut with a historical novel set in Civil War Spain - specifically, the Basque farm town bombed flat by the German Luftwaffe as they conducted "a devastating experiment in total warfare."

"When Will There Be Good News?" by Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown). A new Jackson Brodie mystery from the author of "Case Histories" and "One Good Turn," in which three disrupted lives "come together in unexpected and deeply thrilling ways."

"The China Lover" by Ian Buruma (Penguin Press). A rare excursion into fiction by the cultural commentator ("Anglomania," "Murder in Amsterdam"), tracing the curious career of Japanese film star Yamaguchi Yoshiko. Under a number of aliases (including "Shirley Yamaguchi" in the U.S.), Yoshiko weathers all "the twists and turns in the history of modern Japan."

"One Fifth Avenue" by Candace Bushnell (Hyperion). Bushnell ("Sex and the City") takes a "Grand Hotel" approach to a ritzy Lower Manhattan apartment building where "the lives of New York City's elite play out."

"Deaf Sentence" by David Lodge (Viking). The esteemed British novelist - twice a finalist for the Booker Prize - delivers a tale about a linguistics professor "vexed by his encroaching deafness and at loose ends in his personal life."

 

October

"Flight: New and Selected Poems" by Linda Bierds (Marian Wood/Putnam). A retrospective of the Bainbridge Island poet's work, addressing "the things that unite us in our common humanity - art, science, music, history." Bierds teaches at the University of Washington.

"The Brass Verdict" by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown). "Lincoln Lawyer" attorney Mickey Haller and Detective Harry Bosch form an uneasy partnership as they investigate a case involving Walter Elliott, a prominent L.A. film executive accused of murder.

"A Partisan's Daughter" by Louis de Bernieres (Knopf). The author of "Corelli's Mandolin" takes 1970s London as his backdrop, in a novel about a "bored, lonely" married man who invites a Yugoslavian hooker into his car. Only she's not a hooker - and she is one hell of a storyteller.

"The Eleventh Man" by Ivan Doig (Harcourt). Doig's latest novel tells a World War II story of a journalist and former member of a championship Montana college football team who is tapped by a government "press" agency to tell the wartime stories of 10 former teammates.

"Sea of Poppies" by Amitav Ghosh (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). A saga set in India during the 19th century Opium Wars, with a cast of characters thrown together by colonial upheaval. A finalist for the Man Booker Prize by the author of "The Glass Palace."

"I See You Everywhere" by Julia Glass (Pantheon). A novel about two sisters, one a risk-taking rebel, the other more quiet and responsible but yearning for something more. By the winner of the National Book Award-winning "Three Junes."

"The English Major" by Jim Harrison (Grove). A novel about a man in his 60s who, robbed of his farm by his "late-blooming real estate shark of an ex-wife," takes a road trip to San Francisco to visit his movie-producer son. By the author of "Legends of the Fall" and "Dalva."

"Lulu in Marrakech" by Diane Johnson (Dutton). The doyenne of American expatriate fiction ("Le Divorce") moves the action from her usual Paris setting to Morocco, where her undercover CIA heroine "navigates the complex interface of Islam and the West."

"A Most Wanted Man" by John le Carre (Scribner). Le Carre's latest is set in Hamburg, where a young Russian Muslim, an idealistic German civil-rights lawyer and the aging scion of a failing British bank all cross paths - and become targets in the War on Terror.

"To Siberia" by Per Petterson, translated by Anne Born (Graywolf). A 1996 novel, making its first U.S. appearance, about two neglected teens living in Nazi-occupied Denmark. By the Norwegian novelist, whose "Out Stealing Horses" won the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

"Death with Interruptions" by Jose Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Harcourt). In his new novel, the Portuguese Nobel laureate ("Blindness") posits a world where no one dies.

"The Widows of Eastwick" by John Updike (Knopf). Updike's sequel to his 1984 novel, "The Witches of Eastwick," finds his three heroines contemplating a reunion in their Rhode Island hometown after divorce, remarriage and widowhood have carried them to the far corners of the world.

 

November

"2666" by Roberto Bolano, translated by Natasha Wimmer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The acclaimed masterpiece - all 900 pages of it - by the late Chilean writer ("The Savage Detectives"). The sprawling plot involves academics, convicts, an American sports writer and others all converging on a U.S.-Mexican border town where factory workers keep vanishing.

"Just After Sunset" by Stephen King (Scribner). Short stories from the horrormeister.

"A Mercy" by Toni Morrison (Knopf). A new historical novel by the Nobel Prize winner ("Beloved"), about an Anglo-Dutch farmer reluctantly acquiring a slave girl in 1680s colonial America. "I really wanted to get to a place before slavery was equated with race," Morrison has commented in an interview.

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Nonfiction

 

September

"Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How It Can Renew America" by Thomas L. Friedman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The New York Times columnist and author of "The World is Flat" argues that America can regain its sense of national purpose by pushing the worldwide agenda for clean, efficient energy.

"The Hemingses of Monticello" by Annette Gordon-Reed (Norton). An epic saga of the Hemings family, whose bloodline has been mixed with that of Thomas Jefferson since our third president took slave Sally Hemings as a mistress.

"Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks and a Writer's Wife" by Kathleen Norris (Riverhead). The author of "The Cloister Walk" wrestles with the phenomenon of acedia, a term used since the Middle Ages to describe the phenomenon of soul weariness.

"The War Within" by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster). How various governmental branches under the Bush administration's watch - the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and the intelligence agencies - reacted as the Iraq War moved into its third and fourth years, by the sine qua non of journalistic insiders.

 

October

"The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America" by James Bamford (Doubleday). Bamford, author of two previous books on the National Security Agency, tells how the bureau transformed itself after Sept. 11 "to turn its almost limitless ability to listen in to friend and foe alike" over to the Bush administration in the service of the war on terror.

"The Owl and the Woodpecker: Encounters with North America's Most Iconic Birds" by Paul Bannick (Mountaineers). The Seattle photographer-naturalist showcases the "natural rhythms" of owls and woodpeckers in the wild. Book includes CD of more than 40 species' calls.

"Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners" by Laura Claridge (Random House). The life of America's premier arbiter of manners, from her Gilded Age social life to her scandalous divorce to her fateful decision to switch from society novels to a book about social behavior.

"Dark Water" by Robert Clark (Doubleday). Clark, a critically praised author ("Mr. White's Confession") who divides his time between Seattle and Italy, tells the story of a 1966 flood that ravaged Florence, Italy, and the heroic international efforts to save the city's artistic treasures.

"Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey" by William Least Heat-Moon (Little, Brown). The author of "Blue Highways" writes of a series of journeys into small-town America.

"The Hero" by Jon Krakauer (Doubleday). The story of pro football player Pat Tillman, star safety for the Arizona Cardinals, who walked away from a multimillion NFL contract to fight and die in Afghanistan - from bullets fired by an American soldier.

"Gerard Manley Hopkins" by Paul Mariani (Viking). A biography of the Jesuit priest who used his journey out of loneliness and despair to write some of the 19th century's most innovative poems.

"Titanic's Last Secrets" by Brad Matsen (Twelve). Matsen follows the investigations of legendary divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler (chronicled in "Shadow Divers") as they search through the wreck of the Titanic and its sister ship, Britannic, to try to answer the enduring mystery of the Titanic tragedy: Why did the Titanic sink so quickly?

"Mosaic: Finding Beauty in a Broken World" by Terry Tempest Williams (Pantheon). Essays on various subjects, from the mosaics of Ravenna, Italy, to the prairie dogs of the American southwest, from the author of "Refuge."

"Chagall" by Jackie Wullschlager (Knopf). The story of one of the world's best-known artists; born poor in Russia, Chagall took as his inspiration the lost world of the shtetls of Eastern European Jews, even after he became a political exile and made his new home in America.

 

November

"Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don't" by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown). Mr. "Tipping Point" looks at this question: what makes high achievers different? Answers apparently lie in their culture, family, generation and the "idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing."

"Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North" by Thomas J. Sugrue (Random House). The story of the struggle for racial equality in the northern states, from the desegregation of northern Jim Crow schools to the integration of the suburbs.

 

December

"Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity" by Michael Lewis (Norton). The author of "Liar's Poker" guides us through five of the most violent financial upheavals of recent history, capping his chronicle of greed with the current subprime mortgage mess.

"American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon" by Steve Rinella (Spiegel & Grau). This look at the buffalo and the species - man - that drove it to the edge of extinction has been getting great pre-publication reviews.